12-13-25 The Weekend Hour 1: Will The Wounds Of Slavery Ever Heal?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To night. Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA
director of talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie, no, Brownie,
You're doing a heck of a job. The Weekend with
Michael Brown broadcasting from Denver, Colorado. Hey, it's the Weekend
with Michael Brown. Glad to have you joined the program today.
As usual. You know, we got rules of engagement on
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(00:23):
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Brown USA. So I want to start with a simple
thesis today, and that is a civic curriculum. A school

(00:47):
curriculum doesn't make a difference to me whether it's a
high school curriculum or a higher education curriculum. But when
a curriculum asks students to form judgments about some injustice,
then you got to tell the full story. And in
this case, I'm talking about slavery. And I'm talking about
slavery because it seems to me that once again Jasmine

(01:07):
Crockett running for Texas, running in Texas, Texas, and a
bunch of other people running for Texas. Joy Reid was
on MSNBC this past week talking about how when the
founding fathers killed off something like, I don't know, ninety
percent of the indigenous people in the country when when
they started finding America. And the more I dug into that,

(01:29):
I realized, lame it. That's not true. We did not
kill upwards or approximately ninety percent of the population of
indigenous people when this country was founded, whether you want
to use the date of the Declaration of Independence seventeen
seventy six or the date that we signed the Constitution
in seventeen eighty nine. So they're already lying to you about,

(01:54):
of course, white Europeans, and in this case, and we'll
get to slavery in just a moment, but in the
case to Joy read, she's lying to us about how
white Europeans they came here from America, settled in Suddenly
we were the ones that were somehow destroying all the
indigenous people, And I just I find it offensive primarily

(02:17):
because when you make those kinds of claims, the audience
that she is playing to doesn't know any better. Listen
to what she says.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
So you know, this nation was founded by killers who
slaughtered ninety percent of the Indigenous people, leeches who glombed
off of the indigenous, who taught them how to survive
in the wilderness, and then murdered them as their things
and then took all their land. And you want to

(02:47):
talk about entitlement, They felt entitled to own other people
and they didn't even want to pay taxes on it.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
So they decided to have a whole war with Britain.
So we decided we didn't want to pay any taxes
on the people that own so we decide to have
a war with Britain. Did she ever hear of the
Tea Party, any hear of any of that? But to
claim somehow that the country was founded by killers who
slaughdered ninety percent of the Indigenous people is just blatantly false.

(03:17):
The claim that she makes misapplies a very well documented
approximately ninety percent population decline of Indigenous peoples across North
the entire North American continent, but it didn't occur in
seventeen seventy six or seventeen eighty nine. It occurred primarily
between fourteen ninety two to around sixteen hundred, and it

(03:40):
was because of Eurasian diseases like smallpox. Now, of course
there was some violence, because as these civilizations clash as
they come together, of course there's going to be some violence.
But anthropologists refer to this period between fourteen ninety two
and sixteen hundred as the Great Dying. But that predates

(04:01):
the founding of this country in seventeen eighty nine, and
it affected the entire hemisphere, not just what is now
the United States, where those pre fourteen ninety two estimates
range from somewhere between two and seven million people. Now,
specific estimates for the United States showed Native American populations
around about seventy six thousand and seventeen eighty nine, and

(04:24):
then that number grew. Now I want you to think
about this in the middle of territorial expansion. Now, of
course I understand there's incomplete census that may have excluded
a lot of untaxed tribes or people that we had,
tribes that we had not even discovered or run into yet.
But the number that anthropologists attribute to so called indigenous

(04:46):
or Native American Indian populations grew from about seventy seventy
six thousand in seventeen eighty nine to more than one
hundred and twenty nine thousand by eighteen twenty five. And again,
as I said, that's way, that's when all this territorial
expansion and it is going on, and you would think
those numbers would have decreased, that is, if you believe

(05:07):
someone like Joy Reid. And then by the early eighteen hundreds, say,
you know, eighteen twenty or so, there's no reliable data
anywhere that indicates a ninety percent drop between say seventeen
eighty nine or eighteen twenty. Declines from violence were significant later,
like in the eighteen thirties because of say as an

(05:28):
example of the Trail of Tears that killed thousands, but
that was again because of traveling from the Carolinas to
Indian territory and trying to settle there. But warfare accounted
for only about forty five thousand deaths between seventeen eighty
nine and eighteen ninety. Diseases remained the dominant factor in

(05:50):
those ongoing declines through the eighteen hundreds. Now there was displacement,
but it was not settlers, it was not white Europeans
directly killing some ninety percent in that specified period. Early
censuses in this country omitted most Native Americans, so that
does complicate the counts. But again I emphasize an anthropologists

(06:12):
report that there is no evidence this supports that claims
time frame or the mechanism to put that in perspective.
The reason I bring that up is because again the
thesis is simple. If we're going to teach slavery, then
we ought to ask students to form judgments about injustice

(06:33):
by hearing the entire story. And in this country, classroom
units on slavery usually focus almost exclusively on the transatlantic
traffic of Africans to this country, and I do believe
that story should be taught. But the same classrooms often
give little or no attention whatsoever to the centuries long
enslavement of European Christians by Islamic powers and North African

(07:00):
in North Africa, or say the Ottoman Realms, or for
that matter, of the Black Sea Step. The result is
an imbalance, and that imbalance significantly encourages a racialized narrative,
a victim and appressor rather than a human narrative of
power and predation, and that imbalance is bad for everybody.

(07:24):
Why because it miseducates black students by presenting a one
track account of bondage. And when you teach young mush
brain kids, particularly black kids, or any mush brain kids,
but when you teach them that it was all about bondage,
what does that do? That feeds the politics of grievance.

(07:48):
And when you are taught and fed and pounded into
your head grievance, that leads to societal problems. And at
the same time that it does that, it miseducates white
It miseducates other students by racing episodes in which there
are forebears suffer the same brutal fate all races suffer

(08:10):
from slavery. And to teach well, you have to teach completely.
You have to teach the entire story. Because the point
is not to minimize to minimize Atlantic slavery, it is
to contextualize it within the global institution of slavery, and
to make clear that the capacity to enslave was not

(08:32):
based on race. The capacity to slave, for human beings,
to enslave one another was a human condition. It was
not a racial decision, and many people miss that it's
the Weekend with Michael Brown. Don't forget. Text the word
Mike roor Michael to three to three ones zero three.

(08:52):
When we get back, let begin with a fact that
I think might surprise you. Hang tight, I'll be right back.
Welcome back to the Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to
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(09:15):
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so you get all the Michael Brown radio. The theory is,

(09:37):
so let's go back to the story about how we're
teaching slavery in schools, and I said, I wanted to
give you a fact that I think might surprise many people.
Do you know it only about and I know that
the numbers are still significant, but you would think that
many people do think that, oh my gosh, it must
have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands, But

(09:59):
only out three hundred and eighty eight thousand Africans forced
onto ships in the Atlantic trade actually disembarked in North America.
Do you know? The vast majority of those Africans forced
onto those slave ships went to other countries and other continents.
So the number is small relative to the total. Yet

(10:21):
I know, and I'm not discounting. It's still a moral
catastrophe and it is still wrong. But you would think
that every black person that was put on a ship
and sent to the United States, that they all came
to the colonies and they all came to North America.
That's just simply not true. The smallness of the number matters, though,

(10:43):
when it comes to a curriculum and when it comes
to teaching the truth. It shows that the North American
story about slavery, while it is vitally important, is just
a regional fragment of the total global system of slavery
that was going on at that time. And I might
just add as a footnote, right now, slavery still exists today,

(11:07):
and why we don't want to recognize it, and why
we don't want to call it out is because it
is brutal, and today it mostly involves children, and we
find that offensy. So we're like, you know, the blind mice.
We just cover our eyes, we cover our ears, and
we don't want to hear or talk about it. But
the fragment, that vast majority that went elsewhere and the

(11:33):
fragment that came here cannot bear the whole moral weight
of that system without some distortion. And the curriculum that
treats the fragment as the whole invites confusion about causes, responsibility,
and remedies, and that leads many of the race baiting

(11:53):
individuals today to claim that we are the only peoples
in the entire world that ever engaged in slavery. And
none of this is meant to justify it. It's meant
to give you perspective. It's meant to tell you that,
you know, slavery was everywhere, and slavery still exists today.

(12:15):
But if you browbeat through a public education curriculum that
it was only the United States, it was only the Americans,
it was only you know, Europeans, and white Europeans at that,
then of course, you're going to have people who are
going to be absolutely filled with hatred and filled with grievance.

(12:36):
And we wonder why people act the way they do
today because one, even if they do get an education,
the education is not complete. Now, I want you to
think about the other fragment that is often missing in
this curriculum. Starting in the eighth century, Muslims from Algiers, Tunas,
Tripoli and the Moroccan ports. Do you know they rated

(12:57):
European coasts and see ships at sea and what they
would do is they would carry off Christians for sale
in the North African markets. But we don't talk about that.
We don't teach that. And if we're gonna teach about slavery,
just slavery, then we need to teach the entire story,

(13:19):
not just part of it. In the East, the Crimean
Tatar Cannot, a vassal of the Ottomans, conducted at regular
slave raids deep into what's now Ukraine, Poland and Russia,
and they funneled as many as four million white slaves
into Ottoman centers like into Istanbul, and historians estimate that

(13:39):
the Barbari states alone and slave more than a million
white Europeans from Ruffrey fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred, and
then when you add the Black Sea trade under the
Tatars and the Ottomans, the Cuban stief toll runs into
the millions. More So, this is not some brief episode.
It lasted in varying inten City for a millennia, and

(14:01):
it peaked in the seventeenth century. Now, despite majoring in
history and college, many people have almost no familiarity with
the Barbary Wars, and most people don't even know about
it unless you join the Marines and get in the military,
or you've got an excellent history teacher, either in high
school or in college. The Barbary Wars ended not because

(14:22):
the pirates repented, but because European navies and European empires
forced that issue of Christian slavery, culminating in the Barbary
Wars in the bombardment of Algiers in eighteen sixteen. So
it helps to make the matter vivid. In sixteen twenty seven,

(14:43):
raiders from Algiers and so La struck as far as Iceland,
kidnapping hundreds from villages as far north as the Arctic Circle,
and in the mid sixteen hundreds observers describe swaths of
Mediterranean coastline becoming thinly populated because life on the coast
had become perilous. It was dangerous to live on the

(15:05):
coast because the bobbery pirates were showing up and snapping
people off the beaches, off the coastlines, and then taking
them into slavery, back into Africa and the Middle East. So,
of course those populations moved inward. Algiers at times held
tens of thousands of Christian slaves, and they labored in

(15:28):
the quarries, the dockyards, and or the corsair fleets. The
pattern in the East it wasn't it wasn't easier. Tartar raiding,
known as the harvesting of the step, repeatedly swept up
rural populations, tore apart families. They sold men, women and
children downstream into Ottoman markets. These facts do not diminish

(15:49):
the horror of the Middle Passage. What they do is
it enlarges the moral canvas, so that a student that
is studying slavery by a teacher whose willing to teach
the hold of history, can see the human institution of
slavery in its entire breadth, and not just part of it.

(16:10):
I know a natural objection arise. Was not the Atlantic
trade different because it was racialized chattel slavery that was
tied to plantations, and the barbary in the Ottoman slavery
was religious or strategic rather than racial, often because of
different legal forms and some prospects of ransom or assimilation. Yes,

(16:30):
there are differences in legal status, economic use, and ideological justification.
Those differences need to be taught in. They do belong
in the classroom. They clarify rather than blur. But difference
is not the same as not being commensurate. In both systems,

(16:53):
whether you're talking about the barbary or you're talking about
the North American trade slave trade, both of those institutions,
people were violently captured, uprooted, sold, compelled to labor, all
under the threat of punishment or death. And in both systems,

(17:14):
catless captives died in bondage. In both systems, entire regions
were reshaped by the fear and the fact of rating. So,
as I often say on this program, you can hold
two thoughts at once, and that would be that the
Atlantic system was uniquely large in scale in the early
modern Atlantic world, and that the Islamic enslavement of Europeans

(17:37):
was protracted and numerically significant across centuries in the Mediterranean
and in the Black Sea worlds. The hardest sentence In
moral education, the hardest sentences are often compound sentences. And
we ought to teach students how to diagram and to
parse a sentence, and how to hold two thoughts at once.

(18:02):
Neither one of these two stories, either that of the
Atlantic or that of the Islamic enslavement, are justified. But
teaching only one without teaching both is what leads to
a distortion and leads today to a complete misunderstanding of

(18:23):
where we are with slavery. Hang tight, I'll be right back.
Good night. Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA
director of talk.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Show host Michael Brown. Brownie, no, Brownie, You're doing a
heck of a job The Weekend with Michael Brown.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Welcome back The Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to have
you with me. I appreciate you tuning in. It's always
glad to have you with me. Be sure and follow
me on X at Michael Brown USA, and of course,
the text line is always open twenty four hours a day,
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number on your message app three three one zero three
three three one zero three keyword Mike or Michael. Now,

(19:06):
let's go back to this idea that we had two
worlds of slavery. We had the North Atlantic slavery, which
white Europeans going to Africa picking up blacks, putting them
on the slave ships bringing them to North America. And
then we had that occurring in the Islamic markets in
Istanbul and Turkey and in those parts of what we

(19:29):
now call Eastern Europe. There's another objection though. This other
objection says that raising the history of white slaves in
Islamic markets that somehow when we talk about that, we're
trying to minimize the suffering of black Americans. That is
not the case that I am making. I do not minimize.

(19:51):
I contextualize. Context is not an excuse, it's an orientation
because it gives you a complete picture. If a young
mush brain student is taught only the Atlantic story, they
can easily slip into a crude syllogism. Blacks were enslaved
in the Americas. Therefore slavery is a black phenomenon, and

(20:14):
therefore whites are historical oppressors, and blacks are historical victims,
and therefore the present right now in America, we should
restructure and redress all of these problems. Well, when you
think about that, every single step in that chain is simplistic,
overly simplistic. A young reader that's taught the broader history

(20:39):
is less likely to fall for reductive politics of grievance
and is more inclined to see that slavery has been
a human institution that corrupts whomever holds that power, whomever
engages in that activity. And if our curricula teach both
the Atlantic and the Islamic store worries, then the lessons

(21:01):
that emerge is not racial resentment. Instead, I believe it
will be a sober understanding of how power praise upon
the weak unless it's restrained by law and virtue, which,
just as a parenthetical, is precisely what the founding fathers
in this country were trying to do. So when you

(21:25):
hear about you know Waily counted slaves as part human
that was because the founders knew that they while they
could rip the bandage of slavery off, that that wound
would not heal, and that the country might never form,
and so let's ease into it. It wasn't to dehumanize them,

(21:47):
it was to put them on a path so that
this country could eventually eliminate slavery. I would just ask
you to think out loud for a moment. Do you
think anything like that was going on in the Ottoman Empire.
Do you think anything like that was going on in
Turkey or Istanbul or any of those countries where the

(22:07):
Islamic slavery was taking place where they were enslaving Christians.
Of course not so for someone like Joy Reid to
criticize the Founding Fathers and oh, we just killed all
of these indigenous people and we engage in the slave
trade and it was all about economics, completely ignores and
intensifies and reinforces the grievance attitude that many people have today.

(22:32):
When they have that attitude because they don't have the
complete story, the curricular consequences then follow. First, if you
had a balanced udent on slavery, it should include an
extended treatment of the Barbary rating and the Ottoman slave
roots alongside the Middle Passage, and that treatment should include

(22:53):
the political economy of the Corsair States, the role of
the Ottoman slave markets, the Tartar system. On the step,
it should attract how captives were procured, how they were used,
how ransom worked, how often death or assimilation was the endpoint,
and how European states eventually suppressed the trade by force.

(23:15):
If you include that material, that would correct the false
inference that European societies were always and only slave traders,
when in fact Muslim societies you would also, well, let
me put it this way, it would including that material
would in correct the false inference that European societies were

(23:39):
always only the slave traders and that Muslim societies were
only victims of European imperialism. But that's what many people
believe today, and that's just simply not true. It's so
much more nuanced than that. And you have to be
able to hold both those thoughts in your mind at
the same time. But if they're never taught both the thoughts,

(24:02):
they can't hold both thoughts in their mind. If they were,
If they were taught that and they were able to
hold both thoughts in their mind at the same time,
it would help students understand how Anglo American abolitionism sits.
Within a longer story excuse me how that sits within

(24:22):
a longer story in which our naval power, our treaties,
and our changing norms brought multiple slave systems to an end.
You really should at some point, whether it's your children,
your grandchildren, you're great grandkids, I don't care. Or maybe
just go to the public school and asked to see

(24:44):
because you know you pay, you pay the taxes on it,
and just say, hey, I'd like to see the history
taught in the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth grade in high school.
Or go to a local college and then go to
the index and look up slavery and read the sections
on slavery and then come back and tell me whether
or not you found a balanced curriculum, because my guess

(25:06):
is nine times out of ten you will not. Now,
the textbook is one thing and the teacher is another.
Because the teacher may have a textbook that doesn't have
both points of view, doesn't have both historical contexts, yet
does teach both those. So be careful in making an
assumption about how the history is actually being taught. But

(25:28):
quite honestly, most teachers are going to teach from the textbook,
and that's why textbooks are so important. But There's another
reason too. A balanced historical unit in a school's curriculum
should very carefully compare numbers and timelines without turning some
sort of moral education into a perverse scorekeeping of pain.

(25:52):
That's not what this is about. The best recent syntheses
agree that the Atlantic trade ship about as I said earlier,
about three hundred and eighty eight thousand slaves to North America.
The Barbary States likely enslaved over a million Europeans between
fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred and algiers that was the

(26:14):
largest market. The Black Seas trade and of the Tatars
plausibly added several million more over five centuries, and with
new quantitative work suggesting a floor in the mid single
digit millions, the timelines don't perfectly overlap Atlantic slavery as
a transoceanic system lasted probably, I would say, about three centuries.

(26:38):
Islami enslavement of Europeans, while episodic we need just occurred
occasionally here and there, lasted more than three centuries. Is
Lami enslavement of Europeans endured in some form for closer
to a millennium, beginning in the early medieval period, and
Indian in the nineteenth century. Of course, I would argue

(27:01):
then the twentieth and twenty first century slavery still continues,
but we turn a blind eye to it. If we
gave those contrasts, he would show students something crucial. What
is crucial that would be shown to those students. That
is that human beings have found many ways to rationalize

(27:22):
and to impose slavery, often for very long periods, and
sometimes on an industrial scale. So the moral is not
that one group owes another group of debt for all time.
It is that any group entrusted with unchecked power can
be tempted to treat outsiders as property, and thus you

(27:43):
would have tyranny, and thus you would have slavery. It's
the Weekend with Michael Brown. Text lines always open, number
three three one zero three, keyword Mike or Michael. I'll
close this out next. Hey, welcome back to the Weekend
with Michael Brown. Glad to have you with me. I

(28:04):
appreciate you tuning in. Remember text line three three one
zero three, keyword Michael, Michael. And if you like what
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Talk out of Denver, Colorado on a station called KOA
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(28:25):
find KOA the Situation with Michael Brown at eight fifty
AM or ninety four point one FM. That's Monday through Friday,
nine to noon mountain time. If you like Saturday, you
got to listen during the week two. So lastly, a
balanced curriculum. I want to be candid about procurement. Where'd
they get these people in the Barbary and the Ottoman systems.

(28:47):
European captives were overwhelmingly seized in raids or they were
taking as war captives. There wasn't like a franchise network
of European coastal elites telling their neighbors to the North
African slave traders. The Coursairs themselves stormed ashore, and the
Tartars themselves rode in on their horses to take those

(29:07):
people in the Atlantic system. By contrast, European and American
traders actually depended upon black African intermediaries to supply the
captives at the coastal ports. African politics and raiding confederations,
some influenced by prior Islamic slave training patterns captured other

(29:31):
Africans and sold them to the Atlantic merchants. To say
that is not to deny European culpability. It's to teach
the honest structure of how the slave trade occurred. You see,
students should learn to distinguish between the roles of the collector,
the broker, the transporter, the buyer. I know these are

(29:54):
human beings, but this is and it's horrible to say that.
I think it helps you understand this. This is why
they were called chattel. They were just like any other commodity.
They were humans treated as commodities. You can't get much
more dehumanizing than that. But if that is how in

(30:19):
history it occurred, then that's how people need to understand,
because you have to understand how people looked upon it
at the time. You did have roles of the people
that went out and hunted and collected the people to
become slaves. You had those hunters that would turn them
over to the brokers, and the brokers would sell them

(30:42):
at the ports, and then the people that were going
to transport them would pay a fee or they would
get paid a fee to transport them, say to the
United States and then there they would find a buyer.
It's dehumanizing, it's awful, but they should learn that participation
in evil can actually occur across many hands, including hands

(31:07):
of the same race as the victims. I think fourth,
and probably most important for civic formation and for historical purposes,
I think students ought to see how free nations ultimately
ended the multiple slave systems. You'll read the Marines or

(31:30):
breed the Marines him or listen to it. The United
States fought the Barbary pirates in two wars. Britain bombard
at Algiers to force the release of the captives, and
treaties were imposed against the slaving Europeans. European pressure and
later colonization of North Africa shut down the course air

(31:51):
markets in the Atlantic World. Britain and the United States
outlawed the trade in the early nineteenth century, and then
we abolish slavery after Civil War, in which we killed
six hundred thousand of our own people. Now that's not triumphalism.
It is instruction, it is fact, and it is history.

(32:13):
Free institutions can correct grave injustices. Sometimes they do that
by persuasion, sometimes they do it by force. But teaching
that story rightly tends to unite instead of divide. Why
is that because it emphasizes the shared commitments that cut

(32:34):
across race and cut across creed and religions, and that's
what occurred in this country. I know that many will
worry that adding this content would give license to racists
who want to minimize the significance of black suffering. I
understand that. But the answer is not to censor. The

(32:55):
answer is to teach this with rigor, to make certain
that you teach each the facts. Because a teacher who
says both that three hundred and eighty eight thousand Africans
were landed in North America and that millions of Europeans
were slaved across centuries in the Islamic world has not

(33:15):
said that slavery in America was trivial. That teacher has
said that slavery was universal. And a teacher who says
that African politics often supplied captives to European traders, that
teacher has not absolved the Europeans responsibility. That teacher has
broadened the map of responsibility, and that enables students to

(33:38):
see how evil acts and propagates through incentives. Education look
education cannot inoculate against every abuse of history. But what
it can do is it can give students to tools
to distinguish, to distinguish between careful comparison and the stupid
phrase what about ism. A final point conservacivic rhetoric, No,

(34:04):
I think American students are too often told that the
labor of enslaved America, of the labor of enslaved Africans,
built American. Well, the truth is more specific than that
enslaved labor contributed significantly to certain regional economies and obviously
to certain sectors, especially in the South and especially in

(34:25):
the plantation agricultural sector. Now, that contribution was real, but
it does not follow that the nation as a whole
was built primarily by slave labor, or that the nation's
moral standing is fatally compromised by that simple fact. This
country is built by many kinds of labor, both free
and unfree, both immigrant and native born, both black and white,

(34:50):
and by many kinds of capital, different ideas, different institutions.
So if one insists on reductive slogans, one can produce
them for any given region. I think the better course
is to retire the slogans and teach the particulars because
When we do, students of all backgrounds will see both

(35:10):
the horror, the absolute horror of Atlantic Channel slavery in
this country and the broader human story of slavery's reach worldwide.
And I think that perspective doesn't divide, it equips the
moral and the civil argument for reforming the curriculum. I

(35:33):
think is this, tell the global truth about slavery, and
do it with the same granular level that we already
devote to the Atlantic trade. Second, make careful comparisons across
all the systems and all the different eras, all the
millennia to show what is similar and show what is different.

(35:54):
And third, be precise about the numbers and the timelines,
but never lose sight the moral issue. And then fourth,
emphasize how lawful power a small or republican form of government,
how the Anglo American navy and military action helped end
the enslavement of Europeans as well as Africans. And then

(36:17):
ask students to reflect on a sobering constant of human life.
That constant, the temptation of the strong to prey upon
the weak and the countervailing power of institutions that bind
the strong. That's the kind of curriculum that will help
them begin to understand the absolute power of self governance

(36:43):
that we participate in this country, and the whole attitude
of grievance will start to dissipate because now people will
have a full and a complete understanding of this subject.
Just teach full history, teach complete history, because we gain

(37:04):
something precious. Students who know that millions of Europeans were
enslaved by Islamic powers, and that millions more Africans were
enslaved in the Atlantic world, they can now see a
more complex moral landscape, and they won't be susceptible to
ideologues who want to weaponize partial truths like Joy Reid.

(37:25):
Hang tight, I'll be right back.