November 15, 2022 • 45 mins
Khalil and Ben talk with Donald Yacovone about his book, Teaching White Supremacy. In the midst of new laws to ban books about race and the teaching of slavery, Yacovone digs through thousands of school textbooks and finds that most already emphasize whiteness as the core of our national identity. We’ll talk about how the history we’ve been teaching over the last 300 years isn’t necessarily the history we made, and how that has informed our current social crisis.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushing. We're excited about this conversation and want to hear
more about how you came up with this idea, but
also just talk about the importance of how people learn
American history, do they. I'm Khalil Jibra Muhammad and I'm
(00:36):
Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends are Some of my best
friends are dot dot dot. In this show, we wrestle
with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided
and unequal country. And in this episode, we're gonna unpack
(00:58):
why we are so divided and unequal. We're gonna learn
what we've all been learning in textbooks for a very
long time. We're talking about teaching white supremacy. This episode
has some strong language, just a fair warning, but stick around. Khalil.
(01:25):
Here we are, man. We are in the post midterm America.
We are past that election day. Yeah, man, we're supposed
to be really happy about the fact that this is
the first time when things didn't go so well for
the party out of power. Right, you were a way
out of the country, But I was watching on TV
that night, and you know, it was essentially like Democrats
were like high fiving one another. They were celebrating this
(01:47):
idea that this red wave hadn't happened, right, that there
wasn't the second coming of Trump. Yeah, it became a
red puddle, a red puddle. It was like expecting this
disaster and things turned out just to be shitty, and
we're supposed to be happy about that, exactly, exactly, And
the truth is that, you know, whatever we want to
say about the Democratic Party being the party of democracy,
(02:08):
now they're going to lose power. Maybe less power than
they thought, but they're going to lose power. That has
real consequences for that for our future, and real consequences
for women's reproductive rights, real consequences for how we as
a country expect to pass on, you know, what it
means to have real rights in this country to our children.
(02:29):
It's sad, but to some degree, the bones of this
country seem to be rattling in such a way that
we aren't that much further along than some of the
history we talk about on the show, you know, and
we often talk about race. Maybe that's the only thing
we talk about on this show, you know, but of
course it was. It permeated the entire election, right. I mean,
so there was this whole idea where whether you know,
(02:51):
there's fear mongering about crime, which was really fear mongering
about race, and whether it was rejected or not, which
really was much more interested in this idea of of
you know, using crime as a political tool, whether it
like you know, the Democrats weren't even necessarily concerned with
whether it was right or wrong to run away from
those issues that were embraced them. You know, in the
Georgia race with Stacy Abrams running for governor, seventy two
(03:14):
percent of white women did not vote for her. That
was an exit poll, and that was after getting rid
of Rov Wade. It's nuts, And I guess for me,
I think that what we're going to talk about today
with our guests gives us a chance to kind of
go back to first principles and like figure out, like
why do we keep repeating the past, why do we
keep falling prey to these moments of retrenchment. Well, that
(03:38):
gets us into today's episode, because we're about to dig
into a history of text books in America and how
they really teach white supremacy. How they've perpetuated this idea
for well over a century. And if you're a listener
right now thinking, okay, hold up, fellas, what does emitterms
have to do with history touched books? That's exactly the point.
(03:59):
They are the building blocks of our society. They are
the texts that we all encounter at some point in
our lives. This tell us what we owe each other
as citizens of this nation. And so we get to
talk to Donald Yakavone, a lifetime researcher at Harvard University's
Hutchin Center for African and African American Research. He's also
the author and editor of eleven books, and the book
(04:21):
that he just wrote is called Teaching White Supremacy, America's
Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. So
he wrote this book because he was researching abolition, something
that he teaches about him has been studying for years.
And he went into this library at Harvard to look
at a couple textbooks that were taught in classes in America,
and they were like thousands of them, and he started
(04:43):
digging into them and what he ended up with was
a book which is about the history of teaching white supremacy,
throughout American history. It's a really smart idea because essentially
it's a study of American identity, how it was formed,
what it means, how it was perpetuated one century to
the next. And again, I think this is a really
fascinating concept, meaning to what degree do we owe our
(05:05):
current politics to what we've all been taught in our
history textbook? Yeah? And I felt like I was seeing
this on TV last week and seeing it on all
over the country, like what we saw in this book
about how these ideas or continued to today they still
define our politics and they're going to define them going forward. Absolutely. Yeah. Man,
so let's talk to Donald Yacovone. Let's learn what he
(05:26):
learned to help us all be better. Welcome Donald Yacovone
to some of my best friends are It's so great
to have you on. And So you went and read
over two hundred American history textbooks published and taught in
American schools from basically the early eighteen hundreds to the
(05:50):
nineteen eighties. Correct, and you know maybe in it just
like what was your big takeaway? Like how do you
sum up? Like what all that research led to? Shock? How? So? Yeah? Explain?
So I thought why don't I start near the beginning,
And I picked the year eighteen thirty two because that
(06:10):
was a year after the emergence of the radical anti
slavery movement and William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, throughout the
pre Civil War period there was never any discussion of
the anti slavery movement, no acknowledgement that it even existed.
So I went and I went through the eighteen thirties,
(06:32):
the eighteen forties, and I thought, wait a minute, what
am I seeing here? There is an extraordinary emphasis upon whiteness.
I mean, it's not hidden, it's not assumed, it's overt
and so collective we in all of these textbooks is
always a white collective. We absolutely American identity is white identity, exactly. Yeah,
(06:57):
unless they specifically refer to red savages, which is the
usual way they refer to native inhabitants in North America.
Khalil and I were in public schools in Chica Go
in the nineteen eighties. We're reading history textbooks. Yeah, and
Khalil like where we didn't go to the same middle school.
He went to the same high school. And I definitely
remember Frederick Douglas and I remember studying slavery. And I
(07:22):
also remember, you know, this sort of pervading idea that
you know, post civil rights when we were in school,
like all the bad shit happened back then, you know,
in the unenlightened past. You know, we were not part
of that because we were sort of on the other
end of this. Yeah. I actually thought about this in
light of a conversation I had with Mark Moreale, who
(07:43):
is the current president of the National Urban League. I
was talking to him a couple months ago about actually
this very topic, about the problem of how do you
teach American history and light of the backlash to talking
about it at all, and he kind of laughed and
he said, you know, that's funny. You remind me of
when I was in high school in New Orleans where
(08:04):
he came of age, and he said, one day they
were talking about the Civil War and the topic came
up and it was defined as the War of Northern Aggression,
and he said he was the only person in the
classroom to raise his hand to say, wait a minute,
that is not what the Civil War was. He felt alone,
(08:24):
And you know, I mean I could also remember when
Roots aired on television and that being sort of much
more powerful and sort of talking about the enslaved experience
and sort of creating dialogue, creating conversation throughout my family
at school, like in classrooms even. I mean, that felt
like way more momentous than what was happening in a textbook. Yeah. Yeah.
The kind of attention that Roots gave to the African
(08:47):
American experience in slavery and after had never been done,
nothing approaching it had ever been done. You know, I
have two historians in front of me right now, and
I want to ask a question about textbooks in general
as like a medium for history, even as a subject
for studying history. One of our producers, Lucy, heard that
we were going to talk about history textbook and she
(09:09):
was like, oh, no, they're so boring. She has sort
of lists like clashback to her own high school experience.
And I think about textbooks that are in classrooms and
there's both sort of this ideological factor of them what's
going on in the world. There's also a commercial element
to it, right, Like you have publishers who are mostly
in the North who are like, we want to sell
(09:29):
as many of these as possible, and so there's that demand.
And we also have fifty states and each state each
basically like school district can sort of set its own curriculum,
So there are thousands of school districts, and then we
hear things like even about texts. You know, when they
set their curriculum each year. There's such a big market
for the textbooks that what they decide in their curriculum
(09:51):
is going to shape what is actually like written in
a textbook that's published in New York City. This is today.
I'm saying all that to ask, like, what does it
mean to study textbooks for both of you, like your historians,
what do you get out of a history textbook that's
taught to children in American classrooms? Well, I think for
younger students it is a convenience. It is a way
(10:15):
to encapsulate the record in a manageable signs. I think
once you get to college, a textbook isn't necessarily demanded.
I taught at college. I didn't always use a textbook
in the introductory class. It's not essential. However, textbooks as
a genre are designed not just to present the record
(10:37):
of the past, but they inevitably encapsulate the way Americans
think about themselves, their values, their aspirations, their meaning, their identity,
and that was clear from over two hundred textbooks that
I saw. What about the lag time different than say
studying newspapers of a day or you know today like
(11:00):
social media or television. The amount of times if you're
studying textbooks and reconstruction, it's not like they're you know,
the amount of time it takes to sort of that,
write it, publish it, distribute it. It could take five
even ten years, right, Oh, absolutely, yeah. In fact, that's
why I think some of the most effective textbooks during
(11:22):
this post Civil war period came out not in the
later eighteen sixties, not even in the early eighteen seventies,
but really in the eighteen eighties, even after we recognize
as reconstruction had already ended. It does take a long time,
and at the same time they are in competition with
other textbooks that are taking a completely different interpretation of
(11:46):
this very controversial historical period. So it's confusing. And it's
added to by the fact that, certainly in the nineteenth
century and the early twentieth century, as today, textbook publishers
often produced one version for the northern audience and another
(12:07):
version for the southern audience, and some of these authors
were horrified at what the publishers were doing to their
own textbooks. Khalil, what do you think I mean when
we talk about textbooks as history. Well, I was going
to say to our producer Lucy's provocation, the textbooks are boring.
I mean what I think is interesting about that is
(12:27):
I think they're meant to be boring. I mean, first
of all, they reflect the consensus view of the authors,
in the sense that the authors might be politically left
leaning or politically right leaning, but they are meant by
design to be the most anodyne interpretation of the past,
at least in the way that the general public would
understand them. And they are also meant in a way
(12:50):
to do the kind of civic nationalism work that is
part and parcel of what public education is all about
in the first place, which is to say, to reinforce
the dominant narratives of the nation to absolute Donald so
eloquently describes to define American identity. And in this way,
(13:12):
to emphasize whiteness is also to emphasize kind of the
air that we're all breathing. A textbook is, by its
definition then conservative in that sense. I don't mean conservative
like you know, republican conservative, but like retaining yes, absolutely yes,
just as social studies curriculum for the vast majority of
Americans and newcomers from past to present remains primarily conservative
(13:35):
in that it is reinforcing a dominant narrative of the
nation of its core values. It is not meant to
be the pretext for revolution or change. And actually, what
I kind of want to pick up on this point
been extended a little further for Donald because he writes
extensively about someone he describes as the first professional racist.
(13:57):
In many ways, this character in your book kind of
sits right at the turning point in America between the
slave past and the post slavery future, and you kind
of describe the guy is like the Steve Bannon and
Rupert Murdoch and Joseph Goebbels of Nazi infamy of his day,
someone who has so much reach an influence that he
(14:20):
is shaping the hearts and minds of an entire generation
of Americans and maybe in that way not so conservative. Yeah, Well,
this is John H. Van every and he's there for
two reasons. One, just as Khalil has said, he's influential,
he's terribly influential. But two, he is also representative, and
(14:41):
that's what I think some people tend to miss. He's
a manifestation of the culture as much as a shaper
of the culture. And he also embodies and symbolizes the
emphasis that I am putting on Northern responsibility for the
creation and perpetuation of white supremacy. It is commonplace today
(15:06):
for many Americans to look Southern slavery and Southern resistance
to integration as the source of today's what we call racism,
when in fact, I argue and the evidence is so
overwhelming in any field that you can pick, whether it's religion, literature, science, education,
(15:28):
the domination of Northern attitudes is supreme. Van every had
been trained as a doctor. He was Canadian born, so
you don't get any more northern than that. And he
set up a small publishing empire right in the middle
of Manhattan. He published several books of his own, countless
(15:48):
pamphlets which are derivative of the books that he wrote,
and two newspapers. Plus he advertised his books and his
pamphlets in almost all of the America's newspapers. In one
year alone, he put advertisements in fourteen hundred different American
newspaper just one year. He's like Donald Trump during the
(16:13):
nineteen eighties. Yeah. Absolutely, Lincoln had read him. He was
quoted on the floor of Congress, he was quoted in
state legislatures and read throughout the country. And his works
were republished long after his death in the nineteen twenties,
so by the Daughters of the Confederacy. So you have
(16:34):
Northerners influencing and telling the South essentially how to view
the evilness of Abraham Lincoln and the Northern aggression against
the Civil War and during the Civil War. It's astonishing
about his reach. It's just amazing. I want to lean
into that for just one second longer, because I think
you have hit on something with van every that I
(16:57):
think is really powerful and important, and that is that,
as you say, between eighteen fifty eight and eighteen seventy nine,
any American who read a newspaper was likely to encounter
his work, either because there was direct mention of it
his own writing or these advertisements selling his books. And
between eighteen sixty six and eighteen sixty seven he published
first a textbook youth history of the Great Civil War
(17:20):
in the United States, and then the next year a
book called white supremacy and Negro subordination. Your point about
this Canadian transplant to Manhattan, whose ambitions and reach in
terms of again we could say his social media influence
at that time, for the technology of that era actually
helps to circulate white supremacy from north to south at
(17:44):
a time that then will help, as you just said,
give rise to movements of the Lost Cause, the Daughters
of the Confederacy who were single handedly responsible for fundraising
to build Confederate monuments all around the country. That is
really remarkable, I think for most people and most listeners
to think about the relationship of Northern publishing to the
(18:06):
dissemination of white supremacist idea that even Southerners are learning
and therefore beginning to teach to their own children and grandchildren,
and the cycle just continues, absolutely, and it's so important,
I think for us to understand that a current social
crisis that we're undergoing, the long history of racial repression
(18:30):
that we have experienced, is not the fault of some
kind of external force. It is not the fault of
slave masters long gone. This is not a sectional problem.
This is a national problem, and it takes national commitment
(18:51):
north and south to recognize all our responsibility for the
creation of our modern culture. We can't foist it off
on some long dead past. This is alive, this is real.
We are all responsible for this, not one section. Yeah, yeah, No,
I think that's powerful. So Donald, we've kind of made
(19:13):
it seem obvious that this was a bad dude, you know,
a bad ombrey in the word of Trump, in the
sense that a modern listener today would say, yeah, every
you know, thank god he's no longer here. But of
course our point is his ideas are still here, and
we haven't talked about his ideas, So let's just zero
in on one. I think in particular because as I
(19:33):
understand what he was selling, First of all, he didn't
want to use the word slave to describe African Americans.
That seems totally bananas, right, because no one thinks of
the word slave or slavery is controversial either to white
Southerners or to Northerners, who are you know, ambivalent or
even hostile to black freedom. So what is this deal
with him thinking that the word slave is inappropriate to
(19:57):
describe who black people were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
Great question, van every when he used the word slave,
and he explained this. He said it referred to a
long past aspect of European culture, ancient European culture, only
white people enslaved other people, other white people, that there
(20:19):
was a category of subordination within European people's exactly, this
is a white institution. To his mind, you can no
more enslave a person of African descent than you can
a cow or sheep, because he argued, just like in
the rest of the animal world, you have various species
(20:41):
of animals, And his argument was that people of African
descent were humans. They were just an inferior lower form
of human, a completely separate species. And this was the
fate that nature and God, he argued, dictated to the nation.
(21:02):
People of African descent were born to do the white
man's labor. Those are his words. Yeah, because slaves suggest
immunition of a higher position that now you've been subordinated to.
But if you're already starting out as the floor of
some representation of humanity, even in his most adminished form,
you can't go down. You're already at the bottom, rock bottom,
(21:23):
as they say. So one more thing on this, because
I think this is where the past and the present
meet in his ideas, and the reason why I think
it's important for listeners not to dismiss this is like, oh,
that's interesting. You know, that stuff doesn't exist anymore. But
if we think about white supremacist neo Nazi replacement theory today,
(21:44):
which is animating our politics right now, that white people
will be the minority population and they will be overrun
by brown and black people in the near future, that
these sets of concerns today are tied to every in
the sense that his point was to say that black
people had actually helped make white equality possible by being
(22:08):
a force for wealth creation and for solving the aristocratic
problems of the past, because now white people would agree
that they were equal and superior as long as the
black person was in this inferior position. Did I get
that right? You sure did. He would argue, just like
Tony Morrison would later argue that you could not have
(22:32):
democratic culture without the African presence, ironically, and if there
were no people of African descent, they would have created
a people to fill that role, to show white people
that the difference between themselves was not so great as
it was between themselves and this other quote foreign element. Yeah,
(22:52):
I think that's really, really, really really important. Yeah, after
the break, we're going to hear from a young person
who's actually trying to bring attention to the everyday racism
that exists in America, especially in light of the race
justice movement or Black Lives Matter movement. Welcome back to
(23:26):
some of my best friends are so donald. There's this
video that's been circulating on social media. It shows clearly
that white supremacy is alive and well in the United States. Obviously,
we didn't need much proof for that, but Khalil and
I saw this video. I shared it with him. We
watched it at the same time, and we thought it'd
(23:46):
be kind of amazing to talk about with you. It's
a video taken in what's labeled the most racist city
in America, Harrison, Arkansas, the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.
And in it, there's this young white man. He's holding
up a Black Lives Matter sign and he's video taking
this and over the course of the video, people are
(24:07):
stopping in their cars, one hundred percent of them are white,
and they're all yelling at him. They're berating him, they're
saying incredibly racist things. Let's play this video about ten minutes.
I will be back. You better be fucking gone. Okay,
come back. We matter. You're a white thing? Ship? Are
(24:32):
you the Marxist? I meant domestic terrorists. Bad to Chicago
or New York for COVID enough for the chips, find
Jesus him? All right, all lives matter, not just black
You're why what do you think Donald Well? I think
(24:55):
you probably could have done that in Chicago as well
as uh Arkansas. Yeah, it's all the evidence one needs
about the problem remaining that the ideas that textbooks and
Americans have absorbed for the last three hundred years remain
m Yeah, it is still the case that And this
(25:15):
is why I think the book I did is so important.
It is the background for our current crisis. It is
the reason why we have our current crisis, and it
is the reason why people like that who identify themselves
as white and is the essence of legitimacy, and that
everyone else who isn't is not. That goes back three
(25:39):
hundred years. You know. One of the things that struck me,
in addition to just like this demonstration of our racism,
it's being caught on video and because we have social media,
can disseminate so quickly, and you can just see an
example of how deeply racist the country is. But like
your book, thinking about textbooks, the way that white people
in white culture sort of polices itself, sort of shows
(26:02):
what the boundaries are of behavior and teaching other white people,
you know, how to stay within those bounds, like this
is acceptable behavior. Khalil I sent it to you, Like,
what did you think. I was like a little bit
surprised at how visceral the racism was, because these are
not people who are being confronted by a young man
(26:25):
handing out a leaflet, but he's just standing there holding
the sign, and in that holding the sign apparently provokes
this visceral white racist rage where people are calling him everything,
you know, from the N word, reminding him he's white,
to calling him a communist. I mean, I guess I
was in that way surprised at how little has changed
(26:47):
over the last fifty years since the Civil Rights era
in terms of these deeply ingrained notions that you actually
are trader to the white race if you believe in
the commitments of racial justice that purportedly the country stands for. Yeah,
like what people do in the video, it wasn't just
(27:08):
thinking something or muttering to yourself. They were moved to
stop in the middle of a road, to roll down
their window and to confront another person and to threaten violence.
Right to threaten, in this case, to threaten white on
white violence. Yeah, if you're here, you know, a couple hours,
I'm gonna be back and I'm gonna kill you. Yeah.
I mean I was trying to you know, Donald, you
said like this could happen anywhere, It could happen in Chicago.
I was trying to think of, like what the liberal
(27:30):
equivalent would be. I could give you an example. Okay,
I spent almost seven years and tell hassee Florida. I'm
not sure that counts as a liberal example, Donald, but
hang on. At that point, Panhandle culture was deep South. Okay,
(27:50):
we think of Florida. Everybody thinks of southern Florida, and
as everyone knows, the further south you go, the more
north you are. But in Panhandle culture, this was deep South.
This was South Georgia, no difference really to speak of,
and I almost never heard any kind of racial remarks
by white people. Nineteen ninety one, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts,
(28:15):
and it was everywhere. Give you an example. How so see,
I'll give you a perfect example. I was standing in
the North End waiting to go into a restaurant and
a car stopped. A black man got out and ran
into a store that sold magazines and newspapers, and a
guy who was standing in line next to me said,
what the hell's he going in there for? He can't read?
(28:37):
Oh wow, yeah, yeah wow, yeah. I think there's something
also different. I mean hearing racist stuff. I mean, I'll
give you an example. This is just my own experience.
I was driving with my kids. I live on the
South side of Chicago, and we were actually going through
the part that's the campus of the University of Chicago,
and we saw a young man in a Maga hat.
(28:57):
And you know, this was sort of still the Trump administration,
but like you know all the rage that that invokes,
and my reaction was like seeing a giraffe or something.
I was like, look, kids, look, I was actually excited.
I was like, look, there's one Like look, there's a
kid with a maga hat. And I didn't feel like
there was nothing in me that was like let me,
let me attack this young man, let me like put
(29:18):
him in his place. And try to teach him something
and like shake him. This would be the equivalent, I
would think would be the luxury of not feeling like
that's the status quo of where I live. But in
this town in Arkansas, like, there was no threat from
Black Lives Matter. This kid was a total anomaly. Yeah.
That's one of the great ironies of the moment we
(29:38):
are in now, where a lot of white people are
triggered by criticisms of structural racism and then call the
people criticizing structural racism racists and call them up on
the phone and threaten their lives for being the racist.
(29:58):
Or you're getting them hate mail. You're triggered here. No, No,
you're not. You're talking about your like stuff you've gotten no.
But but I'm just I'm one of them. I'm sure
Donald has gotten. Donald. Have you gotten hate mail for
publishing this book? I got one so far. Yeah. I mean, so,
what you're saying, man, is like not being triggered to
violence because some trumper was wearing a MAGA hat in
(30:21):
your presence. Demonstrate something about you and at least the
subculture that you represent. Whereas for the people who we
actually could objectively say are articulating racist views actually threatened
violence to say that they're not racist, the ship don't
make no sense. But here we are, So we are
(30:42):
living in a moment of extreme backlash. We are living
in a moment where it's not just this kind of
existential political movement of white nationalists who think they have
to hold onto the country because people like me are
eventually going to take over. But we're also living in
a moment where the backlash is legislative. It is actually
(31:04):
doubling down on the kinds of textbook narratives, the ones
that subscribe to white supremacist points of view, or at
least the ones that erase the contributions of people of color,
whether they are black or indigenous or Mexican Americans, as
is what happened in Arizona about a decade ago, when
they basically made ethnic studies like to teach Mexican American
(31:25):
descended children that any part of their history is divisive.
And it's like that video articulates, I think exactly your
point that if we don't deal with these histories, we
are going to continue to produce people like those in
that video, and we're going to continue to have a
politics of backlash and in support of structural racism. Absolutely,
(31:46):
and I think the potential could be even worse because
people of this frame of mind, who believe that they're
very identities, as James Baldwin remark back in the sixties,
that they're very identities, are being taken from them or threatened. Right, Okay,
we'll do anything to preserve the old order. Oh Man, Donald,
(32:10):
I am so glad you mentioned James Baldwin because I
teach him in every class. And there's this particular quote
from an appearance he makes on The Dick Cavett Show
in nineteen sixty eight, and here's a clip from it
from our oldpex's film, I Am Not Your Negro. The
question you gotta ask yourself, the white population of this
company's got to ask itself North and South, because it's
one country and one negro. There's a didence in the
(32:31):
North in the South. There's just a difference in the
way they in a way they castrate too, but that's
but the fact of the castration is an American fact.
If I'm not the nigga here and you invented him,
you the white people invented him, and you've got to
find out why and that includes electing demogogues to office
(32:53):
who will make sure that other demogogues remained in office,
and that people of the Democratic Party or people who
believe in the Pledge of Allegiance where it says with
liberty and justice for all, will be excluded because they
are threats to the social order. Perceived as threats to
the social order, we could lose our democracy within a
(33:15):
few years. Yeah, yeah, our democracy definitely feels under threat.
And how it's tied to this sense of our history
is powerful, and I think we're all saying this. It's
not so clear now that like better textbooks are going
to save us. Yeah. Yeah, Well, this is kind of
a really important point to bring up the sixteen nineteen project,
because your book comes out not only after the original
(33:37):
sixteen nineteen project of the New York Times magazine, published
on the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of the
first Africans who would ultimately experience the early stages of
slavery in sixteen nineteen. That project comes out in August
of twenty nineteen, and then a revised version in a
book length that comes out just last year. So here
(33:58):
your book comes afterwards and I'm curious. Let me shout
you out though, Khalil, you're in the sixteen nineteen Project.
You have a chapter in it, in both the magazine
form in the book from you write about the history
of sugar. Yeah, it's important to say, you know, yeah,
that's true. So and I guess the question is, what
do you think about the sixteen nineteen project. Is it
part of the solution? It is part of the solution.
(34:20):
It isn't perfect by any means. A few things are.
But when I was writing the epilogue to the book
at that point two years ago, so many schools around
the country had adopted the sixteen nineteen Project for use
in class I found that terribly encouraging, even if there
are flaws, even if the emphasis on slavery and the
(34:44):
revolution isn't quite what was presented. However, the sixteen nineteen
projects emphasis on white supremacy is absolutely vital, and as
many people who can read that, the better off we
will be. However, under these current conditions, I have no
faith at all that what needs to be done will
(35:08):
be done, even bike dedicated, well trained teachers. If the
school system won't allow it, what do we do. I'm
finding teachers who are telling me that they are being
compelled to teach some repulsive images of people of African
descent because they're in the textbook they're being compelled to use,
(35:28):
and if they don't use it, they could lose their jobs.
When we come back, we're going to have more conversations
about what we are and are not teaching in our schools,
including my own daughters. We'll be back after the break.
(36:05):
Welcome back to Some of my best friends are so Donald,
Let's just say we have actual teachers who want to
do the right thing, who want to engage the history
of slavery in a thoughtful and productive way. And it
seems to me that part of what you describe in
the last page of your book are these, like many
many stories of things gone terribly wrong, or you know,
(36:25):
you sort of imply that they're all intentionally poor outcomes,
or maybe I'm misreading it, but one in particular, you
cite this example of New Jersey for ten years teaching
slave runaway advertisements or having students do a project on that,
and I wanted to tell you Donald that actually, in
(36:45):
this instance, though this is not to say that all
the other examples that you describe are not examples of
bad teaching or somehow some diabolical effort to make black
kids feel bad. But in this instance, the New Jersey
example came directly from my school district and my daughter Justice,
who is a fifth grader at the time, was given
(37:07):
that assignment, and it made National news. Parents of fifth
graders at school the New Jersey our outrage after two
slavery related school assignments may have taken it too far,
but here's what actually happened. So the story that National
News told was that students, basically black students, were subjected
(37:28):
to these terrible ads of black runaways on the bulletin
board outside of their classroom, and it just reinforced this
negative image of black people, and the black students felt bad.
And it is true that some of the parents of
my daughter's classmates did feel that way. They felt that
their kids were being subjected to racist images of black people.
(37:49):
But the point of the assignment, and this is why
I think this is really tricky as we moved towards
like what comes next in this country. What is tricky
is that the teachers, after I sat down with them,
I reviewed the material I actually had helped my daughter
create her own runaway ad. It turns out that what
they were trying to do was to show the fulls
(38:09):
of colonial life in America, and rather than every kid
pretending like everyone was just a homesteader or a pioneer
or a colonist sharing in the hard work of building
the nation, they found a way to say that black
people were experiencing slavery, and they had prepared the material
(38:30):
to teach them this. I told my daughter as we
went on Google to look for actual runaway ads, that
those ads in the eighteenth nineteenth century were the most
dominant source of learning about individual black people, because they
told their names, they told their characteristics, they gave them personalities,
and in ways that black people are often invisible in
the archives and invisible in their historical record, or only
(38:52):
come through in a diary entry of a white enslaver
describing their faithful slave, these ads served a different kind
of purpose and at least documenting the presence of black
people when they often were left out of the story.
And so I pushed back against the criticism as a
historian because I felt like it was a way to
actually teach slavery rather than simply avoided a lot of
(39:16):
people didn't agree with me, but I wanted to share
that story with you because I do think it illustrates
that even when people want to get this right, the
stakes are really high and fraught. You know. I followed
those debates and I'm listening to both of you, and
I think it's such a landmine and so many, so
many ways it can go wrong. And I hear you
Khalil talking about New Jersey and that it also cuts
(39:38):
both ways, is what you're saying, right, That we have
to we have to find ways to teach that hard
history that really looks at it, and that's gonna be
fraught and difficult to do, and you know, there are
lots of ways to fuck it up, but that is
the space that we have to move into. Right, That's right.
I mean, you have this moment in your conclusion near
the end of the book that really struck me. You
(40:00):
talk about a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center
from twenty eighteen and they cite that, I'm only about
eight percent of students that they interviewed could even say
what the causes of the Civil War was fighting over
over slavery. Yeah, But then another thing from that study
really struck me that that even where slavery was part
(40:21):
of the curriculum, nine percent of the teachers who responded
said they just didn't teach it, they just skipped it over.
And I had this confirmed when I deliver lectures on
this subject, you know, around various schools, and I ask students, well,
what did you learn about the history of slavery and
race in America? The answer quote not much, unquote yeah. Yeah.
(40:46):
That study from the Southern Poverty Law Center is called
teaching Hard History. Yes, And I love the name of
that study. I mean, like this is pre backlash critical
race theory imagined, you know, boogeyman stuff, and the idea
that we need to confront our hard histories as well
as like our soft ones that make us comfortable and
don't make us feel bad. But like you know, we're
(41:07):
we're a nation that has stains on it and we
need to see those as well. And you know, that
idea of like teaching hard history seems like a great
lesson to take off it. Yes, And we've got to
the point where as you point out, even if we
have the best textbooks on the planet, if teachers won't
teach it, what good is it? I just want to
say again how much we appreciate you having it, having
(41:29):
you on and you're sharing how significant this body of
work is in terms of socializing white supremacy as a
core value in American society. And as we have observed
in this moment, this political season that we're all part of,
and that video we saw of the young man holding
a Black Lives Matter sign, that when you write at
(41:50):
the end of your book that history is a mirror,
you say that quote, the history we teach is the
product of the culture we create, not necessarily of the
actual history we made. And I thought that was a
really wonderful line, Donald, and appreciate your commitment and passion
for us getting our history right. Thanks for coming on
the show, Oh thank you. You know, this history of
(42:21):
the founding of this nation that continues to be debated
in our country right now tells us that our history
is fundamental to how we think of ourselves as a country.
And until we get that history right, as I learned
from Donald today, then we're going to keep reproducing one
generation to the next people who have false ideas about
(42:43):
how we arrived at the country that we are and
where we have to take it. But you just said
about false ideas and how they're you know, this long
history of them. That's where we are right now. We're
still caught up in all these false ideas that defines
our politics. You know, we're not confronting these issues of race.
We're not confronting how the politics affects Americans. That's what
(43:04):
we have to solve for. Yeah, and there's no way
out of this dilemma because because as much as we
might hope the young people today are going to be
better than than they were back in the day, that
young man in Arkansas just shows us that it doesn't matter.
These ideas are so sticky. As Donald pointed out, that
unless we change things and how we teach and socialize,
(43:26):
they're going to be new generations of folks with the
same racial hatred, the same bigoted ideas, the same backlash
to the change that we need in this country. No
way out, that's the new name of this podcast. No, no, no,
we gotta end on a happy note. All right, now,
we got this because we're we're living, we're living post
mid term. Things are going to get better. We're working
on this and uh right, it wasn't a red wave.
(43:48):
It was a red puddle. Yes, yes see now we
get it circle Yes, yes all right, man, I love you,
I love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are
is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written
and hosted by me Oldibron Muhammad and my best friend
(44:11):
Ben Austin. Gets produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan.
Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wong,
and our executive producer is Mia Lamell. At Pushkin Thanks
Selita Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars,
Gretta Kone and Jacob Weissberg. Our theme song, Little Lily,
(44:34):
is by fellow chicagoan a brilliant Avery R. Young from
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(44:55):
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And if you like our show, please give us a
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and a review, and please tell all of your best
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(45:25):
listens to some of my best friends are, she says,
I watched you guys. She has to look at the
image of us from from the show arts every time,
so she every week she says, hey, I just watched
your podcast, and she literally did. She have to sit
in front of the computer staring at the picture of
us and imagine like the sounds coming out of our mouth. Oh,
(45:45):
that's funny.
Pushing. We're excited about this conversation and want to hear
more about how you came up with this idea, but
also just talk about the importance of how people learn
American history, do they. I'm Khalil Jibra Muhammad and I'm
(00:36):
Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends are Some of my best
friends are dot dot dot. In this show, we wrestle
with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided
and unequal country. And in this episode, we're gonna unpack
(00:58):
why we are so divided and unequal. We're gonna learn
what we've all been learning in textbooks for a very
long time. We're talking about teaching white supremacy. This episode
has some strong language, just a fair warning, but stick around. Khalil.
(01:25):
Here we are, man. We are in the post midterm America.
We are past that election day. Yeah, man, we're supposed
to be really happy about the fact that this is
the first time when things didn't go so well for
the party out of power. Right, you were a way
out of the country, But I was watching on TV
that night, and you know, it was essentially like Democrats
were like high fiving one another. They were celebrating this
(01:47):
idea that this red wave hadn't happened, right, that there
wasn't the second coming of Trump. Yeah, it became a
red puddle, a red puddle. It was like expecting this
disaster and things turned out just to be shitty, and
we're supposed to be happy about that, exactly, exactly, And
the truth is that, you know, whatever we want to
say about the Democratic Party being the party of democracy,
(02:08):
now they're going to lose power. Maybe less power than
they thought, but they're going to lose power. That has
real consequences for that for our future, and real consequences
for women's reproductive rights, real consequences for how we as
a country expect to pass on, you know, what it
means to have real rights in this country to our children.
(02:29):
It's sad, but to some degree, the bones of this
country seem to be rattling in such a way that
we aren't that much further along than some of the
history we talk about on the show, you know, and
we often talk about race. Maybe that's the only thing
we talk about on this show, you know, but of
course it was. It permeated the entire election, right. I mean,
so there was this whole idea where whether you know,
(02:51):
there's fear mongering about crime, which was really fear mongering
about race, and whether it was rejected or not, which
really was much more interested in this idea of of
you know, using crime as a political tool, whether it
like you know, the Democrats weren't even necessarily concerned with
whether it was right or wrong to run away from
those issues that were embraced them. You know, in the
Georgia race with Stacy Abrams running for governor, seventy two
(03:14):
percent of white women did not vote for her. That
was an exit poll, and that was after getting rid
of Rov Wade. It's nuts, And I guess for me,
I think that what we're going to talk about today
with our guests gives us a chance to kind of
go back to first principles and like figure out, like
why do we keep repeating the past, why do we
keep falling prey to these moments of retrenchment. Well, that
(03:38):
gets us into today's episode, because we're about to dig
into a history of text books in America and how
they really teach white supremacy. How they've perpetuated this idea
for well over a century. And if you're a listener
right now thinking, okay, hold up, fellas, what does emitterms
have to do with history touched books? That's exactly the point.
(03:59):
They are the building blocks of our society. They are
the texts that we all encounter at some point in
our lives. This tell us what we owe each other
as citizens of this nation. And so we get to
talk to Donald Yakavone, a lifetime researcher at Harvard University's
Hutchin Center for African and African American Research. He's also
the author and editor of eleven books, and the book
(04:21):
that he just wrote is called Teaching White Supremacy, America's
Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. So
he wrote this book because he was researching abolition, something
that he teaches about him has been studying for years.
And he went into this library at Harvard to look
at a couple textbooks that were taught in classes in America,
and they were like thousands of them, and he started
(04:43):
digging into them and what he ended up with was
a book which is about the history of teaching white supremacy,
throughout American history. It's a really smart idea because essentially
it's a study of American identity, how it was formed,
what it means, how it was perpetuated one century to
the next. And again, I think this is a really
fascinating concept, meaning to what degree do we owe our
(05:05):
current politics to what we've all been taught in our
history textbook? Yeah? And I felt like I was seeing
this on TV last week and seeing it on all
over the country, like what we saw in this book
about how these ideas or continued to today they still
define our politics and they're going to define them going forward. Absolutely. Yeah. Man,
so let's talk to Donald Yacovone. Let's learn what he
(05:26):
learned to help us all be better. Welcome Donald Yacovone
to some of my best friends are It's so great
to have you on. And So you went and read
over two hundred American history textbooks published and taught in
American schools from basically the early eighteen hundreds to the
(05:50):
nineteen eighties. Correct, and you know maybe in it just
like what was your big takeaway? Like how do you
sum up? Like what all that research led to? Shock? How? So? Yeah? Explain?
So I thought why don't I start near the beginning,
And I picked the year eighteen thirty two because that
(06:10):
was a year after the emergence of the radical anti
slavery movement and William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, throughout the
pre Civil War period there was never any discussion of
the anti slavery movement, no acknowledgement that it even existed.
So I went and I went through the eighteen thirties,
(06:32):
the eighteen forties, and I thought, wait a minute, what
am I seeing here? There is an extraordinary emphasis upon whiteness.
I mean, it's not hidden, it's not assumed, it's overt
and so collective we in all of these textbooks is
always a white collective. We absolutely American identity is white identity, exactly. Yeah,
(06:57):
unless they specifically refer to red savages, which is the
usual way they refer to native inhabitants in North America.
Khalil and I were in public schools in Chica Go
in the nineteen eighties. We're reading history textbooks. Yeah, and
Khalil like where we didn't go to the same middle school.
He went to the same high school. And I definitely
remember Frederick Douglas and I remember studying slavery. And I
(07:22):
also remember, you know, this sort of pervading idea that
you know, post civil rights when we were in school,
like all the bad shit happened back then, you know,
in the unenlightened past. You know, we were not part
of that because we were sort of on the other
end of this. Yeah. I actually thought about this in
light of a conversation I had with Mark Moreale, who
(07:43):
is the current president of the National Urban League. I
was talking to him a couple months ago about actually
this very topic, about the problem of how do you
teach American history and light of the backlash to talking
about it at all, and he kind of laughed and
he said, you know, that's funny. You remind me of
when I was in high school in New Orleans where
(08:04):
he came of age, and he said, one day they
were talking about the Civil War and the topic came
up and it was defined as the War of Northern Aggression,
and he said he was the only person in the
classroom to raise his hand to say, wait a minute,
that is not what the Civil War was. He felt alone,
(08:24):
And you know, I mean I could also remember when
Roots aired on television and that being sort of much
more powerful and sort of talking about the enslaved experience
and sort of creating dialogue, creating conversation throughout my family
at school, like in classrooms even. I mean, that felt
like way more momentous than what was happening in a textbook. Yeah. Yeah.
The kind of attention that Roots gave to the African
(08:47):
American experience in slavery and after had never been done,
nothing approaching it had ever been done. You know, I
have two historians in front of me right now, and
I want to ask a question about textbooks in general
as like a medium for history, even as a subject
for studying history. One of our producers, Lucy, heard that
we were going to talk about history textbook and she
(09:09):
was like, oh, no, they're so boring. She has sort
of lists like clashback to her own high school experience.
And I think about textbooks that are in classrooms and
there's both sort of this ideological factor of them what's
going on in the world. There's also a commercial element
to it, right, Like you have publishers who are mostly
in the North who are like, we want to sell
(09:29):
as many of these as possible, and so there's that demand.
And we also have fifty states and each state each
basically like school district can sort of set its own curriculum,
So there are thousands of school districts, and then we
hear things like even about texts. You know, when they
set their curriculum each year. There's such a big market
for the textbooks that what they decide in their curriculum
(09:51):
is going to shape what is actually like written in
a textbook that's published in New York City. This is today.
I'm saying all that to ask, like, what does it
mean to study textbooks for both of you, like your historians,
what do you get out of a history textbook that's
taught to children in American classrooms? Well, I think for
younger students it is a convenience. It is a way
(10:15):
to encapsulate the record in a manageable signs. I think
once you get to college, a textbook isn't necessarily demanded.
I taught at college. I didn't always use a textbook
in the introductory class. It's not essential. However, textbooks as
a genre are designed not just to present the record
(10:37):
of the past, but they inevitably encapsulate the way Americans
think about themselves, their values, their aspirations, their meaning, their identity,
and that was clear from over two hundred textbooks that
I saw. What about the lag time different than say
studying newspapers of a day or you know today like
(11:00):
social media or television. The amount of times if you're
studying textbooks and reconstruction, it's not like they're you know,
the amount of time it takes to sort of that,
write it, publish it, distribute it. It could take five
even ten years, right, Oh, absolutely, yeah. In fact, that's
why I think some of the most effective textbooks during
(11:22):
this post Civil war period came out not in the
later eighteen sixties, not even in the early eighteen seventies,
but really in the eighteen eighties, even after we recognize
as reconstruction had already ended. It does take a long time,
and at the same time they are in competition with
other textbooks that are taking a completely different interpretation of
(11:46):
this very controversial historical period. So it's confusing. And it's
added to by the fact that, certainly in the nineteenth
century and the early twentieth century, as today, textbook publishers
often produced one version for the northern audience and another
(12:07):
version for the southern audience, and some of these authors
were horrified at what the publishers were doing to their
own textbooks. Khalil, what do you think I mean when
we talk about textbooks as history. Well, I was going
to say to our producer Lucy's provocation, the textbooks are boring.
I mean what I think is interesting about that is
(12:27):
I think they're meant to be boring. I mean, first
of all, they reflect the consensus view of the authors,
in the sense that the authors might be politically left
leaning or politically right leaning, but they are meant by
design to be the most anodyne interpretation of the past,
at least in the way that the general public would
understand them. And they are also meant in a way
(12:50):
to do the kind of civic nationalism work that is
part and parcel of what public education is all about
in the first place, which is to say, to reinforce
the dominant narratives of the nation to absolute Donald so
eloquently describes to define American identity. And in this way,
(13:12):
to emphasize whiteness is also to emphasize kind of the
air that we're all breathing. A textbook is, by its
definition then conservative in that sense. I don't mean conservative
like you know, republican conservative, but like retaining yes, absolutely yes,
just as social studies curriculum for the vast majority of
Americans and newcomers from past to present remains primarily conservative
(13:35):
in that it is reinforcing a dominant narrative of the
nation of its core values. It is not meant to
be the pretext for revolution or change. And actually, what
I kind of want to pick up on this point
been extended a little further for Donald because he writes
extensively about someone he describes as the first professional racist.
(13:57):
In many ways, this character in your book kind of
sits right at the turning point in America between the
slave past and the post slavery future, and you kind
of describe the guy is like the Steve Bannon and
Rupert Murdoch and Joseph Goebbels of Nazi infamy of his day,
someone who has so much reach an influence that he
(14:20):
is shaping the hearts and minds of an entire generation
of Americans and maybe in that way not so conservative. Yeah, Well,
this is John H. Van every and he's there for
two reasons. One, just as Khalil has said, he's influential,
he's terribly influential. But two, he is also representative, and
(14:41):
that's what I think some people tend to miss. He's
a manifestation of the culture as much as a shaper
of the culture. And he also embodies and symbolizes the
emphasis that I am putting on Northern responsibility for the
creation and perpetuation of white supremacy. It is commonplace today
(15:06):
for many Americans to look Southern slavery and Southern resistance
to integration as the source of today's what we call racism,
when in fact, I argue and the evidence is so
overwhelming in any field that you can pick, whether it's religion, literature, science, education,
(15:28):
the domination of Northern attitudes is supreme. Van every had
been trained as a doctor. He was Canadian born, so
you don't get any more northern than that. And he
set up a small publishing empire right in the middle
of Manhattan. He published several books of his own, countless
(15:48):
pamphlets which are derivative of the books that he wrote,
and two newspapers. Plus he advertised his books and his
pamphlets in almost all of the America's newspapers. In one
year alone, he put advertisements in fourteen hundred different American
newspaper just one year. He's like Donald Trump during the
(16:13):
nineteen eighties. Yeah. Absolutely, Lincoln had read him. He was
quoted on the floor of Congress, he was quoted in
state legislatures and read throughout the country. And his works
were republished long after his death in the nineteen twenties,
so by the Daughters of the Confederacy. So you have
(16:34):
Northerners influencing and telling the South essentially how to view
the evilness of Abraham Lincoln and the Northern aggression against
the Civil War and during the Civil War. It's astonishing
about his reach. It's just amazing. I want to lean
into that for just one second longer, because I think
you have hit on something with van every that I
(16:57):
think is really powerful and important, and that is that,
as you say, between eighteen fifty eight and eighteen seventy nine,
any American who read a newspaper was likely to encounter
his work, either because there was direct mention of it
his own writing or these advertisements selling his books. And
between eighteen sixty six and eighteen sixty seven he published
first a textbook youth history of the Great Civil War
(17:20):
in the United States, and then the next year a
book called white supremacy and Negro subordination. Your point about
this Canadian transplant to Manhattan, whose ambitions and reach in
terms of again we could say his social media influence
at that time, for the technology of that era actually
helps to circulate white supremacy from north to south at
(17:44):
a time that then will help, as you just said,
give rise to movements of the Lost Cause, the Daughters
of the Confederacy who were single handedly responsible for fundraising
to build Confederate monuments all around the country. That is
really remarkable, I think for most people and most listeners
to think about the relationship of Northern publishing to the
(18:06):
dissemination of white supremacist idea that even Southerners are learning
and therefore beginning to teach to their own children and grandchildren,
and the cycle just continues, absolutely, and it's so important,
I think for us to understand that a current social
crisis that we're undergoing, the long history of racial repression
(18:30):
that we have experienced, is not the fault of some
kind of external force. It is not the fault of
slave masters long gone. This is not a sectional problem.
This is a national problem, and it takes national commitment
(18:51):
north and south to recognize all our responsibility for the
creation of our modern culture. We can't foist it off
on some long dead past. This is alive, this is real.
We are all responsible for this, not one section. Yeah, yeah, No,
I think that's powerful. So Donald, we've kind of made
(19:13):
it seem obvious that this was a bad dude, you know,
a bad ombrey in the word of Trump, in the
sense that a modern listener today would say, yeah, every
you know, thank god he's no longer here. But of
course our point is his ideas are still here, and
we haven't talked about his ideas, So let's just zero
in on one. I think in particular because as I
(19:33):
understand what he was selling, First of all, he didn't
want to use the word slave to describe African Americans.
That seems totally bananas, right, because no one thinks of
the word slave or slavery is controversial either to white
Southerners or to Northerners, who are you know, ambivalent or
even hostile to black freedom. So what is this deal
with him thinking that the word slave is inappropriate to
(19:57):
describe who black people were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
Great question, van every when he used the word slave,
and he explained this. He said it referred to a
long past aspect of European culture, ancient European culture, only
white people enslaved other people, other white people, that there
(20:19):
was a category of subordination within European people's exactly, this
is a white institution. To his mind, you can no
more enslave a person of African descent than you can
a cow or sheep, because he argued, just like in
the rest of the animal world, you have various species
(20:41):
of animals, And his argument was that people of African
descent were humans. They were just an inferior lower form
of human, a completely separate species. And this was the
fate that nature and God, he argued, dictated to the nation.
(21:02):
People of African descent were born to do the white
man's labor. Those are his words. Yeah, because slaves suggest
immunition of a higher position that now you've been subordinated to.
But if you're already starting out as the floor of
some representation of humanity, even in his most adminished form,
you can't go down. You're already at the bottom, rock bottom,
(21:23):
as they say. So one more thing on this, because
I think this is where the past and the present
meet in his ideas, and the reason why I think
it's important for listeners not to dismiss this is like, oh,
that's interesting. You know, that stuff doesn't exist anymore. But
if we think about white supremacist neo Nazi replacement theory today,
(21:44):
which is animating our politics right now, that white people
will be the minority population and they will be overrun
by brown and black people in the near future, that
these sets of concerns today are tied to every in
the sense that his point was to say that black
people had actually helped make white equality possible by being
(22:08):
a force for wealth creation and for solving the aristocratic
problems of the past, because now white people would agree
that they were equal and superior as long as the
black person was in this inferior position. Did I get
that right? You sure did. He would argue, just like
Tony Morrison would later argue that you could not have
(22:32):
democratic culture without the African presence, ironically, and if there
were no people of African descent, they would have created
a people to fill that role, to show white people
that the difference between themselves was not so great as
it was between themselves and this other quote foreign element. Yeah,
(22:52):
I think that's really, really, really really important. Yeah, after
the break, we're going to hear from a young person
who's actually trying to bring attention to the everyday racism
that exists in America, especially in light of the race
justice movement or Black Lives Matter movement. Welcome back to
(23:26):
some of my best friends are so donald. There's this
video that's been circulating on social media. It shows clearly
that white supremacy is alive and well in the United States. Obviously,
we didn't need much proof for that, but Khalil and
I saw this video. I shared it with him. We
watched it at the same time, and we thought it'd
(23:46):
be kind of amazing to talk about with you. It's
a video taken in what's labeled the most racist city
in America, Harrison, Arkansas, the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.
And in it, there's this young white man. He's holding
up a Black Lives Matter sign and he's video taking
this and over the course of the video, people are
(24:07):
stopping in their cars, one hundred percent of them are white,
and they're all yelling at him. They're berating him, they're
saying incredibly racist things. Let's play this video about ten minutes.
I will be back. You better be fucking gone. Okay,
come back. We matter. You're a white thing? Ship? Are
(24:32):
you the Marxist? I meant domestic terrorists. Bad to Chicago
or New York for COVID enough for the chips, find
Jesus him? All right, all lives matter, not just black
You're why what do you think Donald Well? I think
(24:55):
you probably could have done that in Chicago as well
as uh Arkansas. Yeah, it's all the evidence one needs
about the problem remaining that the ideas that textbooks and
Americans have absorbed for the last three hundred years remain
m Yeah, it is still the case that And this
(25:15):
is why I think the book I did is so important.
It is the background for our current crisis. It is
the reason why we have our current crisis, and it
is the reason why people like that who identify themselves
as white and is the essence of legitimacy, and that
everyone else who isn't is not. That goes back three
(25:39):
hundred years. You know. One of the things that struck me,
in addition to just like this demonstration of our racism,
it's being caught on video and because we have social media,
can disseminate so quickly, and you can just see an
example of how deeply racist the country is. But like
your book, thinking about textbooks, the way that white people
in white culture sort of polices itself, sort of shows
(26:02):
what the boundaries are of behavior and teaching other white people,
you know, how to stay within those bounds, like this
is acceptable behavior. Khalil I sent it to you, Like,
what did you think. I was like a little bit
surprised at how visceral the racism was, because these are
not people who are being confronted by a young man
(26:25):
handing out a leaflet, but he's just standing there holding
the sign, and in that holding the sign apparently provokes
this visceral white racist rage where people are calling him everything,
you know, from the N word, reminding him he's white,
to calling him a communist. I mean, I guess I
was in that way surprised at how little has changed
(26:47):
over the last fifty years since the Civil Rights era
in terms of these deeply ingrained notions that you actually
are trader to the white race if you believe in
the commitments of racial justice that purportedly the country stands for. Yeah,
like what people do in the video, it wasn't just
(27:08):
thinking something or muttering to yourself. They were moved to
stop in the middle of a road, to roll down
their window and to confront another person and to threaten violence.
Right to threaten, in this case, to threaten white on
white violence. Yeah, if you're here, you know, a couple hours,
I'm gonna be back and I'm gonna kill you. Yeah.
I mean I was trying to you know, Donald, you
said like this could happen anywhere, It could happen in Chicago.
I was trying to think of, like what the liberal
(27:30):
equivalent would be. I could give you an example. Okay,
I spent almost seven years and tell hassee Florida. I'm
not sure that counts as a liberal example, Donald, but
hang on. At that point, Panhandle culture was deep South. Okay,
(27:50):
we think of Florida. Everybody thinks of southern Florida, and
as everyone knows, the further south you go, the more
north you are. But in Panhandle culture, this was deep South.
This was South Georgia, no difference really to speak of,
and I almost never heard any kind of racial remarks
by white people. Nineteen ninety one, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts,
(28:15):
and it was everywhere. Give you an example. How so see,
I'll give you a perfect example. I was standing in
the North End waiting to go into a restaurant and
a car stopped. A black man got out and ran
into a store that sold magazines and newspapers, and a
guy who was standing in line next to me said,
what the hell's he going in there for? He can't read?
(28:37):
Oh wow, yeah, yeah wow, yeah. I think there's something
also different. I mean hearing racist stuff. I mean, I'll
give you an example. This is just my own experience.
I was driving with my kids. I live on the
South side of Chicago, and we were actually going through
the part that's the campus of the University of Chicago,
and we saw a young man in a Maga hat.
(28:57):
And you know, this was sort of still the Trump administration,
but like you know all the rage that that invokes,
and my reaction was like seeing a giraffe or something.
I was like, look, kids, look, I was actually excited.
I was like, look, there's one Like look, there's a
kid with a maga hat. And I didn't feel like
there was nothing in me that was like let me,
let me attack this young man, let me like put
(29:18):
him in his place. And try to teach him something
and like shake him. This would be the equivalent, I
would think would be the luxury of not feeling like
that's the status quo of where I live. But in
this town in Arkansas, like, there was no threat from
Black Lives Matter. This kid was a total anomaly. Yeah.
That's one of the great ironies of the moment we
(29:38):
are in now, where a lot of white people are
triggered by criticisms of structural racism and then call the
people criticizing structural racism racists and call them up on
the phone and threaten their lives for being the racist.
(29:58):
Or you're getting them hate mail. You're triggered here. No, No,
you're not. You're talking about your like stuff you've gotten no.
But but I'm just I'm one of them. I'm sure
Donald has gotten. Donald. Have you gotten hate mail for
publishing this book? I got one so far. Yeah. I mean, so,
what you're saying, man, is like not being triggered to
violence because some trumper was wearing a MAGA hat in
(30:21):
your presence. Demonstrate something about you and at least the
subculture that you represent. Whereas for the people who we
actually could objectively say are articulating racist views actually threatened
violence to say that they're not racist, the ship don't
make no sense. But here we are, So we are
(30:42):
living in a moment of extreme backlash. We are living
in a moment where it's not just this kind of
existential political movement of white nationalists who think they have
to hold onto the country because people like me are
eventually going to take over. But we're also living in
a moment where the backlash is legislative. It is actually
(31:04):
doubling down on the kinds of textbook narratives, the ones
that subscribe to white supremacist points of view, or at
least the ones that erase the contributions of people of color,
whether they are black or indigenous or Mexican Americans, as
is what happened in Arizona about a decade ago, when
they basically made ethnic studies like to teach Mexican American
(31:25):
descended children that any part of their history is divisive.
And it's like that video articulates, I think exactly your
point that if we don't deal with these histories, we
are going to continue to produce people like those in
that video, and we're going to continue to have a
politics of backlash and in support of structural racism. Absolutely,
(31:46):
and I think the potential could be even worse because
people of this frame of mind, who believe that they're
very identities, as James Baldwin remark back in the sixties,
that they're very identities, are being taken from them or threatened. Right, Okay,
we'll do anything to preserve the old order. Oh Man, Donald,
(32:10):
I am so glad you mentioned James Baldwin because I
teach him in every class. And there's this particular quote
from an appearance he makes on The Dick Cavett Show
in nineteen sixty eight, and here's a clip from it
from our oldpex's film, I Am Not Your Negro. The
question you gotta ask yourself, the white population of this
company's got to ask itself North and South, because it's
one country and one negro. There's a didence in the
(32:31):
North in the South. There's just a difference in the
way they in a way they castrate too, but that's
but the fact of the castration is an American fact.
If I'm not the nigga here and you invented him,
you the white people invented him, and you've got to
find out why and that includes electing demogogues to office
(32:53):
who will make sure that other demogogues remained in office,
and that people of the Democratic Party or people who
believe in the Pledge of Allegiance where it says with
liberty and justice for all, will be excluded because they
are threats to the social order. Perceived as threats to
the social order, we could lose our democracy within a
(33:15):
few years. Yeah, yeah, our democracy definitely feels under threat.
And how it's tied to this sense of our history
is powerful, and I think we're all saying this. It's
not so clear now that like better textbooks are going
to save us. Yeah. Yeah, Well, this is kind of
a really important point to bring up the sixteen nineteen project,
because your book comes out not only after the original
(33:37):
sixteen nineteen project of the New York Times magazine, published
on the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of the
first Africans who would ultimately experience the early stages of
slavery in sixteen nineteen. That project comes out in August
of twenty nineteen, and then a revised version in a
book length that comes out just last year. So here
(33:58):
your book comes afterwards and I'm curious. Let me shout
you out though, Khalil, you're in the sixteen nineteen Project.
You have a chapter in it, in both the magazine
form in the book from you write about the history
of sugar. Yeah, it's important to say, you know, yeah,
that's true. So and I guess the question is, what
do you think about the sixteen nineteen project. Is it
part of the solution? It is part of the solution.
(34:20):
It isn't perfect by any means. A few things are.
But when I was writing the epilogue to the book
at that point two years ago, so many schools around
the country had adopted the sixteen nineteen Project for use
in class I found that terribly encouraging, even if there
are flaws, even if the emphasis on slavery and the
(34:44):
revolution isn't quite what was presented. However, the sixteen nineteen
projects emphasis on white supremacy is absolutely vital, and as
many people who can read that, the better off we
will be. However, under these current conditions, I have no
faith at all that what needs to be done will
(35:08):
be done, even bike dedicated, well trained teachers. If the
school system won't allow it, what do we do. I'm
finding teachers who are telling me that they are being
compelled to teach some repulsive images of people of African
descent because they're in the textbook they're being compelled to use,
(35:28):
and if they don't use it, they could lose their jobs.
When we come back, we're going to have more conversations
about what we are and are not teaching in our schools,
including my own daughters. We'll be back after the break.
(36:05):
Welcome back to Some of my best friends are so Donald,
Let's just say we have actual teachers who want to
do the right thing, who want to engage the history
of slavery in a thoughtful and productive way. And it
seems to me that part of what you describe in
the last page of your book are these, like many
many stories of things gone terribly wrong, or you know,
(36:25):
you sort of imply that they're all intentionally poor outcomes,
or maybe I'm misreading it, but one in particular, you
cite this example of New Jersey for ten years teaching
slave runaway advertisements or having students do a project on that,
and I wanted to tell you Donald that actually, in
(36:45):
this instance, though this is not to say that all
the other examples that you describe are not examples of
bad teaching or somehow some diabolical effort to make black
kids feel bad. But in this instance, the New Jersey
example came directly from my school district and my daughter Justice,
who is a fifth grader at the time, was given
(37:07):
that assignment, and it made National news. Parents of fifth
graders at school the New Jersey our outrage after two
slavery related school assignments may have taken it too far,
but here's what actually happened. So the story that National
News told was that students, basically black students, were subjected
(37:28):
to these terrible ads of black runaways on the bulletin
board outside of their classroom, and it just reinforced this
negative image of black people, and the black students felt bad.
And it is true that some of the parents of
my daughter's classmates did feel that way. They felt that
their kids were being subjected to racist images of black people.
(37:49):
But the point of the assignment, and this is why
I think this is really tricky as we moved towards
like what comes next in this country. What is tricky
is that the teachers, after I sat down with them,
I reviewed the material I actually had helped my daughter
create her own runaway ad. It turns out that what
they were trying to do was to show the fulls
(38:09):
of colonial life in America, and rather than every kid
pretending like everyone was just a homesteader or a pioneer
or a colonist sharing in the hard work of building
the nation, they found a way to say that black
people were experiencing slavery, and they had prepared the material
(38:30):
to teach them this. I told my daughter as we
went on Google to look for actual runaway ads, that
those ads in the eighteenth nineteenth century were the most
dominant source of learning about individual black people, because they
told their names, they told their characteristics, they gave them personalities,
and in ways that black people are often invisible in
the archives and invisible in their historical record, or only
(38:52):
come through in a diary entry of a white enslaver
describing their faithful slave, these ads served a different kind
of purpose and at least documenting the presence of black
people when they often were left out of the story.
And so I pushed back against the criticism as a
historian because I felt like it was a way to
actually teach slavery rather than simply avoided a lot of
(39:16):
people didn't agree with me, but I wanted to share
that story with you because I do think it illustrates
that even when people want to get this right, the
stakes are really high and fraught. You know. I followed
those debates and I'm listening to both of you, and
I think it's such a landmine and so many, so
many ways it can go wrong. And I hear you
Khalil talking about New Jersey and that it also cuts
(39:38):
both ways, is what you're saying, right, That we have
to we have to find ways to teach that hard
history that really looks at it, and that's gonna be
fraught and difficult to do, and you know, there are
lots of ways to fuck it up, but that is
the space that we have to move into. Right, That's right.
I mean, you have this moment in your conclusion near
the end of the book that really struck me. You
(40:00):
talk about a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center
from twenty eighteen and they cite that, I'm only about
eight percent of students that they interviewed could even say
what the causes of the Civil War was fighting over
over slavery. Yeah, But then another thing from that study
really struck me that that even where slavery was part
(40:21):
of the curriculum, nine percent of the teachers who responded
said they just didn't teach it, they just skipped it over.
And I had this confirmed when I deliver lectures on
this subject, you know, around various schools, and I ask students, well,
what did you learn about the history of slavery and
race in America? The answer quote not much, unquote yeah. Yeah.
(40:46):
That study from the Southern Poverty Law Center is called
teaching Hard History. Yes, And I love the name of
that study. I mean, like this is pre backlash critical
race theory imagined, you know, boogeyman stuff, and the idea
that we need to confront our hard histories as well
as like our soft ones that make us comfortable and
don't make us feel bad. But like you know, we're
(41:07):
we're a nation that has stains on it and we
need to see those as well. And you know, that
idea of like teaching hard history seems like a great
lesson to take off it. Yes, And we've got to
the point where as you point out, even if we
have the best textbooks on the planet, if teachers won't
teach it, what good is it? I just want to
say again how much we appreciate you having it, having
(41:29):
you on and you're sharing how significant this body of
work is in terms of socializing white supremacy as a
core value in American society. And as we have observed
in this moment, this political season that we're all part of,
and that video we saw of the young man holding
a Black Lives Matter sign, that when you write at
(41:50):
the end of your book that history is a mirror,
you say that quote, the history we teach is the
product of the culture we create, not necessarily of the
actual history we made. And I thought that was a
really wonderful line, Donald, and appreciate your commitment and passion
for us getting our history right. Thanks for coming on
the show, Oh thank you. You know, this history of
(42:21):
the founding of this nation that continues to be debated
in our country right now tells us that our history
is fundamental to how we think of ourselves as a country.
And until we get that history right, as I learned
from Donald today, then we're going to keep reproducing one
generation to the next people who have false ideas about
(42:43):
how we arrived at the country that we are and
where we have to take it. But you just said
about false ideas and how they're you know, this long
history of them. That's where we are right now. We're
still caught up in all these false ideas that defines
our politics. You know, we're not confronting these issues of race.
We're not confronting how the politics affects Americans. That's what
(43:04):
we have to solve for. Yeah, and there's no way
out of this dilemma because because as much as we
might hope the young people today are going to be
better than than they were back in the day, that
young man in Arkansas just shows us that it doesn't matter.
These ideas are so sticky. As Donald pointed out, that
unless we change things and how we teach and socialize,
(43:26):
they're going to be new generations of folks with the
same racial hatred, the same bigoted ideas, the same backlash
to the change that we need in this country. No
way out, that's the new name of this podcast. No, no, no,
we gotta end on a happy note. All right, now,
we got this because we're we're living, we're living post
mid term. Things are going to get better. We're working
on this and uh right, it wasn't a red wave.
(43:48):
It was a red puddle. Yes, yes see now we
get it circle Yes, yes all right, man, I love you,
I love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are
is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written
and hosted by me Oldibron Muhammad and my best friend
(44:11):
Ben Austin. Gets produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan.
Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wong,
and our executive producer is Mia Lamell. At Pushkin Thanks
Selita Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars,
Gretta Kone and Jacob Weissberg. Our theme song, Little Lily,
(44:34):
is by fellow chicagoan a brilliant Avery R. Young from
his album pub You definitely want to check out his
music at his website Avery R. Young dot com. You
can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
(44:55):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it. When my mom listens to us, you know,
(45:25):
listens to some of my best friends are, she says,
I watched you guys. She has to look at the
image of us from from the show arts every time,
so she every week she says, hey, I just watched
your podcast, and she literally did. She have to sit
in front of the computer staring at the picture of
us and imagine like the sounds coming out of our mouth. Oh,
(45:45):
that's funny.
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