Challenging American Mythology: The 1619 Project, Curricular Omissions, and the Politics of Forgetting

[00:00:01] This is the MahoganyBooks Podcast Network.

[00:00:40] Thank you for being here today. Thank you. Thank you. I'm trying to keep this little lash on right here. But my name is Ramonda Young and my husband Derek and I opened MahoganyBooks 19 years ago. 19 years ago. I'm from Tulsa, Oklahoma and I didn't grow up where black books were at at all.

[00:01:05] Black Wall Street was one mile from my home and when I tell you I never knew it was there because they never talked about it in my school. And if I'd only known the type of genius, the type of entrepreneurship, the type of leadership that grew up a mile from my home, how much bolder, I think I'm bold now. But how much more confident, how much more bolder I would be because I knew what they did I could do too. So this is our take on it. We're going to create MahoganyBooks and so no matter where you live you can have access to books

[00:01:33] and not have somebody else dictate if you can have access to those books. And so here we are at our third Black Books Matter Festival. So it is a blessing to have you guys here. I'm going to turn it over to my dear friend Nina to introduce our amazing author. Y'all, Nicole Hannah Jones is here. Okay.

[00:01:59] What? Michael Harriot is here. You all are here. So thank you all for being, she's like me, we're here too. Yes. But thank you all for being here. I hope once you leave here get your book signed, but enjoy. There's so many authors that their voices are just as important that I hope you get a chance to meet. So thank you again for being here at Black Books Matter Festival. What? Yes.

[00:02:27] And with that, thank you Ramonda. Blessings to you and thank you to you and Derek for the work that you all continuously do to amplify black voices. It would take a sister from the Midwest to make that happen. You know what I'm saying? Come on. Look, sisters out the Midwest, the Midwest, Black folks in the middle America don't get a lot of love. So, alright. As a Kansas girl myself.

[00:02:53] Alright. As she mentioned, my name is Nina and I am here to introduce you all to the people who really don't need any introduction. But just in case, Nicole Hannah Jones is an American investigative journalist and staff writer. Was staff writer for the New York Times Magazine where she began, where the 1619 Project began. Okay. And this is her most popular work, the one we all know her by, which has been moved into a coffee table book, children's book.

[00:03:23] There's so much more that is, that's to come from that project. And again, this legacy, the 1619 Project explores the history and modern legacy of slavery in the United States. And she was named the MacArthur Fellow in 2017. And that 1619 Project won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. And again, straight out of the Midwest, born and raised in Waterloo, Iowa, y'all.

[00:03:50] Alright. Michael Harriot, first of all, is one of the most comedic historians you'll ever see in your life. Alright. I think I came upon him watching him on Twitter years ago. Okay. The best threads you'll ever see. He's a journalist, best-selling author and culture critic, renowned for his incisive humorous and data-driven commentary on race politics and American history. He's best known for Black AF. I'ma keep it cute.

[00:04:19] History, the unwashed, un-whitewashed history, excuse me, story of America. And as a creator of the popular college curriculum, Race and Economic Construct. He was born and raised in Hartsville, South Carolina. And without any further ado, Nicole Hannah-Jones and Michael Harriot, ladies and gentlemen. The real... Absolutely. Here you go.

[00:04:48] And they will be discussing today, the real America. Not the America, yeah. The real America.

[00:05:01] How's everybody doing? How's everybody doing today? Thank y'all for coming out there, man. It's like book Nick out there. That's what they should call it.

[00:05:30] And we're supposed to be talking about the real America, which is interesting because I... Like, what does that mean, right? It's like, is our America the real America or is theirs? I always think about when you wrote the 1619 Project and you want to talk about this country through a different lens.

[00:05:58] Did you... Were you surprised at the fact that no one seemed to recognize the America that you were talking about in the 1619 Project? The... Because there was so much pushback, like, oh, we've never heard about this stuff. Were you surprised about that? Hello. Hey, y'all. Hey. Hey. It's not really Michael's job to interview me. We're supposed to be in conversation, so we're going to be in conversation. But hey.

[00:06:28] Hey. All right. Book Nick. I like that. I'm going to make a book festival at my bookstore and call it Book Nick. Yeah. I'm stealing that or borrowing it. Yeah. I credit you though. It is great to see everyone. And where's Ramonda? Because just shout out. Yeah. Oh, she went out. But we still saying black, despite what that man down the street is saying. And so please give it up for Ramonda.

[00:06:58] Black books do matter. Black stories do matter. Hey, y'all. It's Nakara, host of Dot Dot Dot, but make it books, a podcast where we're bookishly healing through life. In this podcast, we use fiction and nonfiction as a doorway into the deeper parts of life. Think ambition, healing identity, the questions you didn't even know you were carrying. Every episode, we let the book lead us somewhere real. Because the best stories don't just entertain you. They help you understand yourself.

[00:07:26] So go ahead and find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Subscribe now and bring your whole self to the conversation. Peace, y'all. And obviously, we're going to keep talking and telling our stories. Nobody, nobody can stop us from doing that, no matter what they try to do. Now, to your question. That's a rhetorical question or a real question? I don't know because when you think about it, right?

[00:07:52] Like, I always wonder, do they know the America that we live in exists? Right? Like, I don't think anybody can purely see from another person's perspective. Right? But sometimes I wonder, do they know this whole America that we live in exists? By they, you mean white people? Yes. Okay. Just checking.

[00:08:24] You know, we have to define the terms because honestly, there are a lot of black folks who suspect the America exists but also didn't have the math, right? I mean, that's why your work has been so popular. It's not that it, everything that we have written was absolutely shocking to black folks. But it's like, we just knew kind of the broad strokes of it.

[00:08:47] Not enough often, I mean, I'm sure you've heard this on the road from black folks, how our works have given them actual facts that they can make their arguments with, not just what they know to be true in their spirit. So, if we struggle to know this history, and it directly pertains to us, you know, the answer is pretty clear.

[00:09:14] Most white Americans, unless they have sought it out, would never know this history. You're not going to learn this history in your official school curriculum, even less so now. How else do you learn history? Popular culture. Well, popular culture does not tell the version of American history that centers us or slavery, unless it's a Civil War movie. And even then, the Civil War movie is really about the white people, right? Yeah. And not really about us having agency.

[00:09:43] So, where would you learn the history if you didn't actually take it upon yourself to study the history? Which we had to do too, even as black folks, right? Like I have an African American studies degree. And I read obsessively on that history my whole life. So, no, they don't. And I think if we're talking about this period, this commemoration of the 250, we have to think

[00:10:10] about obviously white people know slavery existed in the United States. But the way they've been taught about it is it's an asterisk. It's so minimal. It's just even though you go to the mall in Washington, D.C. and all those monuments are after enslavers, somehow that's not important to who they are. It means nothing to the nation that they built. So, what we did was shocking to folks who really believed this narrative and had never

[00:10:39] had anyone. I mean, all of what we do has already been cataloged in historical works, right? I talk about learning about 1619 in a book by Lerone Bennett when I was 15 years old. And I don't know when that book first published, but it had been out for some time. Before the Mayflower? Yeah. Yeah, I think. No, like 76, I think. So, even by the time I'm 15, it had been out for a while.

[00:11:06] So, it's not that the knowledge was not available, but you have to seek it out. And white Americans have really embraced the mythology of this country. Like, their personal identity is based in the belief that we are an exceptional nation. That we are the freest country the world has ever seen. And so, what we would call my version of American history is really just American history, right?

[00:11:35] Like, you literally cannot know this country if you don't know the role, not just of slavery, but of black people in shaping the country and its ideals. And yet, that was shocking to a lot of folks. But I think what was most shocking, at least to Power, was that it was published in the New York Times, right? And we've had this conversation. You do very, very similar work that I do.

[00:11:59] And yet, the sense that you were writing to a black audience, in the sense that, even though I don't know that you were, I think you were, I don't know who you were writing to, I think you were. But the sense, I mean, you have written for black publications, in some ways made your work feel less dangerous to them. Oh, it was less dangerous, right? Right, than my work being published in the New York Times, even though our works are obviously in conversation to each other. So it was challenging their narrative of themselves in like the citadel of like,

[00:12:29] prestige white journalism. I think that was the most dangerous. Right. But tell me, like, what are your thoughts on that question that you're asking? I mean, I know you don't, yeah. How much, I'm going to slightly change it. Like, how much do you think is willful, willful ignorance, like making a choice? I just don't want to know?

[00:12:53] And how much of it is, we've all been indoctrinated into all of these lies, all of us. And if you don't make an effort to not know it, you won't. How much, what do you think the balance is? Yeah, I, it's hard to like pick a specific like 62%. Give me a percentage. Give me a number. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 62.4%.

[00:13:13] I think, you know, I often think though, I think about the fact that even black studies is relatively, a relatively new major. So, my generation, my generation, the teachers who taught us in school, I grew up in South Carolina, they didn't, they were Confederate history lives, right? They didn't know, right?

[00:13:43] They were taught by, I was taught by a person who was an actual member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, right? My AP history teacher, right? Like we went to her house to study and she had a Confederate flag on the wall, right? They don't know. Part of it is that they don't know, right?

[00:14:04] But I think, I don't think you get to 1988 or 2015 with nobody knowing unless it is willful and deliberate. And I think part of it is the conflation of that we're trying to sully the expectation, the admiration of America, bring it down, right?

[00:14:28] Remember a couple of weeks ago when Obama said that, you know, he, George. George Washington being a slave owner was a flaw. Right. But he was still a great man. That's y'all. Right. And what's interesting about that is, I mean, now in this conversation, that is the white perspective, right? Like I don't think any white people don't know that George Washington was a slave owner, right?

[00:14:56] And the fact that Obama brought it up to them was egregious. To us, him saying the great man part was wild to me, right? Right. Like it's, we're talking about the same person, two different things, right? But to admire, because he said, I admire him. And he was a slave owner. That was a flaw. Like it was like, you know, sometimes he had bad breath. You know what I'm saying?

[00:15:25] He didn't take a shower a couple of times. And yeah, he owned some slaves, right? But what's interesting is that when you look at the actual history, all of those founders, they were saying, man, I know this slavery stuff wrong. Like we shouldn't put it, like Madison said, man, it would be wrong to admit that there is slavery and put it in the Constitution, right? Like they even couch it in the terms of presidentism, like we're looking back, you know, judging them from the past.

[00:15:54] When at the time they were like, man, like put a little bit about slavery as possible in our writings. Because I mean, we know what's wrong, but we got to do this thing. And that's kind of who they knew they were. But like we've subsequent generations, like try to make us believe something different. And I think when you look back, like when you're studying this history, does it always surprise you?

[00:16:21] Like how much the perception has been whitewashed out? Like, because it's not like we've uncovered, you didn't, the 1619 Project uncovered some scrolls from ancient Egypt that we had never known about, right? Like it was history that a lot of people knew about. Some ancient Negro scrolls. I did uncover some ancient Negro scrolls though. Am I surprised?

[00:16:46] Well, so I got to get back to the Obama thing because I was very vexed by this y'all. I, look, I know he is beloved amongst folks, but I was very vexed because you didn't have to say anything. Right. For one. For two, I saw like white people were applauding that response actually, right? They were like, yes, that's because that was their perspective.

[00:17:13] But I want us to just think about, there is a way to have a nuanced conversation about George Washington, right? Like you can say he was a brilliant military tactician. You can say that, though he really wasn't. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, like you got to lie to say that though, right? Right. But there are things, you could talk about his leadership. I mean, as a black person, I don't know why we're defending any of that, but you can have, we can have, we are mature adults. We are thinkers.

[00:17:42] We can have a nuanced conversation about his conflict over slavery as a man, right? Him and Thomas Jefferson writing letters to each other about whether they would free the enslaved people on their plantation. And ultimately, Thomas Jefferson was like, I'm in too much debt to free mine. So George Washington was like, well, me too. And they didn't, but they grappled with that. Like you can't talk about that without having to treat slavery like a minor character flaw. It was not. And think, who else would we do this for?

[00:18:13] Right. Hitler, you know, he did do a little bit of the genocide, but think about that highway system that he created. Like you wouldn't, but you literally wouldn't do that for no other leader. He was a human trafficker, right? Slavery is human trafficking. You were forcing people to labor for you their entire life for no pay at threat of violence. He sold people who tried to get their freedom to the Caribbean.

[00:18:36] He chased on a judge till the day he died for daring to actually try to get the freedom that they said they were fighting for. This is not a minor flaw. This is who you are. So if you're not going to forgive the drug dealer who would have stopped selling drugs, but they needed the money, that's the same excuse that they used, right? Like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, they loved to shop, right?

[00:19:08] Like George Washington used to order these tricked out carriages from, I'm not playing. Like he ordered these tricked out carriages from Europe because they were like the fake gentry. And even though they said they were leaving Europe to form a classless society, they weren't. They were the landed gentry of the United States, but they were looked down upon by the European brethren. And so he was living above his means.

[00:19:36] That's why both of them could never end their own enslavement of people. They knew the contradiction. And in fact, George Washington, this is why I love like history. This is why we're nerdy as hell, right? Because usually when you're arguing against people, you're arguing against people who have no facts, no historical knowledge, have done no research. Like I enjoy it because it's easy, right? I'm not even a real historian. I just read history and I can argue more facts than, you know, these people are arguing with.

[00:20:04] But he, like George Washington uses the metaphor of slavery to make his argument against the Europeans, the British, about why they needed to break off. And in fact, slavery was the greatest metaphor used in the American Revolution. And the reason they use slavery as their metaphor was they knew slavery intimately. And what George Washington said in one of his letters was we have to break off from England because they want to treat us like we treat our black slaves.

[00:20:32] So don't tell me they didn't know what they were doing. They were making choices. They knew. Thomas Jefferson, when he talks about holding the wolf by the ear, because while we want to act like these human beings are cattle or property, we know that they're not. We know that they're thinking, right? A horse does not lead a rebellion against you. A horse is not going to cut your throat at night. But human beings who want to be free will. So they understood that.

[00:20:59] So I just, I know that Obama is smart enough to know that. I know this is a man who is extremely well read. And so it's a choice in that moment to say that. And that is, to me, incredibly diminishing of us whose ancestors actually were enslaved in this country, which Obama's were not. Right? To then try to treat, to own a judge, was he a great man? Who just happened to own her?

[00:21:29] How do we discount that? But what he is, is he is standing in for white America in that moment. Because that's what we've been told our whole lives. I remember my daughter came home. And she's my daughter, so I was a little ashamed of myself. When she was about in first or second grade, and she was like, wait, George Washington has slaves? And I was like, damn, I didn't teach you that? I thought, I taught you that. I must have skipped that part. But then I was like, we probably never even talked about George Washington in my household, honestly.

[00:21:57] So I don't remember what we were talking about, but I just had to get the Obama part off my mind. Yeah. Now, I remember when, you know, because I was homeschooled, I didn't learn how people learn about, like, the founders until my children were learning about them. And I was like, oh, this is why, because they learned about this great man, George Washington, early on.

[00:22:22] And then they learned about, you know, what Obama calls the flaws, right? But I think what it does a disservice to also is that unless you know about their slaves, unless you know how much enslaving human beings was integral to why they were, you know, financially stable, which even that even they weren't.

[00:22:52] You can't understand how this country was built. Like, you can't understand why they made these concessions to these southern people, unless you understand, well, yeah, I know I'd be broke too, right? Jefferson's saying, like, I'd be broke so I understand why they structured this country like it was.

[00:23:11] And what's interesting to me, though, is that when we talk about this, right, and we reflect on the imagination of, like, our ancestors, which kind of, like, is our job to kind of bring open people's imagination as writers to seeing things from a different point of view.

[00:23:34] We're not saying, like, George Washington wasn't good at presidenting or he wasn't actually the leader of the American Revolution. I think it's possible to put all of that in context, to show how he chased on a judge, to show how when America won the revolution, he's writing letters to the British saying, hey, man, won't y'all give us our slaves back? And they're saying, no, we promised.

[00:24:04] He's like, okay, can I have mine back, though? Right? Right? We know him sending his nephew to the ship where they're shipping the people who fought for the British out and saying, hey, man, look for my slaves. See if they're on the boat, right? It's possible to put all of that in context. And I think what the ultimate effort has been is to take us out of the context of American history, not to just whitewash it, right?

[00:24:33] The only way to whitewash it is to remove that context and prevent this fictional America, not a whitewashed or a one-sided view. And I think when you put out the 1619 project, right, I think it is important that it is in the New York Times, right? It could have been by any publisher.

[00:25:00] But the fact that it's in the New York Times makes it like an official almost reclamation of our story, right? When did you conceive of, like, did you start, when did you start conceiving of this? The 1619 project? November of 2018. So, like, not that long before I pitched it, really.

[00:25:24] I mean, I think that you were going somewhere. So, one, I know y'all probably didn't think you were going to come and hear this nerdy talk about the period of the American Revolution. But we are nerdy as hell, y'all. Yeah. Like, we can literally just sit up here and talk about the period of the Revolution. But I'm going to move us forward.

[00:25:45] One, I think, to contextualize the United States is literally to destroy every mythology that it has. Like, you actually can't contextualize it and still hold the mythology.

[00:25:59] This is why, I mean, in my chapter on democracy, when I say we've been taught to think of the heart of the American Revolution as Boston with the Tea Party and Philadelphia because that's where the founding document was written, that that is also a lie. Like, the heart of the Revolution was Virginia. And to know that, just look who wrote all the documents. They were all Virginians. They were slaveholders from Virginia. Virginia was the oldest colony. It was the wealthiest colony.

[00:26:30] It was the largest colony. So, it wasn't even about having to convince Southerners. You could have no successful revolution or constitute a new nation without the South. The South was required because that's where all the wealth was. So, when George Washington and these white men put forward this idea of republicanism, republicanism is representative government.

[00:26:50] This is where you see these all of a sudden big R Republicans, Republican political party arguing we're not a democracy, we're a republic. They're arguing that now, even though they were always the ones arguing about we're the greatest democracy in the world. That slight turn of phrase is now to argue because republican means you have a small group of representative elites who represent most people. It's not one person, one vote.

[00:27:19] So, we elect the presidency through republicanism, right? You elect your mayor through democracy. Do you understand what I'm saying? So, republicanism is how you get a majority of citizens vote for Hillary Clinton, but Trump becomes president.

[00:27:38] That's republicanism because that is where states, the representatives of the states, the population of the states determine how many representatives you have, and those allotments go to the president. That's the electoral college. Am I being clear here? Yes. Okay. So, the very idea of republicanism comes from Virginia because in Virginia, most of your poor are enslaved. So, they can't vote. They can never challenge your power.

[00:28:08] And so, you have this idea that white elite, white elite men, white elite landowning men will decide government for everybody else. That's how you get the tension of America right now. Because now, because now they wanted democracy when black people could not participate in democracy. Right. Now that they're worried that they're going to lose their demographic majority, now they want republicanism. Right. Or authoritarianism. Right. Right.

[00:28:38] So, when you don't learn that actual history of what we were founded on, when George Washington, when Thomas Jefferson says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal. He's talking about not just all white men. He's talking about landed white men specifically. So, we, of course, though, and this is where we talk about the black American imagination. We read that document. And we're not stupid. Right. They treat us like inanimate objects, but we're not.

[00:29:07] We can't read. Most white people can't read either. So, back in the 1700s, they read documents in the public square. That's how information was transferred. You would read it out loud because most people in this country were not literate no matter what race they were. Black folks were there. Now, they don't think we can think, so they're reading these words in front of us, and we're hearing those words, and we're saying, wait a minute.

[00:29:30] How can you found this nation talking about all men are created equal and die with unalienable rights and then keep us in slavery? So, you might not have meant that document to pertain to us, but we know what those words mean. And so, it was actually black folks that turned our idea of the Declaration into a liberty document. That was a succession document. That was just the white folks listing all their crimes that other white people committed against them so they could form their own white nation. That's what the Declaration is. It's a listing of crimes.

[00:29:59] It's a succession document. But black folks read it and say, this is a liberty document. This is our imagination. And now think about everybody in America, nobody quotes the Constitution. They quote the Declaration. That's because of black folks. But we don't get credit for that. And so, it wasn't that what, it wasn't that the history in the 1619 Project was a radical history. It's actually not. It's actually, if I were to rewrite it in these times, it would be less patriotic than it ended up being.

[00:30:28] Your ancestor's story is proof that strength and dignity endure even when everything else is taken away. When it comes to honoring that legacy, your privacy should never be in question. At AfricanAncestry.com, your story and your information belong to you. We destroy every DNA sample and never sell or share your data with anyone.

[00:30:52] Discover where in Africa your story began accurately and safely with AfricanAncestry.com. It was unintentionally the most patriotic thing I ever wrote. But what was radical about it was the framing of black people, not just in the center of the story saying we built the wealth. Like, we all know that. We say that all the time. The wealth was built on our bodies. But even that robs us, right?

[00:31:17] Because that actually reifies white supremacy where the totality of our input to this country was our brute labor. We did do that. But we gave intellectual labor to this country. We actually perfected ideas of real democracy, which means everybody in society has a say. That came from us. And so if you were to reorient America to say, you didn't even believe in your own ideas. But we saw them.

[00:31:47] And we fought your fascists abroad. And then we came back home and fought your fascist ass right here. When you tell that story, that is a story that actually kills their myth. And they're nothing without that myth, right? They're nothing without this belief in their own exceptionalism. And that was the danger. It wasn't even saying how bad slavery was. It was saying everything that y'all tried to do to us, we still believed in your own shit more than you did. That was what made them so mad.

[00:32:14] And what's interesting about that imagination is, like, they had a blank slate technically, right? And what they did, you know, we say they tried to escape tyranny to come over here and religious persecution. And what they did was kind of reform a society that did it.

[00:32:43] But we could be the aristocrats. They could be the aristocrats, right? And what's remarkable is that we imagined a country for them that they had never even seen for themselves. What if everybody's free? What if everybody's equal? And when we say, like, we are our ancestors' wildest dreams. Now, our ancestors, I mean, if we're being honest, dreamed of even more than we have now, right?

[00:33:09] Like, our ancestors' wildest dreams, they couldn't even see, right? We can't even fathom what it's like to have never, like, just think about people in South Carolina and Louisiana who had never seen a free black person run away thinking there is a place I can run to where I could be free.

[00:33:35] And think about a country where black people had never been equal. And these 21 and 19-year-olds say, I bet you we can do it, though. Right? Like, not just dream of it, but say, let's go out there tomorrow and do it. That imagination to me is remarkable, more remarkable than our founding story, right?

[00:34:03] Like, and the framing of it as the 1619 Project does. Because, I mean, when you think about it, they would have never been able to dream it. And what happened in 1619 was part of the equation that allowed this country, like, brought this country to even the thing that the white people did even dream.

[00:34:38] So, we have three minutes left. I want you to answer this question in three minutes. Right? I want you to answer this question in three minutes. Give me the entire history of black. No, I want you to tell me, like, what, you know, I'm sure while doing this project, people think, like, you know everything about black history. Right? Right? Like, and you learn while you are writing and studying. Right?

[00:35:04] I think what's something now, like, a piece of information you've learned since this book came up? Like, you always, damn, I wish I would have put that in there. Because I think we're constantly learning. That's a hard question. Don't put me on the spot. When I get put on the spot, my mind goes blank. And then after I get off this stage, I'm going to have, like, 12 examples. I mean, there's so much. Like, I learn, like you, every day. I studied African American Studies. I graduated in 1998.

[00:35:34] So, I don't know how long ago that was. But that was a long time ago. Like, almost 30 years ago, right? Is that right? Is that math right? Yeah, almost. Oh, I'm old. Okay. And yet, I'm reading and learning every single day. And I sometimes get overwhelmed, but then I also get excited about the fact that I will never learn even close to what can be known. And I think this is the power of our history.

[00:36:00] This is why we've somehow, some of us, I don't think black folks as much, though some of us have tended to treat this administration's attack on history as somewhat superficial or stupid or we roll our eyes at it. It's very, very tactical. And we need to understand, like, when I took my first black studies class when I was 15 years old, I became an absolutely incorrigible student. I had one semester of black knowledge. One.

[00:36:30] And I literally started going to all my classes challenging my teachers about why aren't you talking about this? Why aren't you talking about this? Why aren't we reading any black folks in my English class? Right? Because what it did was it gave me imagination. It helped me understand they weren't not teaching our history because we didn't have a history. We actually had a lot of history. It was a choice. And so what they were calling history was the memory they were trying to impose upon us.

[00:36:58] It's the same instinct that made us the only people in the history of the United States, maybe the world, for whom it was illegal to learn to read and write. They wanted to control what we knew to be possible. And so if you can control that, then we accept certain things. Why was abolitionist literature banned in the South?

[00:37:16] Because if you are in Mississippi, and if you have for generations only ever known slavery, and every state surrounding you and every state surrounding those states are slave states, it is tremendously powerful to know if I get this far, there's actually freedom on that other side. Then I don't stay. Then I don't stay. Or at least I dream about the possibility of freedom that I didn't think that I had. This is the power of the work that we do. This is why our work gets targeted and banned. Right?

[00:37:46] It is because it allows us to think about the possibility of our lives. And I want, we are here in D.C. in this moment. I want us to think about all the times y'all saw those memes that went around on social a couple years ago where people said we are not our ancestors. You remember? You remember that disrespectful meme that went around? And I just remember thinking you are absolutely right. You're not. You could never.

[00:38:15] When you talk about what you wouldn't have taken. Oh, they couldn't have enslaved me. I would have been this. You won't stand up to your boss at work right now. Right? So now is the time. We need to know our history so we know what we're capable of. Because what these folks have planned for us, most of us in this room have never had to live through. And I don't think we have the muscle memory to fight it. So you better go back and get your learning.

[00:38:42] You better get that ancestral knowledge because it's going to be required of it. And that's what makes this work dangerous. That's what makes this work dangerous. Because if you saw what they fought with and they had so much less than we had, that you may have fear. And fear is okay because courage requires fear. It's okay to be afraid. But what you can't do is say you can't do it because they did it. And that, to me, is why we have to learn our history. I want to thank you all for coming and listening.

[00:39:16] So I want to thank you guys for coming and listening. I woke up early. I'm staying across the street and I woke up. And I saw all of these people out here. And I was like, well, there must be something else going on. But the fact that all of you are here and all of those people are outside, right, is a testament to what these books and all of these books are,

[00:39:43] how much power they have, and why they are so intent on stamping it out. We're going to move expeditiously. But before we do, I would love to do a picture with y'all. Is that okay?

[00:40:13] Will y'all hold y'all books up? If you're supposed to be at work, put your book right here, okay? We're going to do a selfie. Hold your books up. Stand up. Hold your books up. Before you walk out, stand up and hold your book up real quick.

[00:40:42] On the count of three. Who said we can't see? Hold on. I can see y'all. Hold on. On the count of three, say Black Books Matter. One, two.

[00:41:22] Podcast Network. Each and every one of you for listening to this episode. And if you drop us a review and rate us on whatever platform you download podcasts on. Supporting us and making us your go-to for Black books. And we look forward to connecting with you all sometime in the future. Thank you again, fam. And always remember.