Clint Smith: A Reckoning with History

Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Happy Independence Day. I love the 4th of July.
I've always loved the 4th of July. I don't want to leave y'all hanging on the 4th of July if you needed a podcast after your barbecues, before the fireworks.
I'm going to put in the show notes. I've got a special 4th of July playlist for everybody.
For this episode, I want to re-air an interview I did with Clint Smith on the Next Level Sunday show back when I was doing that, so the real ones will know about this and maybe have heard it. I've got a little bit before we get to that.

In the Clinton interview, focused a bit on his book called How the Word is Past, which just talks about a reckoning with the history of slavery in America, but also reckoning with America's promise and how we can move forward. I think it was maybe the most moving conversation that I had in those interviews.
And so for those who aren't familiar, I wanted to give you a chance to re-hear

it today. But before that, I want you to join me in a little tradition I had back when I was on

campaigns. On the 4th of July, I got to work on campaigns, unfortunately, their parades and

whatnot. And so I would always annoy my staff and read them from, I think, maybe my favorite letter

that was ever written. It was by Thomas Jefferson to the mayor of Washington, D.C., Roger Waitman, declining the invitation to attend the 50th anniversary of American independence, the Jubilee celebration, because of his failing health.
And so, I think we're in a time now when we're dealing with the consequences of failing health, where we're seeing what the importance of American democracy and reinvigorating it. And I thought some of you might enjoy hearing from this letter as well.
We'll put the text of it in the show notes if you don't want to hear it in my dulcet tones. Thomas Jefferson writes this, respected sir, the kind invitation I received from you on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington to be present with them at their celebration of the 50th anniversary of American independence as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own and the fate of the world is most flattering to myself and heightened by the accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey.
It adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness to be deprived of it, of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day. But acquiescence is a duty under circumstances not placed among those we are permitted to control.
I should indeed with particular delight have met and exchanged their congratulations personally with a small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country between submission or the sword and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made may it be to the world what i

believe it will be to some parts sooner to others later but finally to all the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves and to assume the blessings and security of self-government that form which we have substituted restores the right restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion all eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man the general spread of light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds for hope for others, for ourselves.
Let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rites and an undiminished devotion to them. Let this anniversary forever refresh our recollections of these r rights as we look to fight somebody that is trying to return to a situation where there's a special few that get treatment that are different from everyone else.
That there are other people that have saddles on their back. That there's a favored few protected by a court or protected by a president

protected by a wannabe autocrat.

I think it's a very important letter one for us to think about today.

I hope you guys enjoy your barbecues.

I hope you enjoy this with Clint Smith and we'll see all back here tomorrow

with another edition of the board podcast.

Happy independence day.

Peace. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark's Next Level Sunday interview.
I'm your host, Tim Miller, and I'm honored to be here today with Clint Smith, author of the New York Times bestselling How the Word Has Passed. He's an Atlantic scribe, and he has a book of poems out this year called Above Ground.
So we're going to get into all that. Clint, thanks so much for doing this, man.
Happy to be here. So I want to discuss with you Reckoning with America's Racial Legacy, Uncle Tom's cabin, identity politics, New Orleans, fatherhood, college athletics, writing poetry.
We've got about 52 minutes. How does that sound? You think we can hit it all? I think we can cover every single contour of that, so let's do it.
I want to start with your book, How the Word is Passed, which was so good and important in ways I want to kind of talk about for me. But for those who haven't read it, maybe just give us a quick thumbnail sketch of what the book was, what you're trying to do with it.
Yeah, so in 2017, I watched several Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans, statues of PGT Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee.
And as I was watching those statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people and thinking about, well, what are the implications of that? What does it mean that to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? To get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? Or that my parents still live on a street today, named after someone who owned hundreds of enslaved people? Because the thing is, we know that symbols and names and iconography, they're not just symbols, they're reflective of the stories that people tell.
And those stories shape the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy, and public policy shapes the material conditions of people's lives.
And that doesn't mean that if you just go around and take down statues of Robert E. Lee, you suddenly erase the racial wealth gap.
Or if you change the name of Jefferson Davis Elementary School, you suddenly create more economically egalitarian schools. But I do think it helps us recognize the ecosystem of ideas and stories and narratives and help us identify the way that certain communities over the course of history have been disproportionately and intentionally harmed by certain narratives around American history.
And so I've been thinking a lot about, well, how are these stories propagated? How are these stories told? To what extent are the people and places that have a relationship to this history telling the story honestly, running from their responsibility to tell the story honestly, or kind of doing something in between? So I started looking around New Orleans, asking those questions, and then realized that the story was obviously much bigger than New Orleans. And I basically spent four or five years traveling across the country, visiting plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, monuments, memorials, cities, neighborhoods, trying to understand how our country reckoned with or failed to reckon with its relationship to the history of American slavery and to sort of examine how the scars of slavery are etched into the landscape of this country in places that would seem self-evident and in places that might not.
I want to start with your trip to the Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, was it, Virginia? And you had these conversations with people that worked there. Martha and Ken is a Confederate soldier cemetery.
And I kind of wanted to get into that, but just share with folks just the contours of those conversations you had with the people that were working at that cemetery and how that kind of led you to the Memorial Day ceremony, if you will. You know, it's interesting because it's hard to imagine the book without that chapter in it.
But one of the wonderful things about writing a project like this and working on this sort of creative nonfiction project, working on this sort of project, this sort of a travel log, is that some of the places in the book are places that I knew I was going to go. And then some of the places in the book are places that when I wrote the book proposal, I didn't know that I was going to go there.
And so the Confederate cemetery at Blanford was one of those places that I did not write in my book proposal. I didn't say in my book proposal, I'm going to go spend the day with neo-Confederates and members of the daughters of the Confederacy and sons of Confederate veterans, because I don't think my wife would have let me out the house.
But I thought I was going to write a chapter on Civil War battlefields. And so I went to Petersburg and I thought I was going to do a sort of meditation on the siege of Petersburg and the battlefields where so many thousands of soldiers were killed at the end of the Civil War.
And I was there and I was having a conversation with the park ranger. And I was telling him about my book project.
And he was like, oh, that sounds really interesting. You should go to this Confederate cemetery down the road.
And it's almost like in the movies where the devil and the angel appear on your shoulders. And it was like on one shoulder was Ryder Clint and the other shoulder is Regular Clint.
And so Ryder Clint is like, we got to go to the Confederate cemetery. And regular Clint is like, we are absolutely not going to the Confederate cemetery.
You're out of your mind. One of the reasons I'm grateful to be a writer is because I think it, especially in those sort of moments, pushes me to go to places and navigate spaces that I otherwise might not go to.
Like on my own, I don't think that I would ever feel compelled on my own accord to just go spend the day with the Sons of Confederate Veterans on Memorial Day. But that is where the story was taking me.
And so I decided I need to follow it. Yeah.
So talk about having those conversations, right? You're going to the cemetery and talking with the people that work there. Then you end up going to this kind of event for the Sons of the Confederate veterans and trying to talk to some of the attendees.
Obviously, you stand out. I don't think there's a lot of black folks probably going to the Confederate cemetery.
There's a journalist way to kind of engage in those conversations. It's like, oh, I'm just trying to gather information.
What does this person think? And then, you know, it felt like you were doing some of that, but then also a little bit of a more human way, right? Like trying to have a conversation with somebody and tease out like what it is that is motivating them, why they are there. So just talk about those conversations and how comfortable you were and, you know, what kind of tools you use to try to draw people out in those settings.
Yeah, I remember in particular a conversation with a guy named Jeff. And Jeff had this round belly, this salt and pepper, handlebar mustache, this long ponytail, this Confederate biker vest that had Confederate paraphernalia all over it.
And when we were having a conversation, he was telling me about how his grandfather used to bring him to the cemetery. And they would sit in this beautiful white gazebo that sits at the center of the cemetery.
And his grandfather would pull out his banjo and play the old Dixie anthem. His grandfather would tell him stories about the men who were buried in these fields, how brave they were, how courageous they were, how strong they were, how resilient they were.
He would tell stories about how the men who were buried in these fields didn't fight a war over slavery. They didn't fight a war over anything that had to do with race.
It was all about states' rights. It was all about protecting themselves against the war of northern aggression, the sort of Yankee invasion, maintaining their culture, the importance of state sovereignty, tariffs, you know, the sort of greatest hits of the lost cause.
And also, you know, as he's telling them in these stories and saying secession had nothing to do with slavery and, you know, they're watching the sun set behind the trees and 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.
They're watching the deer come out from the trees and sort of graze around these gravestones. It's filled with this deeply sentimental sort of sensory experience, these deeply sentimental memories.
And Jeff talks about how now he brings his granddaughters to that same cemetery and he sings the same songs on the same banjo that his grandfather sang to him, tells the same stories that his grandfather told him to his grandchildren, watches the same sun set behind the same trees that his grandfather and he watched. And so the thing is, for Jeff, I could go to Jeff and be look, man, like, I know your grandfather said secession had nothing to do with the Civil War, but all you have to do is look at the declaration, or secession had nothing to do with slavery.
But all you have to do is look at the declarations of Confederate secession and see the state like Mississippi in 1861 said, you know, quote, our position is thoroughly identified with the issue of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world. And so they're not vague about why they're seceding from the Union, they're very clear about it.
But what you realize in having these conversations is that if Jeff was going to accept that information, he would have to also 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 he has with this man who he loves, this man who he not only loves on an interpersonal level, but who also represents an entire community, an entire family, an entire way of life that has been fundamental to shaping how Jeff understands who he is in the world.
So suddenly it's not this thing where you're asking Jeff to just accept this empirical evidence that's right before him. You're providing evidence that serves as a catalyst for an existential crisis.
And I think that that's the centerpiece of this, right? So much of this is about identity. So much is about the story we have been told, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
And part of what you realize is that for so many people, history is not about primary source documents. It's not about empirical evidence.
It's a story that they're told. It's a story that they tell.
It's an heirloom that's passed down over generations where loyalty takes precedence over truth.

And so for me, those conversations, you know, with Jeff and others, they were really important because it helped me take seriously the emotional underbelly that sort of like undergirds these often bigoted, violent,

ahistorical beliefs, which isn't to excuse it,

which isn't to say justify it or to say,

oh, well, now I understand.

If we are going to attempt to understand

why millions of people across this country to various gradations

hold on to beliefs that are so clearly untrue, that are so clearly ahistorical, we also have to take seriously the emotional texture of their lives and their lineages that make the stakes so high for a recalibration in the context of recalibrating history. And I think, you know,

that's the stakes so high for a recalibration in the context of recalibrating history. And I think, you know, that's in the context of the Confederacy and, you know, Confederate reenactors and neoconfederates.
But I think there's a version of that that's happening across the country now, right? It's the same thing that we're seeing with the, you know, the history wars, so to speak, where so many people are fearful of accepting fuller, more honest, more complex, more multifaceted story of the American experience, the story of American history, in part because their identities are, whether consciously or unconsciously, deeply tied to a previous story about America that people are now telling them is untrue, or is partial, or is misguided. And if your identity is tied to an America that people are telling you isn't the actual America, then it creates again and can create this sort of similar existential crisis for a lot of people.
And that then allows politicians to come in and wield it,

that fear as a really potent political weapon. I'm happy you told that full story because I was listening to you talk about that conversation with Jeff in a different setting.
It was what inspired me to reach out to you, right? Because I think that at the Bulwark, like we, you know, not all of us, I guess, anymore, but when we started it, all of us were people that had left, the Republican Party at some level over the fact that we felt like we had seen that we had been lied to. Seeing Donald Trump take over and take that nomination made us shook some of us and made us realize that, oh wait, what we thought the definition of this was actually it wasn't.
And for some people, I found and for many of our listeners, and not all of them of course we have listeners across the ideological spectrum, but from the former Republican listeners, this was part of their identity. And politics can be part of your identity in the way that race and identity is.
And I feel like we're at our best when we're trying to figure out how we can go back into the places that we used to inhabit and talk to those people and find, with empathy but with honesty, try to kind of pull them along and help them see the kind of cracks that we saw and help them see the untruths that we saw. First to say I'm not always that good at that.
Sometimes I succumb to mockery or sarcasm instead Because you can't help yourself This conversation that I'm talking about Is kind of between close-ish People And the identity divide We're mostly white, let's just be honest We all share that one point We liked Ronald Wachin Or had an elephant Sticker on our button You went into these spaces where the gap is much larger right? And so I'm just wondering do you have any lessons from that? Anything from those conversations that made you think man this opened eyes you know maybe we opened each other's eyes in a way that was more effective when I took this approach or when I took that approach. I'm sure you've thought about this and kind of the fallout from having all these experiences.
Yeah. You know, I think that part of the project of the book, whether I was at Blanford Cemetery, you know, which is one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country, 30,000, the remains of 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried there.
Whether I was at Monticello, whether I was at Angola Prison, whether I was in New York or Galveston, part of what felt important for me was that I wanted to genuinely understand why different groups of people believed what they believed. And so in the context of Blanford, if I were to go to

that place and move through it with any semblance of an antagonistic disposition, obviously my, you know, what sociologists will call my sort of- Physical response? yeah well you know my um who i am in relation to my the space that i'm in uh my positionality means that how people interact with me when i enter that space is already going to be different than how it would be if you were entering that space with the same goals with the same questions with the same so for me, it was like, I tried to approach it with a level of generosity. I tried to approach it with a level of honesty.
I tried to approach it with, and not even try. I mean, I think my disposition is one of genuine curiosity.
Like I genuinely wanted to understand how someone like Jeff comes to so deeply believe in the things that he does in the face of evidence that runs to the contrary. And in order to do that, I mean, I think I just asked a lot of questions.
And I also, there were moments in which I shared my own perspective or my own response, but again, tried to do it not in an antagonistic way. So, you know, for example, one of them would be talking about how much this land means to them, right? Like part of the conceit of the book and sort of my larger scholarly project in many ways is that there's something so powerful about putting your body in the place where history happen, like your physical body standing on a plantation, standing in a cemetery, standing on the train depot from which, I wrote a story about Germany and how they remember the Holocaust, like standing in the gas chamber, standing in the crematorium, standing on the train depot from which Jewish families were sent to Eastern Europe.
There's something for me so powerful about that, this sort of sensory experience of that. And it's also powerful for other people in different ways.
And so, you know, I was talking to a guy at Blanford and he was like, it's so powerful for me to be here. You know, I feel the spirit of my ancestors.
I feel the ghosts, the spirits sort of arounding me, holding me up. And in those moments, I'm like, thank you so much for sharing.
That's really fascinating that that's your experience here because my experience is so different. And when I stand here, what I experience is this haunting, unsettling feeling that I am standing amid the ghost and the bodies of those who fought a war with a specific intention to perpetuate and expand the institution of chattel slavery among my direct ancestors.
And so, you know, it's just fascinating that we can both stand on this land and have such a different response to what it evokes within us. And I think in those moments, It's moments like i don't know that they've ever had anybody share that with them in that context um and it's not to say you know i always want to be careful in these moments like i am not an advocate of like all black people need to do is like go to confederate you know memorials and memorial day celebrations and Ku Klux Klan rallies.
Break bread at diners in Trump country and everything will be all right. It can be such a trope.
And so that's not what I'm saying. But I know for me, those sorts of experiences, like I have no idea how they were impacted by my presence or not, you know.
But I know that all I can do is control my own way of engaging my own disposition and try my best to leave a space like that more fully and accurately understanding the socio historical and sort of political dynamics that shape the world we live in today. I'm going to tell an embarrassing story really quick about myself in the sense that I think that maybe this, what you're saying on a smaller gradient, I guess, you know, these sorts of things do have a difference, like do make a difference when you start to think about the perspective of them.
So my best friend went to Ole Miss. So I would go visit them back in college.
This was before Colonel Reb was still around then. The Mississippi flag was still a Confederate flag.
I'm from Colorado. I went to school at GW in the Northeast.
I was visiting Ole Miss. And as just kind of a young, bradish college Republican, this whole culture was totally new to me.
I didn't know any fucking sons of the Confederate veterans or anything like that. And so in some ways, like the fact that when I went to Oxford, that they had the Confederate statue and these Confederate flags were around, it felt kind of subversive and funny, actually.
Like a little funny. I was opening up a box a couple of years ago of my college stuff, and I had collected a couple of Colonel Reb, like a little picture of Colonel Reb, like a little Colonel Reb figurine.
I thought back about my younger self that I remember thinking, oh, I'm going to bring this back to my liberal campus and people are going to be offended and that's going to be kind of funny in order to trigger people. I think about that now with total shame and embarrassment.
But the reason that I think about that differently now is that I've been exposed to a lot more black folks. I know I have a black daughter.
We're going to talk about that in a little bit. I've read your book.
I've read other books. And I'm like, I never put myself in the shoes of what a black person walking through Oxford feels.
And there's history in Oxford there too. What a black person feels is walking down where James Meredith walked that I walked by.
My feelings walking through that were totally different. And didn't even cross my 19-year-old mind how it would feel to 19-year-old Clint.
And so all of that has changed my perspective on this. And I think that obviously there's bigotry out there and that there are people that are deeply bigoted.
I say all that, though, because I'm interested in asking you, you went to this, going to the Sons of the Confederates is all the way on the other end of the spectrum, right? You see now on the internet there are a lot of young 19-year-old Tims, right, that think this stuff is funny, that think the woke stuff is overstated, right, that they're responding against it, they're trying to trigger people, right? How do you communicate the lessons of this book and the lessons of your life and your feelings to folks that have that perspective, right? Do you think about that? Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that story and the honesty there. I think that- You can tell me I'm a dumb shit if you want.
It's okay. It's cool you don't have to do the appreciate thing.
It's a journey. It's a journey for all.
I mean, and again, it's not, it's not to excuse. Like, I mean, part of, part of what brought me to this book is because I realized that I was someone who grew up in a city that was the heart of the domestic slave trade, that I am the descendant of enslaved people, that my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved.
And I didn't understand the history of slavery in any way that was commensurate with the impact and legacy that it has left on this country. I think watching those monuments come down, watching the conversations happening in the early days of Black Lives Matter, after Dylann Roof and Charleston, I was like, oh, this history is both within me and has been around me my entire life.
And I am not someone who feels like I understand it to the degree that I should have. And so the very construction of this book is one in which I am trying to fill the gaps in my own understanding.
It is me recognizing that there were things that I was not taught that I probably should have been that would have helped me more fully understand who I am in relationship to my city, my state, my country. That would have more effectively helped me understand the reason one community looks that way and one community looks that way is not because of the people in those communities, but is instead because of the history of what has been done to those communities generation after generation after generation.
So I think it would be broadly, I think it would be unfair of me to cast judgment upon people who themselves are not cognizant of this history to the degree that I am or that more of us are now, sort of 10 years after Black Lives Matter, after everything that happened with George Floyd. With that said, I think there's like a distinction between someone who doesn't know a set of information but is open to learning new things and someone who is sort of antagonistic performatively or otherwise to the information being presented.
So on a personal level, I don't have any interest in attempting to convince people to believe information when they are not operating in good faith. That just isn't an effective use of my time.
I'm not interested in changing people's minds. Some of the most meaningful notes that I've gotten about the book and about my YouTube series, Crash Course Black American History, are from people who were like, I read this and shared it with my racist granddad and he watches Fox News all day, but he read your book and we were able to talk about this in ways that we had never talked about it before.
That is deeply meaningful to me. I didn't write the book because of that.
I didn't write the book for the Fox News watching

granddad. I'm appreciative that that man or grandmother or person, whoever it is,

can get something out of it. But the book was written for a 15-year-old version of me.

The book was written because I wanted to write the sort of book that I needed in my high school

American history class. And anything else, the benefits that it extends to anyone else are deeply meaningful, but they're not the sort of origin story of the project.
Sometimes you can put out work that has impact that wasn't necessarily your intention. I guess what I'm trying to say is I think that there's a backlash to the post-George.
There's all this progress that's been made. This always happens.
I was not working on the gay stuff too. Right now, I think we're living to this backlash to the, whatever you want to call it, the racial reckoning, the Black Lives Matter post-George Floyd thing.
And you see a lot of young white folks, let's just be honest, that are bristling and are being performatively antagonistic to the point that you're saying. My view is that works like yours, that there are ways, that maybe this wasn't intentional and maybe that this is not, that's not the group that you care about.
But I think that there are ways to get at kind of this young, privileged class that is different from, that makes them think about what it is like for the 19-year-old version of them to have to consume the meme. Like for you, it was to have to walk past the monuments, right? And they still do.
They still have to, as you said, the street names in New Orleans are still the same. but to have to consume the meme.
Like for you, it was to have to walk past the monuments, right? And they still do. They still have to, as you said, the street names in New Orleans are still the same, but to have to consume the memes.
And I think that there is a certain percentage of them that can be reached if they're thinking about it not solopistically, right? If they're thinking about it as like, how is someone that does not look like me consuming this? And I think that is, to me, a value of like the types of material that you're putting out, even if that's not intentional. And I appreciate that.
I wanted the ethos of the book to be one of grace and generosity, in part because so many of the folks I spent time with, the tour guides, the public historians, the docents, you know, they were in many ways a model of the grace and generosity that I hope the book captures because it's in part an ode to them. It's an ode to these people who work at these historical sites who encounter all sorts of people, you know, every single day in their work, who are very much on the front lines of the history wards for the folks who are docents at Monticello who like every day have to deal with people who are in their face telling telling them, you know, that they know more about Thomas Jefferson than than the people who work there and that Thomas Jefferson actually never owned slaves and that the Sally Hemings thing was a myth.
And, you know, I mean, these are people who show up to these folk, these plantations and these sites all the time.

And so there is a, what I saw when I went to these places or the Whitney Plantation where, you know, there are folks who, who's every day, you know, they would, they ask, well, they were really good slave owners, right? Like, or they were really, they were really kind. Just really quick, the Whitney, honestly, for people who don't know, the Whitney Plantation is outside of New Orleans, and it is essentially trying to commemorate, commemorate's maybe the right word, memorialize, like what happened to slaves.
And there's so many plantations around the South where people have weddings here, they talk about, I think you right about how they talk about the windows and the architecture. And at Whitney they're trying to talk about, no, the actual experience of people that had to live on the plantation.
And for me, the biggest takeaway of that section was the living history element of it. How some of the buildings on the plantation, the slaves lived in, their descendants were living in until, what, the 1970s? And so, to me, that the buildings on the plantation, people that the slaves lived in were like their descendants were living in till what the 1970s, you know and so to me that was powerful in that I still am an old Republican at heart I'm not all the way there on reparations yet but it was like I was reading that chapter and I was like that anecdote was the best anecdote in favor of reparations I've ever read, right that was like that's crazy and the community around there and to have people coming, just back to your point, of people coming to the plantation, seeing this just very vivid, the experience that slaves went through, and then wanting to ask the tour guide, well, but there was a good slave owner, right? I mean, that just shows you how warped people get about their identity and not wanting to feel like they're bad.

No, absolutely.

I mean, so much of it is people attempting to assuage their own sense of guilt, their

own shame, their wanting to sidestep any historical moral culpability.

And yeah, so these docents and folks were a model of grace, a model of generosity, a model of patience.

And so I wanted the book to hold that in the same way.

And it is written in a way, you know, there are other books that are tackling similar subject matters that are written by people who are experts.

When they began that book, they were experts.

When they finished that book, they were experts.

I did not begin How the Word is Pass as an expert on the history of slavery. As I said, it was the opposite.
I began that book as somebody who felt deeply naive about a history that is my own. And there was some shame in that.
And so the book is written not as a like, here are the 10 things you should have always known about slavery. Because one, I think there can be value in polemic.

I think there can be value in just naming things and saying this is important and we should all understand it.

I don't know that that's my project.

I think my project is one in which I attempt to model a certain sort of curiosity and attempt to model what it might look like to fill the gaps in our own understandings of history, of the world, of people whose lives are not like our own. That's the book.
It's just like me going around asking a lot of questions and trying to make sense of it. Some of my favorite novelists are people whose stories have nothing to do with my own life, right? Like, I love immigrant novels.
Like, I love stories about, like, folks coming to this country from different countries. I love stories about the first-generation experience of people in America.
Like, some of my favorite novelists are, like, Min Jin Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mohsin Hamid. Like, folks who are really writing about, you know, an experience that is not my own.
And I find value in it because it is sort of a window into a set of experiences that aren't my own, but that still have a certain level of universality that I can tap into, that I can pull something out of. And so, you know, for folks who read this who aren't the descendants of enslaved people, you know, my hope is that it's a similar sort of emotional and intellectual experience where maybe you are stepping into, literally walking alongside me in many ways to all these different places, getting access to information and stories that you might not otherwise have encountered otherwise.
What do you say to the part inside you that wants to be a deplemicist, that wants to say, fuck you, fuck you to these people? How did you navigate that? Yeah, I mean, I also don't want to misrepresent it as me being like this constant well of endless grace and generosity. That's that's just that's not true i am i am i am deeply imperfect and inconsistent in how i attempt to extend grace and generosity to others and to myself and it's something that i wake up and try to work at every day and so i by no means want people to be like wow clint is just like every day he's just walking up to racist and being like, it's okay.

I understand that your father told you a story.

That's not the case.

I think that for me, I think about how I have changed and evolved on certain things in my own life and positions that I've previously had that were largely because people who did not have to extended grace and generosity to me, even when it may have been burdensome to them. And again, it's not to say that it is any group of people's responsibility to be the constant ambassador on behalf of any different facet of their identity, black, queer, immigrant, the list goes on.

But I, at my best, try to, again, very imperfectly and often inconsistently, extend grace to people in the way that grace has been extended to me and i when i can't do that i try to like i think there's also value in having a community of folks that you can go to and and like complain about shit without you know any sort of implications right i might i try not to do that on twitter i try not to get on you know not to get on social media and do it. Your Twitter is boring, man.

I was going through it looking for questions for you,

and it's just like soccer and retweets of inspiring people.

Anyway, where's the hate?

I'm off it now.

I haven't tweeted in some time.

That's a whole other thing.

But yeah, toward the end of my Twitter life, it was basically all soccer Twitter content. But it's important to have people that you can go to close circles of community and friends and just, and talk shit and complain and get it off your chest and then keep it moving and try to be the sort of empathic, humble, thoughtful person in the wider world.
But, you know, we're all human, and we're just a bunch of people trying to do our best. I want to get into your book of poems about fatherhood, and I want to kind of go through your New Orleans childhood a little bit on the way there, if you don't mind, and if you won't mind indulging me.
So as I told you when we spoke over email, I moved here and raising our daughter here that we adopted. And she's in kindergarten here now in New Orleans.
And as you mentioned in the podcast, you talked about how you wrote the book a little bit to young Clint, I guess to high school Clint, not to kindergarten Clint. And so I'm wondering, just talk about that experience of growing up in New Orleans.
And I think I've seen you talk about the gratitude and fear living together and just this, there's the darkness of New Orleans, but there's also the beauty. And, you know, I would just love to hear about that experience growing up here, how it informed the book and how, looking back, like, were there things that you wish you would have gotten more of out of the city, or were there things you wish that you would have, not to criticize your own parents, but gotten exposed to, or whatever, something that might be relevant for me as I navigate that challenge? Yeah, well, I'm jealous, first and foremost.
Doors open, man. Water's warm.
I know. Look, look.
Tell my wife. Literally.
I'm trying to convince her. And maybe one day.
Maybe I'll retire there. So it's interesting.
Hurricane Katrina was my senior year of high school. And I'm 35.
And it kind of pretty cleanly bifurcates my life into the sort of before the storm and after the storm, which is also the marker of time that so many people in New Orleans use for so many things, like was that before the storm or after the storm? And I finished high school in Houston, Texas, and then went to college and grad school and got a job and all that jazz.

So I've spent the sort of latter half of my life trying to make sense of and process both the impact that Katrina had on the trajectory of my life. And also, more broadly, what growing up in New Orleans did to me, for me, how it shaped my sensibilities, how it shaped my personality, how it shaped my interests.
You don't fully appreciate when you're born in a place, and maybe this is so many of us, but when I was born and raised in New Orleans, I didn't fully appreciate what it meant to be a New Orleanian relative to being from anywhere else. Because it was, it fish in the water.
It was the water around me. It was all I knew.
And then you leave and you realize how unique that place is relative to anywhere else in the world. I mean, it is just such a special place, an imperfect place, a place that has its angels and demons, so to speak.
But it is a place that gave me something that I don't think any other city in the world could have given me. And we were just there for Thanksgiving last week.
And I have this thing of wanting my kids to, I have a six-year-old and a four-year-old, wanting them to go to so many of the places that were so instrumental and so formative for me as a child to want to recreate experiences that were really memorable for me. And it's me trying to fit it into like four-day chunks during the holidays.
Yeah, it's just, there's kind of no place like it. And it's interesting because I I never lived there as an adult.
And so my memories of it are also through the lens of childhood, which is different. And I sometimes wonder what my relationship to the city would be as an adult.
Because being 14 in a place is very different than being 34 in a place. You have grown concerns.
Yeah. You don't have to care about the potholes or the insurance rates going up or anything like that.
Yeah. And so, you know, it's a place that is, it means so much to me.
And it's a place that perhaps more than anything else in my life has shaped who I, shaped my writerly instincts. You you know people sometimes have asked me or either ask me or tell me you know like there'll be a list online and be like you know 20 southern writers you should or whatever and sometimes I'm like oh yeah like I live in Maryland now which is I mean that's a whole different podcast like it is the south but it's not it's it.
It's also, like, not. It's not.
You know, like, Silver Spring, Maryland is, uh. Not the South.
It's not the South in the same way that the South South is the South. I have this one little anecdote.
I'm going to embarrass my friend if he's listening to me. But it connects with your book.
And I think it speaks to, like, the opportunities and challenges of growing up here. And so he messaged me, and he's white, obviously, and he said he's going to go there and take their kid to the Angola rodeo.
And he was like, we're going to take the kids. And I was like, I'm not taking my fucking kid to the Angola rodeo.
What are you talking about? And this is a chapter in your book where you talk about going there and it's this prison rodeo. And you can talk that if you want.
But I just think about that and there's this white southern culture here where it's like that where they appreciate all of the black culture and the music and the food etc. But then you can go to the Angola rodeo and not even think twice about it.
And then there's this black culture and history and community. I'm very much betwixt and between with my daughter and trying to make sure that she has all this exposure to the latter when the exposure of the former is going to be thrust upon her in a way that might not have been had we stayed in California.
And so anyway, I kind of wonder about your experience navigating that as you were growing up. Yeah.
Can I ask, when your friend was like, we're going to the Angola Rodeo, was it in a, like an ironic way or like, oh, we're going to go and have this be a, teach our kids about the like cruel insidious manifestation? No, it was not. No, it was not about that.
I wish it was about that, but it was not. I see.
Again, it's not defending, because I think it's a bit like contextualizing, right? It's like, you grow up in Baton Rouge, and that's just kind of something that you do. You know? Yeah.
You know, it's interesting because, I mean, maybe to provide a little more context for Angola for folks before we move to the next part. Angola is the largest maximum security prison in the country.
It's 18,000 acres wide. It's bigger than Manhattan.
It's a place where 75% of the people held there are black men. Over 70% of them are serving life sentences.
And it is built on top of a former plantation. And I went to, as I mentioned before, I wrote a story for the Atlantic last year about how Germany memorializes the Holocaust.
And I went to Berlin, I went to Munich, and visited Dachau. I remember walking into Dachau and looking around and walking through the gate.

And it's this vast haunting expanse of empty gray land.

You look to your left, you see the remnants of the crematorium.

You look to your right, you see the remnants of the barracks.

And I just kind of closed my eyes when I was there and did this thought exercise.

And I was like, what if on this land, they built a prison?

And in that prison, the vast majority of the people incarcerated there were Jewish.

And it was so viscerally upsetting that I couldn't even fully finish the thought exercise.

Then people would come watch.

I mean, it was a sort of visceral and deeply unsettling prospect to imagine. And then I was like, well, here in Louisiana, we have the largest maximum security prison in the country, you know, where the vast majority of people are black men serving life sentences, many of whom pick crops while someone watches over them on a horseback with a gun over their shoulder.
And so thinking about what does it mean that that place is allowed to exist in that way, on that land, in a way that rightfully we probably wouldn't allow in a different geopolitical context. Louisiana, New Orleans are not so different than many places in that they are places full of contradictions.

contradictions that so many of the people, as you kind of alluded to, so many of the people who love your music, who love your food, who love to root for you, you know, clap for you down the

parade route, who love to watch you play sports, will be the same folks who vote for representatives who have run on and whose politics are predicated on stripping you of opportunities for upward mobility, stripping you of access to social infrastructure that would allow you to support your family, strip the healthcare. I mean, you know, the list goes on and on.
And so there is that dichotomy in many ways in New Orleans feels particularly pronounced because people talk about New Orleans as a sort of melting pot. Like, oh man, you walk around, like, you know, you go to Jazz Fest, you go to Mardi Gras, you go to the French Quarter, you're in these spaces.
We're such a celebratory people. There's a different, as you know, there's a different festival every weekend.
There's a lot of intermingling or ostensible intermingling in these places, which can give you the impression that like, oh, well, this place is unique relative to the rest of the South because everybody gets along and is occupying similar spaces. The thing is that simply being in the same spaces doesn't mean people see you fully in the way that they see themselves.
It's interesting because I talk all the time about the power and possibility of proximity. But proximity in and of itself is not a panacea.

In many ways, you can be proximate to someone and it can further reify your prejudices and your conception of who you are in relation to them. So I think that in many ways in New Orleans, that's particularly pronounced, but it's also such a human thing.
We're full of moral inconsistencies.

But yeah, New Orleans still is

amid the contradictions amid the inconsistencies um amid the imperfections is is still such a special place and if you're going to wrestle with the contradictions of the human condition anywhere um you might as well do it while you can eat a po' boy. Yeah, I got to wrestle it in my family.
We're already a couple of gay white guys and a former Republican and a black daughter. So that seems like as good a place as anywhere to wrestle with that contradiction.
Sitting in complexity, yeah. I want to do two things.
I did not get to talk about your Atlantic article about Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is so good that people should just go read it and subscribe to the Atlantic

if they haven't.

I haven't gotten to, but half the other things I want to get to about your writing.

So people should make sure to get how the word is passed.

And your new book of poems, Above Ground.

I want to just read one of them because it made me laugh.

Is that okay with you?

Yeah, for sure.

Read one of your books from Above Ground, which is a lot about fatherhood and other issues. It's called Gold Stars.
As a gay dad, this hits so hard for me, Clint, because I just get so much love out on the street. But anyway, here it is.
On the days when I'm out alone with my children, I'm made to feel as if I'm a saint or a god or the undisputed best father of all time. What I mean is that when we walk into CVS and my daughter is wrapped on my chest and my son toddles at my side, people stop and look and gasp and point and walk up to me asking to shake my hand.
Men pat me on the back. Women touch my shoulder and touch their hearts.
The manager at the front of the store comes on to the loud speaker to say, excuse me, may I have everyone's attention? On aisle seven, you can get three boxes of detergent for the price of two. And on aisle five, there's an incredible father running errands alone with his children.
Everyone in the store bursts into applause. It's just so good.
I just, if you just could just give us one minute, like where you get, excuse the rudeness of this question, but where do you get the balls to be like, I'm a poet, and I'm going to write a poem about being a dad in CVS and getting more credit than I deserve, because it's really wonderful. Yeah, it's always a delight to hear other people read your work.
It's just like, so I really appreciated that.

I mean, so that poem, part of what it goes on to say in the second half of it is like, I get all of these plaudits. I get all of these applause.
And I think it's for all men because I think this is the way that sexism and patriarchy operate. I think there's an additional sort of valence, an additional sort of layer around being a black man

because it runs counter to so many people's conceptions

of the role that black men play in their children's lives.

And just talking about walking into spaces,

especially when my kids were little, little,

but even still now, if I'm alone with my kids,

people just kind of gawking and being like,

wow, look at this guy, father of the year.

It's amazing. I bet he changed his kid's diaper.
Look at him babysitting his kids.

And it's like, just for me, it was important as both a man writing a book about fatherhood And as someone who's is a, you know, is a father is a person in co-parenting alongside someone who, you know, a woman who doesn't get acknowledged for doing the exact same thing in the same way. It felt very important for me to name directly the ways that men are celebrated for doing things that their counterparts, their female counterparts are often not.
And it's not to say, as I say in the poem, it's not to say I don't want people to tell me I'm doing a good job. Like, you know, I try to be a really good father.
Like, that's something that I take a lot of pride in. That's something I invest a lot of myself in.
And it's nice when people see that and acknowledge you for it. The problem is when they acknowledge you and don't acknowledge the mother, in part because of the societal expectations that like, oh, this is just what mothers are supposed to do.
Whereas like anything that a dad does beyond patting his kid on the head and having a job is seen as like bonus, like the extra gold star. So yeah, and I try to add, I think there are opportunities for humor to to exist in a lot of these poems like this this book was really a delight for me to to write because it got it allowed me to tap into humor in my writing in a way that i i kind of obviously didn't in um how the word is passed given the subject matter right but i think it also allows people to maybe, humor in writing can be really effective in that it allows people to enter or hear something or enter a set of ideas that might otherwise be more off-putting.
So if you can make a poem about how dad gets more credit than mom for doing the exact same thing, but make it kind of funny, but not funny at the expense of its truth. I think maybe you can get the attention of some folks who might otherwise be like, I'm not going to read this poem about patriarchy.
Yeah, right, exactly. That's so good.
All right, well, I suspected we're out of time, but if you had indulged me, we're not going to be able to make it through all the rapid fire.

But you kind of alluded to the fact that you've changed your mind on things as an adult.

And my rapid fire question for every guest at the end, one of them is, what is something you've changed your mind about?

So if you'd share that with us, we can leave that as the final word.

Something I've changed my mind about.

Something you've changed your mind about.

I change my mind all the time i don't know if this counts but i've been working on my next book which is about world war ii sites around the world so it's a similar conceit to how the word is passed but it's about world war ii memorials and monuments and museums around the world and i was recently was recently in Korea studying the history of women who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military, Korean women. These hundreds of thousands of women, it's systematized sex slavery.
It's a horrific period of history. And what's interesting is that you can't study that without also thinking about, I'm doing a terrible job at like rapid fire.
No, that's fine. I didn't expect you to be good at rapid fire, to be honest.
Oh, man. It's as weird as on your time now.
You can give a 20-minute answer if you want. But what's interesting is that when you study the history of the so-called comfort women, you also have to study the history of Japanese imperial and colonialism of korea and it just is interesting because like my conception of colonialism for so long has been like black or brown people subjected to colonial violence from white people from europeans and it just really complicates the japan kore relationship, complicates any sort of homogenous notion of colonialism or imperialism, right? Because it's the Japanese colonized Korea.
And the way that you read about Japanese people talking about Korean people is not dissimilar to how you would read about Portuguese people talking about Angolans, right? Or Senegalese people. And it's just so fascinating to see the way that oppression and the way that justifications of colonial violence manifest themselves in all sorts of different cultural contexts.
You know, this is the English and the Irish, the way that the Irish conceive of themselves as a colonized people relative to the British. Whereas for a long time, I was like, these are just both white people.
What are they talking about? Being in Korea and reading books about Ireland my, my conception of the possibilities and the contours of colonialism are much more complex than they previously were.

Hope you enjoyed that flashback with Clint Smith. Hope you have a wonderful 4th of July

and Independence Day. I'm going to see you back here tomorrow with Annie Lowry

and then on Monday with Bill Kristol.

Have a great weekend.

See you all then.

Peace.

Don't you know

we're talking about a revolution

It sounds like a whisper

Don't you know

we're talking about a revolution

It sounds like a whisper

While they're standing in the welfare lines Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation Wasting time in the unemployment lines Sitting around waiting for a promotion Don't you know? about a revolution Sounds Poor people gonna rise up And get their share Poor people gonna rise up And take what's theirs Don't you know you better run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run Oh I said you better run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run Cause finally the tables are starting to turn Talking about a revolution Cause finally the tables are starting to turn Talking about a revolution, oh no Talking about a revolution, oh While they're standing in the welfare lines Crying at the footsteps of the zombies of salvation Wasting time in the unemployment lines Sitting around waiting for our promotion Don't you know Talking about a revolution sounds a whisper And finally the tables are starting to turn, talking about a revolution Yes, finally the tables are starting to turn, talking about a revolution Oh no, talking about a revolution Talking about a revolution, oh no Talking about a revolution, oh no

Talking about a revolution, oh no