History Is A Story We're Told

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Quinn: I've recorded hundreds of conversations with incredible people working on the front lines of the future. People who've asked the most important question: what can I do? Who found their answer and followed it. But for today's conversation, we're going back to the front lines of the past because the past can tell us a whole hell of a lot about today and how tomorrow might go.

But only if we tell the full story of how we got here, about who got us here, about how my great-great-grandparents got here. And how my grandma got here fleeing the Nazis, and how millions of Africans were forcibly brought here. Over 35,000 trips across the middle passage over almost 300 years. The full story of the choices we made then, which was not so long ago, and continue to make now about [00:01:00] wars and heritage and bondage and family and land and more.

And how, if we can break from the stories we've been told and continue to tell ourselves to choose history over nostalgia, to choose facts over memory and infinite disinformation on demand, we can make different choices. We can find our conscience as a people, no matter the government, and make measurably radically better choices for equality, for global health and climate change, artificial intelligence and ethics, food and water, education, and museums, for maternal health, for sustainable agriculture and Alzheimer's research to redlining and reparations, for indigenous health data, food stamps, yes, and electric school buses. It's just as important now on the cusp of all of this, in the middle of all of this to ask, what can [00:02:00] I do to teach our fullest history? To be curious and examine the anthropology of us and why we do what we do. Why we enslave and punish people and tear families apart, who we built our myths upon, and who they really were, no matter what they wrote. And have we even taken the time, have we even the collective will to read everything they wrote?

I'm your host, Quinn Emmett, and my guest today is Clint Smith. Clint Smith is the number one New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, he's the winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award for nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for book journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021.

And now in 2025, the Young Reader's Edition has just come out and it is wonderful. Clint is also the [00:03:00] author and you'll hear us talk about two books of poetry. And the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground, as well as Counting Descent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards.

Clint is a staff writer at The Atlantic and he has received fellowships for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canum, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. I read them over and over again. Clint is a former National Poetry Slam Champion, and the recipient of the Jerome Jay Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.

Previously, Clint taught high school English in Prince George's County, [00:04:00] Maryland, where he was named the Christine de Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. Clint is the host of the fantastic YouTube series Crash Course: Black American History. He received his BA in English from Davidson College and his PhD in education from Harvard University. Born and raised in New Orleans, he lived through Katrina. He currently lives now in Maryland with his wife and their two children. I am just incredibly grateful to Clint, not only for his work, for agreeing to have this conversation today, and it should be said to my dear friend, Franklin Leonard, for introducing us. For questions or feedback and I expect a lot of it, you can email us at questions@importantnotimportant.com.

Clint, it is truly an honor man. Thank you so much for joining. Welcome.

Clint Smith: It’s good to be here.

Quinn: It's [00:05:00] very kind of you. I will try not to abuse that as much as possible. You were, from my understanding, and I watched some videos from your Teach for America time and stuff like that, like an incredible teacher. Pulling the desks in the circle and having these actual conversations with people.

My high school is not like that, but I went to a liberal arts college like you and for better or worse, if you did your homework, that was how the classes went as well. And I, you know, loved it and loathed it. But I'm curious now, 'cause you're not a teacher, you're teaching millions of people in a very different way.

Why do you have to do the work that you're doing now? Whenever I think of your work, it's like, who watches the Watchmen? Like it's very like you're the record keeper of the record keepers a bit. Why do you have to do this work?

Clint Smith: I am a deeply curious person. I think curiosity is in many ways the sort of central animating feature of my life. And that curiosity in so many ways has been oriented toward history and memory [00:06:00] and a sort of curiosity around how we as a nation, how different countries around the world tell the story of who they are and what they've been through, and how they've experienced in particular war, atrocity, violence. And in what ways do these places articulate their sense of what happened. And what are the contemporary implications for that? 'Cause I think I grew up with a lot of gaps in my own historical understanding. And so much of the existence of those gaps is what propelled me to write How the Word is Passed.

Because I watched these confederate statues come down in New Orleans in 2017, statues of PGT Beuregard, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. And I started wondering what does it mean that I grew up in a city where there were more statues to enslavers than there were to enslaved people? And what does it mean that I grew up in a [00:07:00] city that is the heart of the domestic slave trade? And that my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. And I began to realize that I didn't understand the history of slavery in any way that was commensurate to the impact and legacy that it left on this country. And so I wrote the book as a way to sort of fill in the gaps of my own understanding, to fill in the gaps of all the things that I hadn't been taught growing up.

And so I think that for me, I am drawn to, I'm drawn to learning, you know, I want to learn histories that help explain how we domestically, globally, collectively have arrived where we are.

Quinn: It's kind of like how you grow up and learn your parents are people. And all these other things you know about being an adult. My daughter threw a tantrum the other day 'cause she said adults never have to do any chores. And I was like, there's so much you don't know yet. It's coming. Give it time. Discovering you have those gaps, which for a while might be, what do they call them? Unknown unknowns. And then maybe they become, if you're lucky, known unknowns. [00:08:00] I ordered a shitload of the Young Readers edition of How the Word Is Passed and I gave 'em out to middle schools and the local library down the street. Same library I grew up going to. And I did that not just because I loved the original so much. Was it four years ago? Five years ago? My god. And honestly, especially, with the more global context you gave it later with that Germany piece in the Atlantic. But also, 'cause I am above a candy shop in Colonial Williamsburg. I left for a long time like a lot of folks, and as you noted in your Colonial Williamsburg piece, What is Colonial Williamsburg For? Part of the sort of American Revolution bit they were doing and the work that all the 1619 production did examining Jamestown down the street as the birthplace of slavery of Africans in the continental US.

Is this a complicated place to grow up. There is a profound amount of history that needs a much more unvarnished telling, which I don't think I had access to. And so I really [00:09:00] wish a young reader's edition or either edition had been available in middle school and high school. 'cause here's the thing, I think I was exposed to just enough to imagine that there was much, much more to tell.

So I can't imagine growing up in the parts of the country where someone has none of that. And usually by design and then encounters your book in one way or another, either version of it. And I wonder how you think about that as someone who was a teacher who challenged your kids?

Clint Smith: I guess I began thinking about these things in earnest when I was a teacher. And I was a teacher in the sort of early, the earliest days of the Black Lives Matter movement. I was a high school English teacher, at Parkdale High School in Prince George's County, Maryland, right outside of DC. And my first year teaching was 2011. And in 2012 is when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman. And in some ways that marks the beginning of that period of time. Obviously it then accelerated with the murder of Michael Brown in [00:10:00] 2014. And then the sort of 2014 to 2020 period when it became supercharged after the murder of George Floyd. But because I was teaching in a moment where the beginning of this social movement was asking us to look at our history in order to explain how we arrived in a moment where something like this happens and what does it reveal about the sort of systems and structures and social infrastructure of our contemporary world. How does the history that preceded it explain how we arrived here in this moment? And so I began just in a personal capacity, thinking about and reading about a lot of those things. And then I brought a lot of those things to my classroom. Like I would, you know, I'd read something in the Atlantic and I'd bring it to my classroom and I'd teach it.

I'd read something in the New Yorker or I'd read something you know, a chapter of a book. I'd see a clip on YouTube and, you know, so I was constantly bringing [00:11:00] in much of my own learning that I was doing to share it with my students because my students, you know, they were largely Black and Latino kids.

Many of them were undocumented, at a time where, you know, immigration was precarious but less precarious than it is today. but wanted so desperately to give them the language, the historical context, the intellectual toolkit with which to more fully understand the current events that were happening around us, but also to understand their lives.

You know, I think that so often young people who are growing up in historically oppressed and marginalized spaces and contexts, see the context of their lives, but are never given information with which to understand why the community looks the way that it does. And what happens if you are never given that historical context and that information, you begin to look, you know, you look at one neighborhood in Prince George's County and you look at another neighborhood in Prince George's [00:12:00] County, or you look at one neighborhood in DC and another neighborhood in DC and you begin to assume that the reason this community looks that way and this community looks that way is 'cause of the people in those communities, right? Or because of the cultural disposition of those communities, or the genetic, or biological realities of those communities. And you don't understand that it actually has nothing to do with that. What it is, is because of what has been done to those communities and what's been taken from those communities, generation after generation.

And so these are things that I was learning in real time. In many ways during my time as a teacher. I was reading sociology, I was reading history, I was reading you know, all of these books and these writers and these scholars and these journalists and these artists who were providing me with new language to understand the world in front of me. And I wanted to provide that same language to my students and do my best to put it in conversation with so many of the pieces of literature that we were reading in class. And for me, that felt like part of my duty as an educator, you know, it wasn't peripheral or [00:13:00] it wasn't something that supplemented it.

It was central to what I understand my responsibility as a teacher to be. And ultimately what led me out of the classroom was that I began thinking about these issues for so long and so deeply. And thinking about, well, how I want to understand in more depth the social and historical infrastructure that surrounds the communities my kids are growing up in, that explain the context of the communities that my kids grow up in. That explains the context of the community that I grew up in. And that's ultimately what led me to graduate school and then to write about these things in a more full-time context.

Quinn: You mentioned in some interviews how instructive James Baldwin's Role of a Teacher speech was to you, I think it was like 63, 64, something like that. I'm curious if you ran into that before becoming a teacher, while you were a teacher or later as you've really expanded it on this idea of, again, basically the context, right?

Why these places are designed this way? I mean, there's a great book. I had a fellow on the podcast a couple years ago [00:14:00] who wrote a book called The Great American Transit Disaster. And it's as if someone was like, look, I'm the biggest nerd on this. I'm gonna write the manifesto about it so everyone understands how we got here. And it's basically that white people didn't want to ride the subway anymore with black people and buses and then he's got 500 pages of evidence in every city, you know, especially places like Atlanta. You know, how and why they were defunded and how that worked and white flight, and it's incredible. But like you said, like people have to understand why they're growing up in the places they're growing up and why it's not about them.

Clint Smith: No, a hundred percent. I mean, I can't remember if I encountered that James Baldwin essay before or after my time teaching. What I had encountered was Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed which is in many ways in conversation with much of what Baldwin was saying in a talk to teachers, which is essentially it is a teacher's responsibility to help a young person understand that the world is a social construction. And also that means that it can [00:15:00] be reconstructed and deconstructed and made into something new. And that you don't have to accept the realities of the world before you as static or as an inevitability, but you can understand it as something that can be changed, something that can be molded, something that can be, you have agency within that sort of social context. And so that was really important to me. I wanted my students to understand that they were agentic, that they could influence and impact and change the realities of the world before them, both in a micro context and also in a macro context. And what that meant was that, and that's only possible because one does the work of learning the history so that you understand the sort of legislation, public policy, judicial decisions that created the contemporary landscape of inequality before us. And so yeah, in that essay, Baldwin demands, he says that this is what [00:16:00] teachers must do. Like you have to teach the history of this country because if you don't, your students will not understand why this country looks the way that it does today.

And the social ramifications of that are profound. And I think that it is not a coincidence that we live in a political moment now where there is an intentional effort to prevent students from learning about different parts of American history and not simply not wanting young people to learn about different parts of American history, but specifically not wanting them to make the connections between the history and the present.

Right. Because once you begin to establish those connections between past and present, once you begin to understand as Saidiya Hartman talks about the afterlife of slavery, how the remnants, the residue of slavery shape our social, political, and economic infrastructure in profound ways.

Once you begin to understand the afterlife of what happened to indigenous people, the afterlife of our immigration policies, the afterlife [00:17:00] of all of these different histories of public policy and the intergenerational impact that they've had, then you begin to look at the world before you and understand it in a fundamentally different, but more necessarily honest way.

Quinn: You go, oh, this is on purpose. Got it. And it is, like you said, it is the grandchild of all of these decisions that were made over time. Luckily, you know, if we make it out of this moment in some way, we can try to make some different decisions, hopefully that can start to dig out because everyone always talks about compound interest as the most powerful force in the world, but it goes both directions, right? We've got some serious intentional holes to dig out of. You talked about this moment and purposely not allowing and skewing and however you wanna phrase it history and the present moment in this moment by the folks who are in power, who you know very much the grandchildren of the people who were there.

And you had a quote and I know the original version of the book. And I can't remember if it's in the new one or not, 'cause you're [00:18:00] never afraid to almost narrate your own path of telling the history and retelling the history and exploring it. And you had this line that said, how do you tell a story that's been told the wrong way for so long?

And it made me think of a good friend of mine, Craig Maizin, who made that TV show Chernobyl a few years ago. I dunno if you saw it. It's incredible.

Clint Smith: Incredible show.

Quinn: The first line, and it's sort of, you know, it jumps around in time, but the first line is what is the cost of lies? And you can't shake that once you've heard it and once you look around and see. And so I tried to pull all this sort of together and I'm gonna talk about that when you visited Blandford Cemetery here.

Because it seems like so much of your work through your Crash Course, which I can't recommend enough, and we'll put in the show notes. Joyous poetry about marriage and fatherhood. And this heartbreakingly like ruthlessly comprehensive [00:19:00] nonfiction examination of Angola and the Black History Museum, which is not even 10 years old now, and Monticello up the street and Juneteenth and New York's slave trade which was enormous and exactly how many slaves passed through which door on the coast of Senegal, right?

You are, like I said it seems like you're the record keeper of the record keepers. But anyways, I was really happy to see in the Young Readers edition you told the story again about visiting Blandford Cemetery here in Virginia again, Sons of Confederate Veterans. And the speaker told a story about how he was told Memorial Day really started, and he finished by saying what really seems like the most American way of saying the quiet part out loud ever. He said, I don't know if it's true or not, but I like it.

Clint Smith: But I like it. Yeah.

Quinn: In this moment of like mass automatic disinformation, I'm trying to think of something that sums it up better, and it also made me think, was this Clint's origin? Like, is this taped on your computer to monitor somewhere, like for [00:20:00] all the wrong ways? I was like, oh my God, that's it. That's the whole, that's the whole thing, right?

Clint Smith: It's the whole thing. I mean, it speaks to, I was having a conversation, for a different podcast the other day. And it's just sort of about writing in the weeds, like how writers do their work. And I was saying one of the things about writing nonfiction is that sometimes you meet people, you know. I mean, one of the joys of my life and great joys of this job is that I go and I talk to people and I meet people whom I would meet in no other context in my life, there's no other context in my life that I would show up to a Confederate cemetery, on the day of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration nonetheless.

But it was so, I mean, it was a life changing experience in so many ways and it was so valuable because I wanted to understand how people can continue to believe something so deeply and so intensely, even though it's so clearly untrue and so clearly has no grounding in [00:21:00] primary sources or empiricism or fact.

It's just not, it's not real. But part of what being there taught me was that for so many people, history's not about primary source documents or empirical evidence. It's a story that they tell and it's a story that they're told. You know, it's an heirloom that's passed down across generations. It's something where loyalty takes precedent over truth. So when the leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is standing on that podium and he is telling the story about the founding of Memorial Day, and he's like, you know, to your point, I don't know if it's true or not, but I like it. It's one of those moments as a writer where you're like. I couldn't have, you know, if I wrote that in fiction my editor would be like no.

Quinn: No. That sounds like something my 12-year-old says, you know, about six, seven. He is like, I think this is what it is. I like it. And I'm like, well, what? This is how the problem starts.

Clint Smith: Exactly. And so I love those moments where you meet somebody and you have a conversation and in many ways, the thesis of your project in a way and in a manner and in a context that you then, you know, I remember hearing that line and being like, [00:22:00] oh, the entire chapter is built around that line. This is the seed from which the rest of this thing comes to, it comes into existence. And that moment is in so many ways the centerpiece, because it is a sort of comically clear articulation.

Quinn: It feels like a Far Side cartoon, right? Like the ultimate satire. And it's easy, like you said to use the word comically except for the black maternal health rate is multiples worse than the poorest white woman in this country. It is still operable. Right. And I study, I'm a monster atheist, but I studied comparative religion again in my little classrooms up at Colgate University about 100,000 years ago.

And I study a lot about the Holocaust and I really loved the piece you wrote, Monuments to the Unthinkable, I believe it was called. And you talked about admiring museums and everything in the middle of the city and the stumbling stones and all of that. And the effort's gone to.

What I really [00:23:00] loved kind of, to which you were just saying where for these folks, there's both you know, the fight isn't over for a lot of those folks at that meeting. And again the ramifications of these systems over time are still very operable in so many folks' lives. You had this part in here, you were talking with this gentleman, Steiner. And you said Germany's able to make Holocaust remembrance a prominent part of national life. Jewish people are a historical abstraction more than they are actual people. In the United States there's still millions of black people. You cannot simply build some monuments, lay down some wreaths each year and apologize for what happened without seeing the manifestation of those actions and the inequality between black and white people all around you.

Right? So they've gone to all of these lengths, but it is the past for them in a lot of ways. I mean, Germany, by the way, like not on a great track as it is right now in a lot of ways. But it's every day here, right? For everyone. But especially the people who are [00:24:00] still suffering, again, in those intentionally designed systems.

So it's this interesting thing where you spend half the article going boy, I wish we could do some of the things like this. William and Mary right down the street finally built a, I dunno if you saw it when you were here, they built a monument to the enslaved people who helped build the college, right down Jamestown Road. And you're like, that is something, it's a little thing. But even stumbling stones and a thing right in the middle of the university campus is not enough when the systems are still designed that way every day.

Clint Smith: Yeah. I mean that trip to Germany was life changing. I went in fall of 2021. So How the Word Is Passed was published June of 2021. And, you know, it reflects reporting from beginning in 2017. And the book came out and I was having all these conversations and even before the book came out when I was doing this sort of virtual book tour, I was thinking a lot about Germany, because Germany in many ways is often lifted up as the exemplar of memory making.

You know, it is the [00:25:00] place, you know, from our vantage point is the place that is most honest, that is most direct in its contrition about its role in perpetrating this horrific genocide against millions of people. I mean, two thirds of the Jewish people in Europe. I mean it's a scale that even when you say it and you're like in just a few years, they killed two thirds of an entire demographic of people across the continent. But I wanted to go to Germany because I've kept invoking Germany and being like, oh, Germany does this and Germany does that. And I was like, I've never been to Germany like I've never, at least as an adult. And so I went and obviously part of what you learn is that the story is more complicated than the story we tell here, right? Like Germany, to your point, they're not perfect in the way that they engage in the process of memory making and the way that they remember the Holocaust. And, you know, and honestly, the story I write about when I visit in 2021, and again in 2022, I [00:26:00] think the story has to be told in a different way or with a different sort of texture today given much of what has happened in Gaza because sort of the triangulation of German memory making around the Holocaust, Germany's relationship to Israel and then Holocaust memory, you know, the sort of triangulation of those things and the ways in which the story of the Holocaust and the story of antisemitism can be used to enact different sorts of violence in other contexts is another important part of the puzzle to wrestle with. So as I've begun the process of, you know, over the last few years, adapting that article into a chapter for my forthcoming book that is based on that article, it demands that there's an even more complex, nuanced story that needs to be told about Germany's relationship to the Holocaust and the implications that has not only for the landscape of iconography and museums and memorials in Germany, but [00:27:00] also for the sort of post World War 2, post Holocaust.

Quinn: Yep.

Clint Smith: Order that was created in the state of Israel. So there's so many layers, but I remember being in Germany and visiting Dachau for the first time. And you know, you walk through these heavy iron gates and the gravel is crunching beneath your feet. You look to your left, you see the remnants of the gas chambers, look to your right you see the remnants of the crematorium, and it's one of the most unsettling and haunting, sobering places that I've ever been. And something about the act of physically being there. The act of putting your body in the place where history happened. It was a reminder that is like a sort of singular, both spiritual and physiological experience in many ways. And that is what animates my desire to go to places, whether it is in the context of enslavement, whether it's in the context of, [00:28:00] you know, with this most recent book project World War II, you know, I left Germany. I was like, oh, this has given me a sense of what World War II was and what the Holocaust was in ways that I had never fully appreciated.

You know, despite having grown up reading you know, Night and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Anne Frank's Diary, and Number the Stars. And this, that trip inspired me in so many ways to try to get a sense of how the story of World War II was told beyond the sort of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, very American-centric framework. But also to learn more about the things that I thought I knew about, like I, if you had told me, or asked me, I thought I knew what the Holocaust was, but I only understood it on a surface level. I thought I could tell you what Japanese American incarceration was, but I couldn't really, and so I went, you know, I go to Germany and think about the Holocaust.

I go to Argentina. I think about the Nazis who escaped. After the war, I go to South Korea and think [00:29:00] about the women who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military. I go to Japan and think about the people who were subjected to, you know, the only two atomic bombs dropped in the history of the world. I go to California and think about the Japanese internment and incarceration camps. I go to New Mexico and spend time with the Navajo code talkers. And so, you know, for me what it does is it, my trip to Germany propelled me forward to these other places that have subsequently given me a much more expansive understanding of what World War II was, and also a clearer understanding of what it means to live in this moment, which the people who live through World War II are almost all gone. And the question of to what extent can these monuments, memorials, museums, can they hold the memory of these things? Can the Stolperstein in Germany, can the statue of [00:30:00] Peace in Korea, can the, you know, the Statue of the Navajo code talkers in the museum they want to build in New Mexico.

Can Manzanar as a national historic site hold, can these places, these historical sites, these monuments, memorials, is it enough? Are they enough to remind us of what happened? Or is something lost in ways that can never be recaptured when people who lived and have a memory of what World War II was and all that it wrought when they passed away? And that ends up being, one of the sort of central questions of this book as we look around us and watch the sort of post World War II global infrastructure fall apart in real time. How much of that is because the people who remember how terrible World War II was are no longer here to remind us of that?

Quinn: It is such a fundamental question because you go to such appropriate specific lengths [00:31:00] in your work to describe that America is not America today and 2025 is not far from the end of slavery, much less Jim Crow and all of that. And yet again, we can see how it's still applicable today in everyday life for so many people.

All of these folks who at least lived through, if not fought or suffered from in a million different ways. Like you said during World War II, my own grandparents who were all part of it are for the most part gone now. And I remember my wife and I were having this conversation about, and talking to my 12-year-old who's starting to learn history. He's in like modern American history now, and he is really interested in talking about that and going, it's definitely concerning to me that they won't have that personal link to the people who lived it. Right? And that's, by the way, I mean, we can keep pulling this string all day, which is to say oh and the greatest generation that stood up and fought it, and then you go, well, America had absolutely no interest in participating in it for most of it. Right. Very, very isolationist. Like we have to tell that story too, but all these people are dying. It makes it seem [00:32:00] as if it's further away. And like you said, we can talk about Germany's statues and the stones. And then again, look at Gaza and their defense budget and go, or the people who are running Israel, you know, they always talk about, oh, if you're a 60-year-old you have one version of Israel in your mind, right?

Which is like 1948 to 1973. My parents were there in 1973 as college students. They were there during the Yom Kippur war. And then you have the version that maybe like Generation X and our generation that maybe thought there might be peace in the nineties and early two thousands, right?

And then you have the young people now who don't know any of that, weren't party to any of that. And all they have seen is 20 years of what has been going on. And again, you look at it and go, that's not that far away. Like, will these statues be enough to make these lessons continue to be instructive? 'cause it doesn't feel that way, like you said, as everything's either falling apart or being pulled apart. Right. By descendants of those, very close descendants of those same folks.

Clint Smith: [00:33:00] Yeah. And I think the answer I kind of come to is that no, can't be. But we have to try anyway, right? Like the far right is rising in Germany as we speak. They're gaining more influence, more political power. They are talking about the Holocaust in ways that are diminishing it and sometimes outright denying its existence. Antisemitism is on the rise, which is very much tied to that. and this is with a country that has monuments to the Holocaust sort of, ubiquitous across the country. And so these statues and these historical sites, and these, you know, these pieces of iconography, they're not panaceas, they're not going to cure Germany of its, sort of the remnants of its illness, so to speak. But I think what I do is I try to imagine how much worse it would be if these things weren't present right. It's a difficult counterfactual, but if there weren't tens [00:34:00] of thousands of Stolpersteina, if there weren't, there wasn't the memorial to the murder Jews of Europe if there wasn't the Dachau and so many of the camps that serve as memorial sites now, if there wasn't you know, the Jewish Museum, if there wasn't a museum beneath the memorial to the murder Jews of Europe, you know, all of these different, the train tracks where people were sent from. Right now the thing about Germany is that as you walk through that country you are confronted with that history every single day. And I think that the rise in antisemitism, the rise of far right extremism that denies the Holocaust would be much worse but for the presence of those things and in many ways the US is an example because we don't have those things in the context of slavery.

Quinn: Right. And they're desperately trying to erase what we have actually managed to fortify in any way. And you had a wonderful two pieces earlier this year in the Atlantic about the Black History Museum in DC and this sense of not just foreboding, but almost desperation, like we just did this. We [00:35:00] just did this. We just managed to, like you have, I think your quote at one point was, had the collective will to do this, and now we're trying to erase it at all costs. Right.

Clint Smith: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think the, so much of the efficacy of what the failures in American memory are creating these fissures, these holes in our collective memory are because we don't have the sort of parts of the memory of slavery is not etched into the physical landscape of our country in a way that is commensurate with the impact that it had on creating this country. You know, there's a moment in the Germany chapter where I'm speaking to a woman, a historian, and we're looking at these Stolperstein, and I should say for people listening who don't know, the Stolperstein translates into a stumbling stone. And it's these 10 by 10 centimeter brass stones that are placed into the ground in front of the last known residents [00:36:00] of people who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis. And it will have the name of the person, the day they were born, the day they died, and where they were taken. And so, you know, you'll have somebody's name and it'll say, you know, 1920 to 1943, and then it will say Auschwitz, right?

And so, you know that this person was 23 years old, they were taken to Auschwitz. And you walk through the streets of Berlin and you know, you walk past a house that has two of these stones, and then you walk further down the street and you walk past a house that has five of these stones. And then you walk down the street and you walk past the house that has 12 of these stones, and you look down and because you see the birth date and death date, you can kind of make sense of what the relationships of these people were. Who were the children, who were the parents, who were the grandparents, who may have been a cousin who was coming to visit and stay with them when they were at university.

You can kinda look up at these houses and come up with all sorts of stories that make [00:37:00] that history more human and make it more proximate and make us more proximate, that make it less abstract. And the woman I'm with she goes, can you imagine what it would be like if, like in New Orleans where you're from, they had stumbling stones for the enslaved people who lived there. She was like, the whole street would be covered in stones. You know? I think about how different might our relationship to that history be if we had entire streets in cities like New Orleans and Williamsburg and New York and Charleston, and I mean everywhere in this country. If we had those things to remind us on a daily basis what it was, does that mean there would be no anti-black racism, does that mean there would've been no segregation, does that mean there would be, no, of course not. But it's interesting to imagine to what extent it would exist, how pervasive it would be if you had those sorts of things present. Which is why I think despite the complications of relationship to memory it is still so important [00:38:00] that the landscape of iconography in that country looks the way that it does. 'cause I think without it it would be experiencing something far worse than it's experiencing now.

Quinn: Sure. Sure. And then you always have to ask why we don't have those. Right. Whether, again, it's Colonial Williamsburg, they did one slave auction here 25 years ago. Right. You know, we've tried to have more Black interpreters and you did a great job documenting their very personal experiences with that. And going again, it's almost far from having the collective will to do that sort of thing, to have every brick around New Orleans and Charleston and Williamsburg and Jamestown and all these places, all the plantations down round five, right. That people get married at, and go, well, it's because there's generations of people who say, I don't know if this story is true, but I like it. And who will never give up making sure that doesn't happen.

Clint Smith: No, and it is true. And it's because for so many people, if you have to tell a different story about America, it means you have to [00:39:00] tell a different story about yourself.

And that is deeply frightening to many people. I mean, you know, so I think about, you know, to go back to Blandford, one of the people I met at Blandford was a guy named Jeff. Jeff had this long salt and pepper goatee, this ponytail that ran down his back, handlebar mustache, biker vest with confederate paraphernalia all over it, round belly. And Jeff was telling me about how when he was a boy, his grandfather used to bring him to this cemetery. And they would sit in this gazebo, this beautiful white gazebo that's at the center of the Blandford Cemetery, in this cemetery, which is one of the largest confederate cemeteries in the country, where the remains of 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried. And so he and his grandfather would be in this gazebo on the cemetery, and his grandfather would pull out his banjo and he would start playing these old Dixie anthems, these old Southern songs. And he'd play these songs and he'd start to tell stories about the men who were buried in the fields. And he would say, these men, they didn't fight a war over slavery.

The secession had [00:40:00] nothing to do with slavery. This was about sovereignty. This was about state's rights. This was about taxes, tariffs, protecting our women and children from the war of Northern aggression, from the invasive imperialistic Yankees who were coming to take our land and change our way of life. So he's singing these songs and he's telling these stories and they're watching the sun set behind the trees. They're watching the sky turn from blue to orange, to purple to black. They're watching the fireflies come out of the forest and hop from one tombstone to the next, watching the deer come from behind the trees and graze around the cemetery. These really intimate and sentimental memories. Jeff told me that now today, he brings his grandchildren to the same cemetery where his grandfather brought him and sits in the same gazebo where he sat with his grandfather and he pulls out the same banjo and plays the same songs that his grandfather played for him, and tells the same stories about the men who were buried in this field and watch the same [00:41:00] sun set behind the same trees. And so I could go to Jeff and be like, you know, Hey Jeff, I know your grandfather told you that secession had nothing to do with slavery, for example. But all you have to do is look at the declarations of Confederate secession in 1861, where the states say very explicitly why they're doing what they're doing.

A state like Mississippi says, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world. So they're not vague about why they're seceding from the union, they're very clear about it. But if Jeff was to accept that information, he would have to accept that his grandfather was lying to him. And if he has to accept that his grandfather was lying to him, it threatens to disintegrate the foundation of a relationship that is central to who he understands himself to be in the world. So suddenly you're not just giving Jeff information that serves as you know, it necessitates or ask him to reorient his relationship to American history. You're giving him information that serves as a catalyst to a fundamental crisis of identity. Like it's existential for [00:42:00] Jeff because who he understands himself to be in the world has been shaped by the people he loves, by the community he was raised in, by the stories he's been told by those people in this place. And so when you go to him and say, actually, that's not the full story, or actually that story is wrong, or actually we need to include these other parts of the story that kind of render your story insufficient or rather fictional or distorted or sort of misrepresentation whether empirically or by omission, that's a hard thing for people to hold onto.

And it doesn't mean they shouldn't because I think many of us are told stories our entire lives by people we love. And whether it be in the context of religion, whether it be in the context of our identities, whether it be in the context of all manner of things and we have to make different sets of decisions about what we believe and don't believe, what we subscribe to, and don't, what our values are, what they're not. And you see this show up in one way at the Confederate Cemetery. You know, I also went to Monticello not too [00:43:00] far from you all. And when you go to Monticello, part of what you see is, you know, docents there will tell you that every day somebody shows up at Monticello and is like, why are you lying about Jefferson? Why are you doing this? You know, you're telling these woke stories about Jefferson, these politically correct stories. Why are you trying to tear him down? Simply because they're telling the story of Jefferson as it relates to the fact that he was an enslaver, enslaved over 600 people, enslaved four of his own children that he had by Sally Hemmings and that's because Jefferson, if you have to tell a different story about Jefferson, you have to tell a different story about America. And like I said, if you have to tell a different story about America, then it means you also have to tell a different story about yourself. And people don't wanna do that. A lot of people like the stories they've been told and their identities are grounded in the stories that they've been told. And so to have to go back and reexamine those stories or let go of [00:44:00] those stories and begin to tell a new story. There are a lot of people who don't wanna do that and that is why it can be so politically effective to literally premise an entire campaign on the fact that like, oh, let's just go back, you don't actually have to tell a new story. Let's go back to tell the story that we told of America when America was great, when you didn't have to worry about including these indigenous stories or these Black stories or these immigrant stories or the, you know, right. This is so much of what the MAGA movement is premised upon. And you have really savvy people who recognize its utility as a political weapon and have wielded it as such. And that's part of why we are where we are today.

Quinn: That's so comprehensive and thoughtful, and I'm so glad you brought up the Monticello point and the wonderful docent there. I think you called him David in the books who pulled zero punches, which I really appreciate when there are folks like that there or here or wherever we need them to be.

One of the, or the largest voting block [00:45:00] in the country, which is the largest block that turned this election in so many ways. And then so many downstream decisions and policies and people who were hurt and suffering because of it are young men, specifically young white men who because of the, again, now artificially generated like you said, very smart people who are purveyors of disinformation and at least misinformation in any way through just the most instant always accessible media that we've ever had.

Right. our little brains are very much not prepared for it. This is a little bit of a stretch, but masculinity's in a tough spot for a lot of reasons. In your poetry, which often involves straight up love letters to your loved ones, about your loved ones, about growing up, about your incredible sense of place.

You described New Orleans and the tree which it sounds like it's not there anymore. You're honest in your poetry about the perils of trying to conceive and [00:46:00] of pregnancy, which really hit home for me. We went through all the same things. That was not easy to read and such a relief to find another person so publicly writing about in an era, not a moment, when masculinity is again, purposefully poisoned. These like love letters that you write effectively, they're written so specifically, they're shared so publicly. They're such a wonderful example of, you know, I think what you could say of what real masculinity could be, of gratitude in so many ways.

And I wonder if you've ever had any hesitations about writing them, if not sharing them, why do you have to write those? Are they for you? Are they for her, for your future kids, for your current kids that you've got now, is it to keep a record or is there more to it than that? 'cause again, I read that and thought, boy, we gotta tell these stories more often about how scary it is.

You know, very similarly my wife emergency C-section after a bunch of failed miscarriages and [00:47:00] IVF and at one point they were like, you can go with your son to the NICU, your new son to the NICU who didn't breathe for 30 seconds. Or you can stay with your wife who's bleeding out, and you're like, it's scarred me. She doesn't remember any of it, but also we're terrible at pregnancy and giving birth, period, without the racism, in the animal kingdom. And we have to tell that story more and more. And then your expressions of love and gratitude for them and rolling on the floor and playing music and your wife, like we have to do that more.

So it, again, I know that feels like a stretch, but in a world where like masculinity is fucked, that is so emblematic to me of where we could be if we let ourselves be a little more vulnerable.

Clint Smith: Yeah. No, thank you for that. So I think there's a few things. So one, I felt compelled to write that, the book Above Ground, which is largely sort of, meditation on fatherhood through poetry. Because I, in my nonfiction work, I write a lot about, as we've discussed places with really hard histories, with really traumatic histories. My friends are always like they're like, Clint, where are you going on your sad tour next?

Quinn: My [00:48:00] wife's a screenwriter. She wrote the Wicked movies. And so she's fun at parties. I am not. 'cause she'll say, this is my husband, he has a podcast about climate change. And people are like, nevermind. Just nevermind.

Clint Smith: So I'm on my, I'm on my sad tour. And I go to those places because I think that there is power in clarity. I think there is power in studying, naming, identifying, understanding why horrific moments in history took place. and that's a huge part of my personality. That's a huge part of my life. But it's not all of me, right? I'm also the guy who like loves having dance parties with his kids. I'm also the guy who like gets on the ground and pretends to be a dinosaur or these days a mechanical bull. That's what they're into.

Quinn: Oh yeah, that's good for the back.

Clint Smith: They just want to get thrown around. Yeah. It's truly, I mean, me and Tylenol, me and Ibuprofen are on, we're close. You talk about proximity, I'm very proximate to those. You know, playing board games with my family, the [00:49:00] book was written as a way to trace, my and my wife's experience, but obviously from my vantage point from when we were told we probably wouldn't be able to have kids to when we, you know, she was pregnant and then it felt very precarious to our son being born. And then the sort of miracle our daughter being born, but also the complicated, you know, so, I wanted to write about those things first and foremost for myself, because I believe in what poetry is for me is the act of paying attention. And each poem is a sort of time capsule that allows me to remember who I was or what I cared about in a certain moment in time. What was happening, what I was worried about, what I had questions about, what I marveled at, and ultimately when I, you know, I started writing all these dad poems and they began to cohere into a sort of potential project. It also then felt important for me, I had read a lot of poems about parenting, but most of them were from [00:50:00] women. And, you know, incredible, beautiful, astonishing books and beautiful poems. But I hadn't read a lot of books about fatherhood particularly from Black poets, Black male poets. And that's not to say those books don't exist. They do, and I've encountered many of them. But relative to the amount of books on that subject that exist from women, I think, you know, I was interested in what does it mean for a man to talk about these things that are not often publicly discussed, you know, in our voices. And I wanted to offer that to others because I think the process of writing about it was incredibly important personally for me. And in the context of masculinity, you know, I don't know. You talk about the stories we've been told and what we grew up with and I think so many of us grew up with a very specific set of stories about what masculinity looked like and what it meant to show up as a man in the world. And I have had to spend many years and decades unlearning much of what I was [00:51:00] taught explicitly and implicitly, and I'm trying to think about, you know, and becoming a parent has made me think about that even more intentionally. What does it mean to show up as a co-parent, and what does it mean to not only carry this sort of equal logistical and physical work of parenting, but also the emotional labor, you know, that women and mothers are often forced to carry and to offload that?

And, you know, think about the ways I write about this in the book that I'm praised for doing the sort of things that my wife never.

Quinn: Going to CVS for 20 minutes.

Clint Smith: Yeah. You know, and people are like, wow, you're the second coming and you know, my wife has the same two kids and walks into the same CVS and people, you know, barely hold the door for her.

So, yeah I'm interested in all those things. And you know, we're in a really hard time when it comes to, in many ways, it feels like we are retreating back into an even more toxic masculinity. And a sort of, there's been a permission structure [00:52:00] for a toxicity around manhood that's really concerning. And so I think it's incumbent upon, many of us to offer, as much as we can, a sort of different mode of masculinity in public, you know, and to say that these podcasts guys, or whom, you know, politicians or, you know, it shows up in all sorts of places now. But that's not what it means to be a man but I think unless you are publicly offering a different model then people, especially young guys, don't often know that it exists. You know, I'm just one person. And I'm just trying to do my part.

Quinn: I thank you for it. Not only again, because I so personally identified and appreciated with it. So much of your poetry, again, like your nonfiction is a gut punch from one about Zoom school which was truly like the most upsetting one to read of all of them. ' cause you're just like how, my God.

That was so awful. Trying to do preschool via Zoom. Oh my god. With raisins everywhere. Where did the raisins even come from? Who can know? To all of it, but I want to thank you for one of them in Counting [00:53:00] Descent, which almost 10 years ago now, you wrote this poem about you and your wife, about your morning rituals and how they're just for you all, and the honor, and I hope you don't mind me sharing this again.

You published it and I want to join in, the honor of seeing your wife before the world does every day. And I don't believe you had children yet, because I think you referenced like what it'll be like when we have kids. And I wanna say thank you because it came out and I read it and I, doing the math, had three under three or three under four at that point.

And again, my wife was still working more than I was. I had just very recently lost a very close friend to cancer, so I was going through my own, you've talked about your depression here and there and overwhelmed with kids and work. But I texted her and I said, Hey, I just read this poem by this, I mean, this was such a visceral memory. I read this poem by this guy named Clint Smith, and he really described how I feel getting to see you at the end of every night, in the beginning of every [00:54:00] day before the world, and especially before our kids steal you from me. And I think I got a lot of credit for that. But also, again, no matter what your work, no matter where your spotlight is, the specificity is I think what makes it so universal, but also instructive, right? And again, you're saying that out loud before kids 10 years ago, before how the word has passed and all these things before pulling the string of World War II in Germany and seeing like there is so much more sweater here. And again, I watched a film they did of some of your time teaching and getting these, there's this one child who said, it turns out I've got a lot to say with spoken word poetry and I can't imagine what they had to say. But again, there's two decisions to write that for yourself, which again, writing is such a healing process, if not a clarifying process, you said like clarity and curiosity but to publish it again before you'd really published anything else it [00:55:00] sets a tone, you know, it sets a bar for yourself and where you're willing to go that I really appreciated and again, that was very instructive to me too. And now I feel like I have this struggle with it, like any guy with your insecurities with this and that and my wife works very hard and successful and kids, and now they call you on all your shit once they get old enough, good luck with that. To be happy and willing to say things out loud. Like, I'm so excited to live a life of service to my wife, you know, and watch people around you just feel uncomfortable with that because of, again, just the historical standards of masculinity and marriage roles and gender roles, but also because of where we are now. But like you said I'm just one person, but I feel like I have to do that because of the way I was taught and because of where we are and because of what I owe this person and my kids and you for setting the tone for that. So that's just a thank you.

Clint Smith: I appreciate it.

Quinn: It is to steal those moments with them, with everything going on is, I'm very protective of those. I dunno if you still are, but the dancing on the floor or breakfast or yelling at them to pick up their [00:56:00] sweatshirts four times, it's, to me, it's still time with them, I guess, before the world gets at us.

Clint Smith: Yeah. And it's a very particular, and ultimately very brief season of our lives. You know, my mom always talks about how sometimes you don't realize when your kids are young, that most of your relationship with them will be as adults. And that actually the season of them being kids is, you know, prayerfully, you know, a very small portion of their, what you hope to be long lives. And it's, you know, it is interesting to think about oh, I've known my mom longer as an adult than I have as a kid. And it's, in many ways it's well, of course. But then also the disproportionate sort of formative impact that those early years have is you know, I mean that shapes everything. For good and for bad.

Quinn: It does. And I said to my wife recently, it was our 15th anniversary, and we went out to dinner, one of those, like, how do you feel like it's gone so far conversations, and, you know, I said to her, I said I kind of wish I could go back sometimes to when they were three, four, and five or [00:57:00] 6, 7, 8 or whatever.

And both support her work better and be a better dad to them. And, you know, she was unnecessarily kind and said, you know, oh, you're a great dad, this and that. She's like, but you have more experience now than you did then. And no one skips through except for those crazy people who end up like starting a second family later who are like, now I know how to do it.

But then you're 50 and you're exhausted. I don't know. I feel like I have to now, especially 'cause my children don't listen to me anymore find some way, you know, like you are a little bit to speak about those vulnerabilities about time passing, about what time does to us, about how are we gonna use our time, right?

One of the questions I ask folks when they come to me if they come to us with, you know, a fair chunk of change or some position of power and say, what can I do? Is I try to say them, well what is it for? What is your position for, what is the time? What is your money for? If not this thing that you just told me you care about it. And that's how I feel about [00:58:00] this. You know, it's like, how do I take this and just turn it around? Last one. What are you listening to with your kids right now? What's the dance party? What can they not get enough of.

Clint Smith: Oh man. We are, this is such a random song. There's a song that I loved in, this is 10 years ago, my kids are very into to House right now. Especially my son. He's like into House music. He's like, oh, I like this beat. There's a song by a woman named Karen Harding called, Say Something. And so we listen to Say Something. And then we also, Craig David, who many of us remember from our young swooning teenage days is now like a sort of House artist, right? So a lot of his songs are not the sort of like R&B crooning of the early aughts. It’s more like a British House vibe.

Quinn: Yeah. Oh man, I ran that album into the ground.

Clint Smith: It's very fun. It's, look, Craig David's still got it.

Quinn: I love it. That's awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. Clint, I know you gotta run. I can't thank you enough, man, truly. And if he's listening to our friend [00:59:00] Franklin Leonard, who made this happen, I'm so appreciative for his friendship. Thank you, Clint. I really appreciate everything.