Classics Scholar Dr. Anika Prather on Healing the Present by Studying the Past

On today’s episode, Ryan talks to Classics Scholar Dr. Anika Prather about the bridge that books can create between diverse cultures, why it’s so important to continue teaching the Classics in Universities, how to properly educate young people about racial inequality, and more. Dr. Anika T. Prather has earned several graduate degrees in education from New York University and Howard University. Her research focus is on building literacy with African American students through engagement in the books of the Canon and self-published her book Living in the Constellation of the Canon: The Lived Experiences of African American Students Reading Great Books Literature recently. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Policygenius will help you find the insurance coverage you need. You can save 50% or more by comparing quotes. And when your life insurance policy is sorted out, you’ll know that your family will be protected if anything happens. Just go to policygenius.com to get started. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Dr. Anika Prather: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was trying to think about this. Like, what was the first classic book that I read? I don't mean like classics like The Great Gatsby. I mean like classics when they think of the ancient Greek and Roman texts, you know, The Odyssey, the Iliad, Marcus Aurelius, Virgil, you know, the real, real classic texts, like what you would study in the classics departments. And I mean, I guess we read parts of The Odyssey in high school. So I guess that would probably be the first. But I think my real introduction to it, ironically enough, for today's episode,

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  would have been reading Plato's Republic and the allegory of the cave, the idea, which we'll talk about in the episode, so I won't spoil it. But I remember being struck by the allegory of the cave. I think it was in a class I took. My freshman year of college, freshman or sophomore year, actually, you know, I guess I would have read Socrates my first year. And then my second year, I was taking this class called Aristotle, Philosophy 101 Aristotle and the Meaning of Life. And we read Nicomachean Ethics, which later I would use as a source in Ego is the Enemy. And then I read Marcus Aurelius, not that long after. And that set me on this whole journey that I'm grateful to have you on with

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  me today. It was eye opening, to say the least. I think of the classics I'd read up until that point, what struck me most about Marcus Aurelius was it was like, oh, I don't have to be like a genius to understand this. He's like saying what he means. But as I've gone and read more and more, particularly biographies, I've always loved similar moments that other people have had, you know, Frederick Douglass falling in love with reading, Malcolm X falling in love with reading. All these people that that I've come to study and use in my books, they tended to have this moment where they fell in love with books. Harry Truman has this moment. You've heard me talk about it a million times. But the classics, they changed my life. They opened up the vastness

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  of the past, but also have helped me comprehend the present and participate in the future. So what we're going to talk about today is an interesting discussion that's coming from this racial reckoning that we're seeing. A lot of universities are questioning the idea of having a classics department, because the classics have been misused in the past. The classics were used by the Nazis, for example. The founding fathers used the classics to justify slavery, as did the South. And so people are questioning, why do we study old?

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  Dead white guys. And especially given the horrible things that those ideas have been made to use. Of course, anyone who's actually loved the classics realizes that they're far more complicated, far more complex, and can teach as much about human goodness as they can be used to rationalize human evil. I was talking to you about that awakening earlier, and I wanted to read you this little section from today's guest. She writes, "I began to write ferociously. Every assignment was written to take me deeper into the history of classical education in the black community and to create a mental database of all the black literature that cites a volume from the great books. Raisin in the Sun references Prometheus Bound. Harry P.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  Newton taught himself to read by reading Plato's Republic. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail is based on St. Thomas Aquinas. Henry David Thoreau, although white, was an abolitionist willing to stay in jail instead of supporting our racist system. And in learning about him, I discovered Martin Luther King's love for the text civil disobedience. I discovered that schools before desegregation provided a primarily classical education to black students and how desegregation killed that. I learned that Frederick Douglass loved Cicero and was first introduced to the classics when he bought The Columbian Orator as a 12-year-old enslaved boy, the same book that Harriet Beecher Stowe had also read as a child. I discovered that President Barack Obama formed his worldview by reading the thoughts

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  of many of the great philosophers and thinkers. My most recent discovery has been that has been that Toni Morrison minored in classics at Howard University, which is the only historically black college with a classics department. And Ta-Nehisi Coates also cites Prometheus Bound in his book Between the World and Me and makes the powerful statement that black diaspora was not just our own world, but in so many ways, the Western world itself." And that is a beautiful passage from my guest today, Dr. Anika T. Prather, who is an adjunct professor at Howard University. She has several graduate degrees in education from New York University and Howard. She has a master's in liberal arts from St.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  John's College and a PhD in English, theater, and literacy education from the University of Maryland. She may be the most well-educated guest I've ever had on this podcast. I had such a great time talking to her about her love of the classics, which you'll hear in the interview is just absolutely infectious. Talk a little bit about religion. We talk about racism. We talk about learning from history. And we talk about this sort of cultural boogeyman of CRT, which has got a lot of people riled up these days. I really enjoyed this interview. When I read her USA Today piece about Howard University closing its classics department, I had to reach out. I listened to her on NPR as well.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Her perspective was a great one that I benefited from having. And you can follow her on Twitter as well. @Anika, that's A-N-I-K-A-F-R-E, indeed. Anika Free Indeed. And you can check out her classical Christian school, The Living Water School as well, which seems really interesting. And you can go to her website at drprather.com. This is my conversation with the classicist Dr. Anika Prather. Enjoy. And if you haven't read any of the classics, you've only read me, please do yourself a favor. Go straight to the source.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  Go straight to the seat of intelligence. As Marcus Aurelius says, "You won't regret it." So I thought we would start with Plato's allegory of the cave. It hit me the first time I learned about it, actually in college. But not everyone's familiar with it. But I do feel like it remains sort of the allegory for our time. And then, as you talk about it, it has some particular relevance in the Black community.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, my first introduction to its connection to Black history was when I read. Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And that was really exciting for me to read because, you know, there's, it's almost like two battles I'm fighting here. I'm the one trying to show African Americans or black people that studying classics is relevant to us. It's not, people who read it don't become assimilationists. They don't want to deny their heritage. And so finding Huey P. Newton was kind of just like my way to give an extreme example of how these texts don't make us hate our heritage or reject our heritage. And so Huey P. Newton was illiterate till he was about 18.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And he got his hands on, he decided he wanted to learn to read and to just kind of stop wasting his life. And he began to read Plato's Republic as an illiterate person. And he was using dictionaries and having people help him sound out words. And he just muddled through the text several times before he was finally able to read it and understand it. Before it was just about decoding. And then he began to read and was comprehending. And as he began to read, he read it 10 times. He read Plato's Republic 10 times. Somehow, somewhere before that 10th time, his mind was drawn to the allegory of the cave.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  And in reading it, is when he decided, as he says, to free all black people. And the allegory of the cave is so interesting with regards to talking about freedom. Because here you have these people locked up in the cave, right? And they are making assumptions of what is going on outside the cave, based on, there's like a fire pit in the cave. And the pit is located close enough to the door or the entryway of the cave so that the shadows, what's going on outside the cave

• 10:15Speaker 01

  is picked up by the flames inside the cave and which casts shadows on the wall. And so what those who are locked up in the cave do is they

• 10:28Speaker 01

  They make assumptions of what's going on outside the cave, based on the way the shadows are dancing on the wall inside the cave. And, and so it's not until one of the men decides to leave the cave, to see, you know, like, let me just see what's really going on out here. And so he goes out and he finds out that whatever is going on outside is not really what's happening on the wall or the shadows of the cave. And he frees himself. He decides to experience the outside world and to know what is true. And, and he's trying to encourage the others to come out to see,

• 11:11Speaker 01

  you know, what we're seeing on the wall is not really what's true, but they won't leave the cave. And they just kind of stay stuck wanting to believe these, uh, false shadows, false representations on the cave. And of course, he's free outside knowing what's true. And I feel like this allegory really connects to, um, all of us because we have our, our worldviews, our perspectives, our experiences.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Instead, and, and then we're afraid to step outside of ourselves, to branch out and to find out what is true.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's, that's, uh, and, and, and Q E P Newton felt like black people have been kind of been kept in the cave of oppression, the cave of society making them feel less than. And he was trying to, to make the case for, now I read the cave and I come up with a totally different feeling and.

• 12:13Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, what's your feeling?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  The importance of, um, I don't know if you're religious, but going into Samaria, like you can't really know what's true until you cross, go outside of your worldview and talk to other people and find out what's in their hearts and find out who they are and to bring healing through actually knowing people.

• 12:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's my, my reading is, is that once you learn the truth, you're obligated to go back into the cave and teach the truth to the people who have been limited only to shadows and assumptions.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Right. And so I like, I like that too. That's great. I, I've received that too. My thing is we're, um, I'm gonna give you a good example. What I mean, because I think we could both say the same thing or put the two together.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  So, um, in trying to, in, in this whole journey of racial unrest, you know, there's groups of us who are trying to bring racial healing. And one of my tools I'm trying to advocate for is good literature, especially the works of the canon. And then reading other authors who've connected to the canon but have, have, have written about it from diverse perspectives, specifically African-American literature. And a lot of times, um, I know for me in my journey, when I first came to the canon, I had one perspective. I was reading mainly African-American lit. I was in my cave.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  But when I began to read the works of the canon, my perspective on everything began to change. Now, many years later, about 20 years later, I'm trying to advocate for everyone doing that. Not just reading the works that you feel comfortable with or that represent your worldview or people group, but reading from the actual voices of the other, whether you, it makes you nervous, whether you think their beliefs are the same as yours, so that you can understand the very hearts of people. And, and, and that's how you find what's true. And then once you do that, you are held responsible to go back and to tell, hey, hey, hey, I think we're all misunderstanding each other.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  This is what I discovered, and building relationships and learning about other people and reading about other people from their perspective.

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I, I think, uh, there's that, there's that great poem about how, how books are door-shaped, that they're, that a book is supposed to be a window, not a mirror. And I think, I, I think that's right. It's, it, it's, it's that books are an entry point into a different way of thinking, a different way of life, and that whatever culture you're from or history you're from, you're sort of obligated to explore

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:59Ryan Holiday?

  all of them and then come back to your people or your group or your industry or whatever it is with the, the wider perspective that you've gained.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Now, that's very hard. I, I, for me, that, doing that has been very hard because... I always say, it seems like everyone has PTSD, you know, like there's, we're all so triggered by every little word, every little action, that it makes, makes it hard for people to want to leave their caves.

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  So, um, one of the kind of the disheartening things for me is trying to encourage the Black community to join me in this journey of reading the canon. And I'm not saying read the canon and don't read Black literature. I'm not saying read the canon and forget your heritage. I'm saying, hey, let's read the canon together to get a broader understanding of humanity, a larger perspective on the human story. But the constant pushback is, um, I often feel like I might be called an Uncle Tom, or that I'm forgetting my heritage, or as someone said to me recently, you, you want

• 16:14Speaker 01

  to cater too much to them, whatever that's supposed to mean. Um, and that's not what I'm doing. It's really about being tired of the division.

• 16:24Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  And not wanting to wait for someone else to take the first step to bring healing.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  And I have found that books are a lovely way to do that, because I can say to you, Ryan, hey, right, like, right, right now, Ryan, I've read Plato's Republic, I've read The Allegoria of the Cave, and you can say, oh, I've read that too, and this is how I see it. And I go, oh, that's good, I like that. Well, what about this? And here we are, two strangers.

• 16:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Different backgrounds. Uh, we may not agree on everything, but I feel a bridge is being created, and I feel there's a healing, um, that's happening as we've left our caves to share something with each other.

• 17:07Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I think that's right. Like, when I've gone, uh, the journey that I've been on, I've read Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, and Maya Angelou, and, and, uh, Solomon Northrop. When you, when you go and you read these sort of first-person memoirs of, of history, I think you're struck by a couple of things, and, and they're sort of classics in their own way.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:28Ryan Holiday?

  You, you realize, one, that history has been filtered through other people's experiences, and you haven't been getting it directly from the source.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:36Ryan Holiday?

  And then, two, you realize, like, Oh, like Malcolm, and I heard this great description, I forgot who it's from, but that like Malcolm X, the autobiography of Malcolm X and A Catcher in the Rye are like equally powerful books to read when you're like 16 or 17 years old, because it's all about sort of coming into who you are. It's like a wake up. And you realize that for all the differences that, I don't know, Frederick Douglass falling in love with reading is exactly the same as you or I falling in love with reading today.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:06Ryan Holiday?

  And people are people.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And that's really what it is. We're all human beings and we don't have to agree with each other on everything, you know, because what you do in your life is you and what I do in my life is me. But at the end of the day, we gotta respect each other. And I mean, James Baldwin even says we have to love each other. And my dad used to say, you can love someone even if you don't like them. And I thought that was very interesting. And I think what that means is I value your life. I value that your life is sacred and I honor that. And I feel like one of the greatest ways to do that

• 18:52Speaker 01

  is to read and hear the voice of the other. And I think in this, especially in America, we have been living in this tradition of using labels to slap on people, which subconsciously in our minds dehumanizes the other to us. So that what they say is not meaningful because you have this like, you're a liberal, you're a left, you are Democrat, you are Republican, you are black, you are white, you know, even in black communities. We will dehumanize white people because of our experiences. Because I've heard it, I've heard names,

• 19:34Speaker 01

  I've heard the derogatory names that we all call each other because of our world experiences. And I'm gonna give you a personal example of how I was delivered from that way of thinking. And in no way did this process cause me to not love myself or love my ancestry or love my heritage or my culture. It just made me love others more, which has been very liberating. So up until before I went, got into reading the canon and before I went to St. John's And I came to this very late in life.

• 20:09Ryan Holiday?

  I noticed that.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:10Ryan Holiday?

  You, for an advocate of the classics, you, you came to it like in grad school or something, which is pretty impressive.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, in my thirties. Like, and it was a, it was almost an overnight change.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  And what happened was I accidentally ended up teaching great books at a classical school that my parents founded. My parents have always been a lot more open with regards to literature. I was very, you know, I was a graduate from Howard University. I had endured a lot of racism in, in Christian schools. And so I came out of Howard pretty clo- pretty much locked in my cave.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And, um, but then I ended up teaching this great books class and I was using theater and music to help students connect to Shakespeare or Aristotle or what have you. And it was more so just a job at the time. And then as I began to see the students really connect to the literature and we began to discuss the actual common human themes, I realized there was more to this literature than, oh, that's just white people's stuff. Well, anyway, I decided to go to St. John's after that epiphany. And I would spend every summer for four summers studying at St. John's. And every summer I became more and more addicted to the canon. Well, one particular summer I remember, and, and please don't ask me what line it was. I can barely remember the full text.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  It was the Federalist Papers that we were discussing. That, that I do remember. But I remember sitting in my seat and realizing that the founding father, labeling the founding fathers as racist slave owners may not be, as only being that.

• 21:53Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  May not be the whole story.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  And I remember, I'm sitting here thinking how free I felt at that moment. Now, someone may be listening to this and rolling their eyes, and that's okay. But that was very freeing, because at that point began the journey of figuring out, who is George Washington? Who is Thomas Jefferson? Who was Alexander Hamilton? Who were these people? Even though they did enslave my ancestors, even still, they were human beings. And I wanted to understand what that meant. And that journey also gave way to me having a new perspective on America. That's why I've really fallen in love with James Baldwin.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Even though I acknowledge the flaws, the good, the bad, the ugly, I'm still able to value the country.

• 22:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And so, and that began through my studying the canon. And it's been very freeing for me, lonely, but very freeing, you know?

• 23:01Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. No, I'm more of an Ellison fan than a Baldwin fan. And I was just reading this biography about him. And first off, he falls in love with the classics at Tuskegee. But he describes this scene where this is after Invisible Man comes out, and he's giving some talk at Harvard. He's been asked to address the class at Harvard. And as he's leaving, he walks through this Civil War memorial to all the students who had died for the Union cause at Harvard. And he has this sort of epiphany that he hadn't been really seeing the full picture.

• 23:46Ryan Holiday?

  And that these people, who almost certainly all of them at that time, would have been what we are now referring to as sort of white supremacists. They would have believed that all the black people deserved to be free. They weren't sort of fully equal. But he realized that it was more complicated than he had been simplifying it. And I think- That's the same awakening that Malcolm, or sorry, that Malcolm X has towards the end of his life. It's like we realize that by simp, we realize that almost we willingly go back in the cave and decide to see people only as shadows. When really, they're just like us, which is that they're complicated and hypocritical and contradictory and limited by their beliefs and upbringings.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, because we're all imperfect. I think it's almost like we're all on a search to find the perfect person or the perfect group of people to affiliate with.

• 24:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  And we're not. And actually, all of this has even led me to kind of turn away from politics, not, not in a radical sense, because I still vote and things like that, but.

• 24:57Ryan Holiday?

  You mean like culture war?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and yes, because it's not so simple. I hope it's okay if I give an example, so like.

• 25:05Ryan Holiday?

  Please.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  I grew up in, you know, going to conservative Christian schools and I'm a Christian and I'm also, I'm pro-life and not, but that's a whole nother story. I just feel like.

• 25:21Ryan Holiday?

  What you're saying is that it's complicated.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  It's complicated. It's so much more complicated.

• 25:25Ryan Holiday?

  Of course it is.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  You know, because I remember, I wish I could find this person, but years ago, I was very young, I was probably a teenager, and I knew that she, either she had had an abortion or was advocating for having an abortion, and I called her a murderer. And I thought I was so self-righteous and I was, you know, being this good Christian by saying that, and I see that word thrown around. Let's fast forward then to my late 30s and my very dear friend, she passed away of ovarian cancer some years ago, very dear friend, also a Christian, love the Lord, and I was having that same ridiculous conversation with her again, and she loved me so unconditionally. And she said, you know, I'm a Christian. I said, yes. She said, do you know I've had an abortion?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  I was shocked, oh my God, really? She said, because I was raped by my mother's drug dealer.

• 26:14Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Do you still think I'm a murderer?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Everything that I thought I knew, I thought I knew, just fell to the ground at that point. And I just, I was just like, she said, would, you know, can you really judge me? Maybe you would have kept the baby. She said, I was pregnant. Maybe you would have kept the baby, but I know that my mother's drug dealer, my mother owed him some money and he raped me to get his money back. And I got pregnant. So are you gonna call me a murderer as well, after all I've been through? And so I feel like we have got to stop complicating the human story. We've got to learn to, as we're saying, connecting it to the cave, come out of our caves, come out of our churchiness,

• 27:02Speaker 01

  out of our politicalness, and to see people, understand their stories, understand their experiences. And the beauty about classics and, and reading the works of the canon is it kind of provides a tool to help us leave our caves, you know?

• 27:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. No, it's funny that we call it the canon, right? Because this means sort of authoritative, definitive, it's everything. Really, I think the best relationship that one can have to these texts is not to see them so much as definitive, but as part of a, you know, centuries-long conversation or debate.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:44Ryan Holiday?

  And that the, what people mean and how we see them, it changes over time.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:49Ryan Holiday?

  And I had Shadi Barsh, the translator of Virgil, on recently. And she was talking about how, you know, Virgil was seen as one thing to one generation, then two generations, it was the opposite. And then it, that, that it's evolved over time. So the idea that you would say like, oh, these texts represent X to this group, therefore they're worthless, or that they represent this, and if you question them, you are, you are, you know, doing something heretical.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:19Ryan Holiday?

  Is to miss the point, which is that, no, this is just really great art that should be spurring exactly the kinds of complicated questions that we're talking about. Is this person good or bad? Is so-and-so a hero or a villain? You know, should they have done X? It's supposed to be a debate.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  It is. It is. And I love how Mortimer Adler. So he's very inspirational to me because as a teacher, he helps me so that I can formulate how I'm teaching K-12. Who is he? Mortimer Adler, I'm sorry, I was, okay. So Mortimer Adler, he is one of the many people who brought together the canon. I mean, there's others who've done it, but he made it very accessible to K-12 educators. Got it. Because his dream was to bring classical education or studying of the great books into K-12 public schools across the nation. He felt like doing this and having all the students read this and discuss this would kind of connect us all, give us a common ground, a common language. Sure.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Sadly, he left people of color off of his list. And I think the assumption was that black people would not read it, aren't reading it, it's not relevant. And he did not realize there's a whole black tradition of reading the canon. And so I've just kind of inserted my, my list in, integrated with his. And he says that, he calls it the great conversation. Yes. Where you start off with classics, ancient Greece and Rome, and, and going forward, every author is writing about their world perspective and then reaching back and referencing that. And they're all doing that and say, oh, Aristotle said, oh, well, Shakespeare said, or what the Bible said, or, you know, Plato said, and they're kind of, or you'll sometimes

• 30:07Speaker 01

  see a quote that reminds you of something from another text, that you know they're citing that text. So you get the sense of a great conversation that spans worlds and times. And so when we read it and we engage with each other around it, we become a part of that great conversation. It's, it's very unifying. And so my, my, my desire is to train children.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  To do that so that the journey I went on in my 30s, they it happens with them sooner.

• 30:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that moment you talked about where you sort of realized like, oh, the founders were complicated or whatever. I think one moment you have as you read the great books is suddenly stuff that you understand now, you know, basic understanding of, I'll give you an example. Realizing that a lot of the the famous lines in American history, you know, give me liberty or give me death. I regret I have one but one life to leave. Or just other moments in philosophy where you hear some great quote and you realize, actually, this person is quoting someone else. And that if you had if you had grown up,

• 31:23Ryan Holiday?

  you know, being forced to learn Greek or Latin, memorizing these epigrams, you'd actually get the reference that they're making and that that so much of history is actually sort of remixing these same ideas from like 2000 years ago.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Yes. And in my dissertation, that's what my students said when I interviewed them. When they began to read classics and learn Latin and read the other works of the canon, they said they began to notice these words all around them in the movies, in the news, commercials, like they it's like they one girl said, I feel like I've been given a code. And that's just really powerful. I mean, because so when we talk about canceling the classics, you're almost cutting off access to the origins of our human narrative to this generation. And I had a Howard student asked me one time, well, why is it necessary?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  When I can just pick up and read what black people are writing now, why do I have to go back?

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Even those who are writing now understood the class. How can you fully understand what they're even saying if you don't know who they're referencing? If you don't understand the origins of the thinking that they have?

• 32:46Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. I was just reading during the first part of the pandemic, I read Taylor Branch's, you know, series on Martin Luther King. And it was amazing to me, reading, you know, all of sort of Dr. King's writing and thinking and his comments, just how often he was like, you know, when you're reading like Cicero or something and there's like some Latin expression and then you Google it and like, they don't even translate it because they just assume you'll also speak Latin. Or that you'll, you'll notice that, oh, this is a reference from the Odyssey or whatever. That Martin Luther King is doing that, like so much of what he's talking about are obviously riffs from the Bible. But he's also riffing on St. Augustine and Sophocles.

• 33:27Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, he had this profound, almost intuitive knowledge of the, the classics, that it's like a second language. And, and it's, you're just amazing. They're like, these like impoverished, back country people, they're also getting it because they were, they were, it was also the language they were speaking in church. And, and so, yeah, you just realize like, but by getting rid of that stuff, by not studying it, what you're really doing is like cutting the legs off this other powerful, more recent work.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  You know, the, the image I have with what you're, I love this. The image I have with what you're saying is seeing the canon, or let me say classics. Classics being that, the writings of ancient Greece and Rome. I see that as the seed, and I've said this before, but just want to visualize it. I see that as the seed. And then the stem and the branches and the.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Leaves and the flower and the fruit of the plant is everything else. And if you, if you kill the seed, like when, when my husband and I want to kill weeds, we get roundup.

• 34:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  If you get the kind of point and the, the poison goes down to the seed and kills it from the bottom up. And eventually you see it die. You know, at first, you know, you, you spray it down and it doesn't kill the plant up top. It goes down into, to the seed of the plant and kills it from the bottom. And then before long, you see the brown creep up in the plant and the plant dies. I feel like that's what we're doing when we, when we fight against classics and even the works of the canon. It's, it's, it's spraying roundup.

• 35:12Ryan Holiday?

  That's beautiful. Well, it's haunting, but beautiful.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  It is. And, and eventually you're going to see if we don't somehow wake up and realize that this is not a good path. We're going to see a withering away of something meaningful. And that's, and I feel kind of like an urgency about it. And I think that's why I talk so much about it. Even today, I was, um, was really grieving about, um, the, the, the, the misunderstanding around the canon and, and, and classical study. Because I'm working on a, a book about Anna Julia Cooper. And I'm just.

• 35:52Ryan Holiday?

  Who is that?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Reading, okay. I always, I'm sorry, I keep saying names.

• 35:55Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I, I, I just want to, I just want to make sure I, I can learn.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Thank you for doing that, because I'm just going and going. Anna Julia Cooper, she was a slave up until emancipation. And at 10 years old, she was emancipated and went into St. Augustine's College, which was an early, uh, St. Augustine's normal school. It was a school set up for emancipated people.

• 36:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  And it was a classical school.

• 36:21Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  And so most of the early black schools set up for the emancipated people were founded by missionary organizations partnering with the black community. And they were classical and Christian. So they'd study the canon, they'd study classics, they'd study Latin, Greek theology. And Anna.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Went to St. Augustine's Normal School and she would get a little bit of classics, but mainly they wanted to learn just a little bit of that and then learn how to clean a house and cook for her man. And that was the, and the men got to study the full, the gentleman's program, they called it, uh, got the fullness of classical study. So she protests and says, listen, I want to learn this too. They let her do it. And that began her journey at 10 years old to studying classically. And she went on to be a classical educator up until she was, I mean, she died when she was 106. Whoa. But, um, her journey is interesting because you hear about, um, Howard University's connection to her, like when she earned her PhD, she's like the fifth black woman in

• 37:27Speaker 01

  America to earn a PhD, the first woman in DC to earn a PhD, something like that. Please double check it, but Okay. Almost one of the first, right? And, and Howard University was celebrating her and Alan Locke, who was also rooted in the canon, he is the father of the Harlem Renaissance and he wrote a book, uh, essay called The New Negro. Um, and he leads this whole celebration honoring her for getting her PhD. And that's all held at Howard. And so I'm reading that and researching her life and researching her work of classical education in the black community and how it was really used as a, as a source of liberation and, um, for black people and how Howard was at the center of it.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  And I was just grieving at this spraying of Roundup on the seed in the black community. Yeah. And I hate it being lost. I hate the story of that being lost because it's actually the story of the beginnings of black education. Classical education was the first philosophy used to educate black people coming out of slavery. And, and, um, and I've, I've started to cry about that because this, this misunderstanding around the canon is actually, um,

• 38:46Speaker 01

  What's the word I want to use? It is burying a part of Black history that is so important. And then, when you think about the larger misunderstanding around classics, you know, universities are closing their classics departments and we're lessening the requirements in their classics departments. And again, I see that again as a spraying of Roundup on the seed of our heritage of as human beings, you know?

• 39:17Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 39:24Ryan Holiday?

  It seems strange, right? Like, certainly the classics and their use throughout history have not been perfect.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:33Ryan Holiday?

  But of the sort of list of priorities, things to remove or to tackle as sort of mechanisms or vehicles for spreading racist or unproductive beliefs, like, you know, the classics would be like the absolute, not only would it be lower, but it also seems like the easier way to solve it, instead of, say, eradicating a department at Howard, which has professors and is a long history, as you said, it's like, why don't we just elevate and include other voices into the canon?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:11Ryan Holiday?

  Like, you were just talking about Cooper, who I hadn't heard of, but like, only earlier this year, or I guess it was last year, that I heard of Phyllis Wheatley for the first time. And it's like, why don't we just include her in the story? Because she, and in fact, by including her, you, by extension, indict

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:33Ryan Holiday?

  a George Washington and a Thomas Jefferson and a Ben Franklin for not, for that it's, they can't be excused for, you know what I mean? It's, you realize that, oh, they weren't living in a vacuum.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:45Ryan Holiday?

  There was also incredibly talented, brilliant

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:48Ryan Holiday?

  Black people that they were aggressively holding down. So it seems like by introducing diversity, or rather, just ceasing to artificially exclude diversity.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, I love it.

• 41:00Ryan Holiday?

  You improve the entire ecosystem.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Right. Jessica Hooton Wilson says something along the lines of, instead of disrupting or canceling, why don't we expand?

• 41:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And because it's there, like when I read, when I look at the, I have one of Mortimer Adler's books. Like I'm a Mortimer Adler, like I go to use book sales and thrift stores and I like find his stuff, you know, because people consider stuff a lot, a lot of it obsolete, but like I'll get anything he's put together. And I'm, I'm looking at this list and I can just see where we can integrate it. But the, the, the formula is there, so you don't have to start from scratch. You know, it's, it's, it's organized according to time period and somebody has already put the thousands of hours of work to bring it all together. Even classics themselves reference ancient African civilizations. So you can learn about ancient African civilizations, Middle Eastern civilizations, Asian civilizations,

• 41:56Speaker 01

  all just by reading classics, you can do that. And we kind of find all about ourselves and how we intersect and how we connect and how we've been on this lifelong journey to preserve humanity. And I just don't understand why we can't expand. Another easier task would be to get with these curriculum in K-12 schools and make sure they actually tell the stories correctly.

• 42:21Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Um, it's like you're so, it's, it's like a knee jerk reaction. It's like, we've got to do something, what's the easiest thing to do? Get rid of classics. And it's like, there's no, I, I'm really not seeing the logic. And another thing I've said to people is like, guys, it's not the books, it's people. Like, wouldn't it be easier to do training? Wouldn't it be easier to, to, to get people to, to root racism out of their hearts? Wouldn't that be more meaningful? Because like, what if you get rid of classics and you do all of this stuff that you think is doing something, but people's hearts haven't even changed? Like people are still holding to their caves.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 43:01Ryan Holiday?

  What always strikes me is, yeah, people go, let's get rid of this. But then there's never a good argument for what you're replacing it with. And so, so, you know, I, I'll find that too. And, and it's, I, I, you know, and nobody's perfect, but you know, I'll put up a book list for instance. I'll be like, here are my 20 favorite books about this or something. And someone will go, you know, uh, why are there no women on this list? And it's like. Well, first off, you don't know how to count because there's several.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:26Ryan Holiday?

  But, you know, I get your impulse, which is, you know, it's like, it's like, oh, you just, you just actually didn't look very closely, or you assumed that this name was a man's name. You know, you thought George Eliot was a man, or whatever. But, but, you know, I get your point, which is that things should be, that we should try for some level of equity and representation.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:53Ryan Holiday?

  But it's always striking to me that your impulse, like, if you see a list that's missing something, your impulse shouldn't be like, this list sucks. Your impulse should be like, add these people to the list, you know? Because like, I would love the recommendations.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. That's so true. I'm laughing because it's, you're like, you're speaking so much truth right now. It's almost, it's hilarious, but yeah.

• 44:18Ryan Holiday?

  So who would you add? Like, when you, when you talked about Mortimer Adler sort of leaving some books off, off the, the list, what would you add? When I was talking to, to Dr. Barr, she was talking about, you know, like, we read the ancient Greeks, and we sort of let them get away with referring to the Persians as barbarians. She's like, I'm, I'm from there. I don't like that. We should, you know, we should study Cyrus the Great and these other figures. But, but as you, as you look at like, sort of what more representative classics might be, who do you feel like maybe slides under the radar? Maybe a Philip Sweetley, Solomon Northrop, who else?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I'd even put, this morning, I just thought of somebody else, and not even black, it's Paulo Freire, I would put him on there. He, he refers to the canon so much, a lot of Plato, a lot of Aristotle. And then there's a, he's a theater person, but his name is Augusto, Augusto Boll. And so, so.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  He created something called Theater of the Oppressed. And these two men are connected to each other. And what it reminds me of is again Frederick Douglass. Oh, I know what I want to say. Okay, follow me on this. Okay.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I've been working through this all day. It's just really intense. Okay, so Paulo Freire and Augusto Bol, they're both somewhere from,

• 45:50Speaker 01

  I think they're both, are they both from, I know one is from Brazil. I can't remember what other, what country, South American country or Central America country. Freire is from, I can't remember. But, so when they read the works of the canon, they both were incited to do something to stand for liberty or freedom from oppression, right? You see that same thing happen with Frederick Douglass. You see that same thing happen with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, even Angela Davis. Like, all of these people, but most people of color who are rooted in the works of the canon from classics and beyond

• 46:32Speaker 01

  were incited to fight for equality,

• 46:36Speaker 01

  even the founders of America. And so I'm really kind of baffled by the resistance to putting these other voices on the list, such as Paulo Freire, Augusto Bol, or Phyllis Wheatley, or Du Bois, or Frederick Douglass, or Martin Luther King. I'm, it's weird to me, but they will put the founding fathers on the list. They will put the Constitution on the list. They'll put the Declaration of Independence is on the list, right? But, but those people were rooted in the canon and incited to fight for liberty. So I'm like, so how do you come up with not including other people inspired by the canon to fight for liberty?

• 47:22Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Yeah. When you look at, um, when you look at Toussaint Lévonteur.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:28Ryan Holiday?

  Or, um.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Even Marcus Garvey.

• 47:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was just reading, I was just reading a book about, about him as well. Yeah. Another person that sort of, I, and actually, you know, when you really look at the great civil rights leaders, like what Martin Luther King does so brilliantly, what Frederick Douglass does, uh, perhaps best is take those texts and then shove them in people's faces.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:51Ryan Holiday?

  Actually, Lincoln does the same thing, of course. He's like, no, no, no, they really meant this.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:56Ryan Holiday?

  Like, you can't, and I think, uh, you know, great activists did this in the, in the gay rights movement as well. It's like, where is this love thy neighbor stuff?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:06Ryan Holiday?

  That you purport to believe, you know, where is, you, Thomas Jefferson wasn't joking when he said, all men are created equal. He may have been a hypocrite. He may have been, done monstrous things in his personal life.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:18Ryan Holiday?

  But he wrote it and let's take him literally.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:22Ryan Holiday?

  And force him to, to, to put his money where his mouth is, you know? And I think that what, so, so it's, it's almost, you want to do the opposite of get rid of the classics. You want to familiarize yourself with them. And to a certain degree, almost weaponize them against the power structures that you're trying to motivate to change.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  And, and that's what our, isn't that what our founding fathers did? Like.

• 48:45Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Somehow, like, the Declaration of Independence is a radical document. You know, the, the Boston Tea Party was a radical, uh, protest. And so, and, and all of these people had a classical education. All of these people were rooted in studying the, there's something about these documents that, I mean, Douglass really, his narrative really explains what, not, not just what happened in black people, but what happened in those who settled this country. I mean, those who crossed the ocean just to come here to settle the land. Whether, yes, Native Americans were already here and I'm not, that, you know, that's a, that's trouble, that's very troubling.

• 49:30Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  But they were moved to feel like I am free. I should have this liberty. So they crossed the ocean, they come here, right? And, you know, for a while, they're willing to be up under, um, Britain's rule, but then.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  They are incited to fight for liberty. Give me liberty or give me death. Their story is exactly like Odysseus. You know, their story is exactly like Frederick Douglass. Their story is exactly like Phyllis Wheatley and Martin Luther King. All these people, what do they all have in common? A fight for liberty. I mean, can you imagine if we if we framed it that way? Can you imagine the healing that could come? If we all looked at, we're studying the canon to learn how these works inspired so many different people to want to fight for liberty.

• 50:29Ryan Holiday?

  And maybe part of it, too, is, as you said, it's part of a great conversation. So it's problematic to see the classics as sort of from a certain period to a certain period, right? Because then it ceases to be, it starts to be dead as opposed to living. And like, I think if you see, for instance, Frederick Douglass as a founding father, even though he comes about almost 100 years later, then what he's doing makes a lot of sense. And then he can be included on the same reading list as Thomas Jefferson. But in this book that I was reading about Marcus Garvey, I was introduced to Claude McKay, who I had not heard of. Again, another failing of the education system.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  No. That's something I'm going to read.

• 51:12Ryan Holiday?

  That poem, you know, "If we must die, let it not be like hogs hunting and pending in a glorious spot while round us bark the mad and hungry dogs." That sounds like something that one of the founding fathers could have said as he was trying to whip people up into fighting in the revolution.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. And see, and see, this, see, we're proving something right here, Ryan. We are proving how these texts can bring us together. We're proving right now with this discussion because we are seeing how all of our narratives and all of our ancestry

• 51:47Speaker 01

  reflects the other. Because it's the human story. The human story is all about our fight to find our place in this world, our journey to finding our identity, to finding our place, to being liberated from all the things in this life that seeks to restrain us. And so, and so some people may, may struggle with the way I'm putting it because the pain of slavery was so awful, you know, and we still are experiencing the aftershocks of that even now. But it's not that I'm belittling that. You know, I think some people almost want to say like,

• 52:32Speaker 01

  I can't have that conversation. We don't have anything in common because my situation of my ancestors being enslaved and my roots being torn from me, I can't even trace my family history, is so much worse than what this person has gone through over there. But is it worse than Native Americans who are relegated to living on a reservation? When this was actually their land? You see, so, so we all have this story, and they have a fight, you know? They fought, they actually contributed to the Constitution. A lot of people may not realize that I think it was Benjamin Franklin

• 53:10Speaker 01

  went to them to look at the Iroquois, the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation.

• 53:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, their Confederacy sort of informs the Articles of Confederation.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And they were even invited to the convention, right? And so, my, my point is, you see how all of that is all mixed? And the Constitution is on the canon, but that, that experience connects Native Americans. It connects white people, you know? And it even connects Black people as we grapple with, hey, y'all not living up to what this thing says. You know, so it is, it, it shows a connection. It doesn't mean that it lessens the importance of your story. But how, at what point do we say? At what point do we stop holding on to our, okay, like this is my pain? It's so much, it's more, it's so much more painful than yours.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I can't talk to you because of my pain to, I have this pain. I have this burden. Let me see how we can relate each other with the hopes of being healed from that.

• 54:17Ryan Holiday?

  So it sounds like the, in the Christian community that you're in, maybe you can relate to this, but I have been observing slash hearing from a fair amount of people I'd otherwise see as pretty reasonable, certainly decent, certainly not prone to hysterics, very worked up that kids are being taught critical race theory, you know, like, like very concerned about this.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:45Ryan Holiday?

  Walk me through what it is, why it matters, and whether, you know, maybe, maybe we can walk some people off the ledge here.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Okay. So I'm, let me preface this by saying, I, I actually, I, I have so many mixed feelings about CRT and I'm gonna be very honest about that. I have mixed feelings because I had to learn about CRT in grad school back in like 2005, six. And when I read it, I didn't think it was dangerous or something to be concerned about. And most of, if not all of it, I could see and it made sense to me. And I could see how, and I had to study in a college of education and they, they wanted us to study it at the University of Maryland. Just so we, in our teaching, we can be aware of making sure we're not teaching in that way, in a way that oppresses others.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Okay. So there was that. So then, you know, I graduate, I, you know, meet my quota for graduate school and I move on. And then now, 20, almost 20 years later, it's rising up as this horrible demon sent to take over the world.

• 55:56Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  And I'm like, this is not what I read in grad school. Like, and I feel like I'm a pretty good reader. I'm pretty, my, I have pretty good antennas. Why is this, what I'm hearing now is not what I studied in grad school. And so one of the things I've heard is, how can I explain it? It's almost like they're misunderstanding that.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  CRT is telling people to label people by race, to mistreat people by race, or X, Y, Z. But CRT is actually seeking to explain to the world what it's like to be Black in America, like, or a person of color.

• 56:48Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Or, and, and if you read the fine print of the original documents, they, they wanted it to go out to not just Black people or people of color, but the LGBTQ, women, like, anyone who felt like the system was not really working for them. They wanted it to help to, to explain that. Okay, so there's that. And how the systems of our country lend itself to favor a certain demographic. It doesn't consider all of the diverse types of people in our country. Okay. And that comes played out by how education is done, how real estate laws are done.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I don't know about all those other things, but I can speak about education. So even now, I can, even now, I go into public schools and I, I review curriculum and I can look at curriculum and I can see, wow, you're not telling the true story about the Native American people here, or you're not telling the true story of what slavery was like, or you are talking about George Washington and Washington DC, but why won't you talk about Benjamin Banneker, who designed Washington DC? And so, or you'll talk about Thomas Edison, but you won't talk about Latimer, the man who created the filament inside the light bulb. And so you can, you can look at how education has, has intentionally left out the narratives of all the diverse people

• 58:16Speaker 01

  who've worked to make America what it is. Okay. So that's, that's just fact. That's not me having a conspiracy. I just, and that's, those are just a few examples. That's not me having a conspiracy. That's not me thinking, oh, everyone's racist and out to get me. That's just, I've taught in the schools, I've used the curriculum. That's just that. Now.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  The issue with critical race theory, though, I have is how do you how do you take that and roll it out to every single school in the nation, leaving it in the hands of all types of different teachers and know that it's being taught in an ethical, gentle, child-friendly way so that a healthy outcome happens? And so I just feel that it is easier to just fix the history curriculum.

• 59:19Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Like, just go get the books, get a few, make a committee and say, let's analyze these texts and see where we missed the mark and need to fill in some holes. Rewrite the curriculum, put it back in the schools, and teachers just teach the curriculum.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Because to place

• 59:40Speaker 01

  the perspective of racism around you on a child is a huge burden for a child to carry.

• 59:50Ryan Holiday?

  It's also a hard thing to sell. I think you're raising a good point. This is something I think activists do poorly, which is like, if you want to make people really nervous, tell them you're going to reimagine what their kids are learning from start to finish in school. This is why people are so mad about Common Core and stuff. You're like, this isn't how I learned how to do multiplication. Something must be wrong. So it's like, understanding that people are inherently conservative, not politically, but that they just don't like radical change.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:21Ryan Holiday?

  Ideally, you want to find a way to explain the changes you're making within the confines of also

• 1:00:30Ryan Holiday?

  Sort of sneakily keeping them the same. You know what I mean?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:32Ryan Holiday?

  Like, and so, yeah, you're right. It's like in, in Texas, like, they're still teaching. Like, we still celebrate, like, Confederate Memorial Day here in Texas, right? It's like, why don't we just fix that?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Get rid of that. Get rid of that. How about we just get rid of that?

• 1:00:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And I'm not saying you're telling people, oh, you gotta wait. But I think your point, which I would agree with, which is like, let's, let's update and fix the curriculum rather than trying to sell a wholesale reimagining of the curriculum. Because you're probably gonna get a bunch of resistance on the second one from people who would wholeheartedly agree with you if you said you were just doing the first one. It's like,

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Ryan Holiday?

  deep, if you told people, we're gonna demilitarize the police, probably 99% of people would agree with you.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:18Ryan Holiday?

  Then when you say, we're gonna defund the police, they're like, what are you trying to do? You know, it's, it, how you, how you explain things matter.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  How you package it. Yeah. And, and then again, I'm looking at it also from a psychological point of view of children. Children, the, the whole concept of race is a very complicat- and racism is a very complicated thing for children to wrap their minds around. I mean, I have three young children, seven, nine, and 11. And I have to be, and I'm their mother, and I love them, and I want them to feel safe in their world and to enjoy where they are. But yet be aware of things they may endure. And I have to be very careful with that. If I just walk around all day saying, it's racism everywhere, these people don't treat you right, then I'm gonna raise a whole bunch of pessimistic children.

• 1:02:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  And so it's very important that I'm very intentional about how I lovingly and gently explain it to them, and not too much, because kids just want to play. They don't care about the color of your skin. They don't care about anything but that you're nice to them and we can play together. And, and I don't wanna, it's almost like- I feel like you can preserve a child's innocence at the same time of making them aware of things that are going on around them, how to love someone equally, how to recognize when someone is being mistreated because of the color of their skin without throwing them into a feeling of the whole system is against me.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  And as a Black woman, I'm not saying I've never felt that way. I'm just gonna be really honest. I mean, oh my gosh, through my grad school experience, phew, I mean, I felt the system was against me. It was a really difficult journey. If it hadn't been for the dean of my college and the head of my department, I don't think I would have, I don't know if I would have gotten out of there because you, and Anna Julia Cooper, who I referred to earlier, she went through something similar, like trying to get a woman, a Black woman, a woman at that, trying to get her PhD was just very hard for her, and it's still hard today, especially for Black women. And so I'm not saying that I've never felt or experienced a system that is not seeming

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  to be for me. I just don't think it's wise to trust every school, every teacher in the nation, we're trying to educate kids about that, because someone's gonna do it wrong, someone's gonna come out pretty jacked up. But if you focus on curriculum, because teachers can follow curriculum, so if you go into the curriculum and fill in the holes that should be there, inherent in doing that would be teaching them the truth. I have a friend, my cousin, she says, I don't know if she's listening, my cousin Anne, she says, if we would just teach the truth, we wouldn't even be talking about CRT. Sure. You know?

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  But we're so busy, we're so busy. Trying to make the narrative so much about, like, America is so much more than slavery and not being enslaved and racism and not being racist and left and right and this divided, segregated world that we in, you know, it really was a fight to become a union. And if we, if we teach our kids that, maybe they'll grow up to fight for it, too.

• 1:04:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and then it's also funny, though, that people are like, oh, they're teaching propaganda in schools, this is the reaction against CRT. It's like, you mean when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the day?

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:59Ryan Holiday?

  Or do you mean when they learn, you know, like, the lost cause mythology, like, that's not propaganda, you know, like, the idea that you,

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:09Ryan Holiday?

  who your ancestors

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:12Ryan Holiday?

  came in and fucked up our history by

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:16Ryan Holiday?

  inserting a bunch of propaganda and lies in it, don't get to then prevent someone else from coming in and we're, it's like, it's like, the status quo is not acceptable either. And anyone who's looked at a history book, especially in the South, immediately sees that, like, all is not well.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Right. And I saw, and somebody was saying the other day, like, we're fussing so much about CRT, why aren't we fussing about removing, not allowing the Confederate flag to be flown? Like, my neighbor, I have a neighbor, I live in Maryland, so my neighbor decided to put his Confederate flag up.

• 1:05:50Ryan Holiday?

  Not a Confederate state, by the way.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Hello? And so, I wrote him a letter. I said, because I was scared to go over there and knock on his door, so I wrote him a letter. And I said, why, why are you flying this flag? And let me tell you how this makes me feel. And a wonderful dialogue, and he has a farm, happened. He's like, why don't you come bring the kids over and feed the sheep? And I never saw him fly that flag again.

• 1:06:12Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  And so, that's relational, you know, I mean, those kinds of, but, but why aren't we, as a, as a country, taking the leadership to educate our society about why the Confederate flag shouldn't be flown, or, or why Confederate monuments need to be put somewhere in the back of a museum someplace?

• 1:06:31Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Why, why, why aren't we promoting the story of the Union more? Why is this a battle? But instead of even focusing on that, You know, we come up with something as complicated as CRT in schools. I just, I struggle with CRT, not because I don't see the points of it. It's because I feel like it's too complicated to teach children.

• 1:06:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and this is where classical history is so important, right? When you read, when you read Machiavelli, Machiavelli talks about how the hardest thing in the world to do, he says, is to do something new. He says, which is why a prince always makes it seem like what they're doing is a continuation of the ancients. You know, and, and so I think that's something that activists often mess up, which is that they are convinced that because they're right, you know, because they have the, let's, let's go back to Socrates. You know, Socrates asked a bunch of brilliant provocative questions. You know what his reward was? They killed him.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  They killed him?

• 1:07:30Ryan Holiday?

  So you, you learn that, you know, truth and justice, as important as they are, are not always welcomed with open arms. And you have to figure out, it's, it's not gradualism, but you have to figure out a way to subvert power structures to, and use them against themselves. This is what Martin Luther King does, this is what Gandhi does, this is what great activists do. Booker T. Washington realizes, you know, basically that, you know, if he preaches, if he talks, you know, the sort of all fingers on the same hand, he can at least get a bunch of resources from white philanthropists to start a movement that generations later can probably

• 1:08:13Ryan Holiday?

  be closer to how he actually wanted to see the world. And, and that's, that's, you know, there has to be a pragmatism to this as well.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Balance, yes.

• 1:08:21Ryan Holiday?

  CRT, like if Fox News can turn it into a scary talking point, you probably haven't done the work as far as how you present it to the world. I think this is what Biden does well. You know, Biden, the Republicans tried to throw all the things that they threw at all the other candidates at Biden, and he just said, I'm Joe Biden. That's not true. And it worked, you know, like he, it finally, you, you, you can't, you couldn't make him look like a scary radical because he comports himself like a kindly old grandfather. And, and that's what made him electable. And, and there is a, there's a long classical tradition of understanding.

• 1:08:59Ryan Holiday?

  As Odysseus is cunning.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:02Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and that's what we're talking about.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and another thing about CRT that I want people to understand. So when people look at those who are, the funny thing is people are not even reading the original writings about it. They're reading what political figures or people on, from their perspective are saying about it. But I want to say this, why are we shocked about the things that CRT says about systemic racism? And how the government and real estate and education and all of these systems in our world are set up against people of color or underserved populations?

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  And the reason why I want to say, it shouldn't be foreign to any of us, because if you're studying human civilizations, every people group has had an opportunity to run the world. Every people group. There was a time where ancient African civilizations were running everything. They were the most powerful, scary group.

• 1:10:06Ryan Holiday?

  That's the Moors, right?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Right, the Moors, you have Kush, you have, which is also Ethiopia, you have the Egyptians.

• 1:10:13Ryan Holiday?

  Carthage?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yes, you know, you got Hannibal that overcame Rome for a little while, you know? And then you have Cyrus the Great from the Middle East, the Babylonians. If you're a Bible, if you're listening to this and you read the Bible, you can see the different human civilizations. In fact, there's a vision, I think in the book of Daniel, where God gives Daniel a vision of a statue which shows all the different human civilizations that would be in authority. And then if you break that up a little bit and you look at the different Bible stories, and this is, even if you think it's a myth, you can connect a lot of what I'm saying to actual documented history.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  So if you look at different human civilizations and you see the story of Daniel, who was there under Nebuchadnezzar, which was the Babylonians, you know, you can see that the whole way that government was set up was to keep. Israel and other people under their authority, like all the systems, everything about their system was to support those in power. Or if you look at the story of the Egyptians and the children of Israel and them being enslaved, like they even had to live in segregated parts of Egypt. Like, so, so the whole, this thing that's going on in America, it's like, there's nothing new under the sun. This, this is what happens. And, and, and we cannot deny history. The history says, says, yes, the Native Americans were here first,

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  but the settlers came and then eventually all of Europe seemed to come, took over the land, took the land from the Native Ameri-- that's just the story. This is not me to raise up bitterness and to point fingers. I'm just saying, this is the story. Like, we can't deny that that's the story. I'm not sitting here being mad at you because that's the story. That just is the story. That's just how Sure. human history has rolled out. Well, with that happening, just like with Babylonia, just like with the Egyptians and all other, and, and the ancient Africans, which were the fir-- the ancient Africans were actually the first world powers. And then you go from ancient Africans up to, I think, the Babylonians and then, um, and then, I think, Greece, Greece and then Rome. But, but I'm not a historian, so if I'm mixing up my facts, I'm sorry.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  But my point is, every people group has had this point where they have been in control. And then part of that being in control, governments and school systems and all ti-- even real estate, everything has been set up to benefit the desires of those who overcame. Well, watch this, I'm gonna say this real quick, Ryan. I'm sure all of my brothers and sisters are gonna probably throw things at me when I say this, but I just wanna say it anyway. But with that, um, understanding, it just is what it is. Like, we, that's, that's just the story. The, the big task for us to do now as America

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  is are we gonna go the way of these other ancient civilizations that to stop what they were doing? They had to literally be overthrown and they no longer exist? Or are we gonna continue in the way of America that has constantly fought to try to live up to its promise? And preserve what we have? And to make it better? And that can only be done if we're willing to root out those things that aren't adhering to what the promise has said. And, and so CRT, whether they do it perfectly or not, is seeking to say, hey, this is what's going on in our society.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  And so that you can recognize it, what can we do to change it? This is not so that black people can now be in power, or Muslims can now be in power, or gay people can now be in power, or women can now be in power. This is so, how can we make it so that America really is living up to the promise that all men are created equal?

• 1:14:09Ryan Holiday?

  I think, I think that's beautiful. And, and yeah, your point that every group has ruled, uh, one society, uh, has, has had a chance at the, at the, uh, you know, the, the, the top at one point or another. I think what you find is universally, there's always been oppression, evil.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:28Ryan Holiday?

  Persecution.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:14:30Ryan Holiday?

  And the, the idea is, isn't, the idea is that all cancels out to some degree. How do we now, in the future, with this knowledge, try to be a little bit better?

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:41Ryan Holiday?

  And try to, as, as Martin Luther King says, fulfill out the true meaning of its creed, of our creed. You know, that's the idea.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yep. That's the idea. And I can't say that everyone's going about it, um, right, or in every way that I agree with.

• 1:14:57Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Um, the whole thing's political CRT, it stresses me out so much. I'd rather just read a book with somebody and talk and get to know people.

• 1:15:05Ryan Holiday?

  Or an old book that doesn't have any of that in it. You know, just read, read something old that, that isn't part of the culture war. That's always.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. It is very freeing. So I have no interest in politics or activism in that sense. I just want to love people and connect people, but also be truthful and realistic about what is going on around me. And how can my little bit of action somehow, uh, put a dent in the mess, you know?

• 1:15:34Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's beautifully said. Doctor, I'm so glad we got to chat. Please keep fighting for the classics and, uh, I hope we can talk again soon. I can't wait to read your book.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:15:48Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening. We just crossed more than 50 million downloads with the Daily Stoic Podcast. Thanks to you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Please share it with your friends. Send an episode you liked. If you liked today's episode, send it to someone you know. We're always trying to reach more people and we appreciate it. Thank you for helping us keep the lights on here at Daily Stoic.