Pod Insights How to Be a Better Human How you can move forward and learn from the past (w/ Clint Smith) About this episode How do you grapple with national history, legacy, and the stories you tell yourself? Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction, How the Word is Passed, and the poetry collection, Above Ground. Clint joins Chris to talk about the cognitive dissonances that shaped American history. From understanding the complexities of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote “all men are created equal” while enslaving over 600 people – to reflecting on growing up in New Orleans – a major site for domestic slave trades, Clint urges you to examine historical contradictions. He also discusses his love for poetry and why it’s crucial to teach joyous moments in Black history too. So students won’t see slavery and Jim Crow as the totality of the black historical experience but can envision themselves of possibilities beyond subjugation.
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Host: Chris Duffy (@chrisiduffy https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en | chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/)
Guest: Clint Smith (Instagram: @clintsmithiii https://www.instagram.com/clintsmithiii/ | clintsmithiii.com https://www.clintsmithiii.com/)
Links
Above Ground https://bookshop.org/p/books/above-ground-clint-smith/18629397?ean=9780316543033&next=t
How the Word Is Passed https://www.clintsmithiii.com/how-the-word-is-passed
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0:01 Chris Duffy? Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. You know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover things like the smartest way to book flights without planning your trip around the cheapest days to fly, or the quick math for knowing when to pay with points or just swipe your card. It's like having a travel savvy tour guide right in your pocket to let you in on all the little-known tips and tricks to avoid all the hassle and extra costs that make travel so much harder than it has to be. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.
0:46 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court, and that fight needs your support today.
1:25 Chris Duffy? Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times. You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I'm going to keep things very short up top today because I don't want to take a single second away from our guest, Clint Smith. Clint is a poet and a journalist, and he has so many brilliant insights to share. For years, Clint has been investigating history and fairness and justice, and what truths we do and don't allow ourselves to hear. Here's a clip from the audiobook of his 2021 nonfiction work, which was called How the Word Is Passed.
2:04 Speaker 01 New Orleans is my home. It is where I was born and raised. It is a part of me in ways I continue to discover. But I came to realize that I knew relatively little about my hometown's relationship to the centuries of bondage rooted in the city's soft earth, in the statues I had walked past daily, the names of streets I had lived on, the schools I had attended, and the buildings that had once been nothing more to me than the remnants of colonial architecture. It was all right in front of me, even when I didn't know to look for it. It was in May 2017, after the statue of Robert D. Lee near downtown New Orleans had been taken down from its 60-foot pedestal, that I became obsessed with how slavery
2:49 Speaker 01 is remembered and reckoned with, with teaching myself all the things I wished someone had taught me long ago. Our country is in a moment, at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today. But it seems that the more purposefully some places attempt to tell the truth about their proximity to slavery and its aftermath, the more staunchly other places have refused. I wanted to visit some of these places, those telling the truth, those running from it, and those doing something in between.
3:22 Chris Duffy? We are so lucky to have Clint on the podcast today for a conversation about history, honesty, and what it means to reckon with ourselves and our world.
3:31 Speaker 01 Hi there. My name is Clint Smith. I am the author of How the Word Is Passed, which is a work of narrative nonfiction, and two poetry collections, Above Ground and Counting Descent, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine.
3:44 Chris Duffy? There's an idea that you touch on in How the Word Is Passed about the distinction between history, memory, and nostalgia. So can we start by talking about the relationship between those three ideas?
3:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, that sort of triangulation of ideas came from one of the folks that I spoke to at Monticello. He's a guy named David Thorson. He's a guide at Monticello Plantation, which is, as many of us know, the home of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, one of the intellectual founding fathers of this country. And David has been a guide at Monticello for many years, and he focuses on the Experience of the enslaved at Monticello, which was a story that people didn't tell at Monticello for a long time. Part of what's so fascinating about that place is how it tells the story of itself has changed in the sort of decades of its existence. And even now in 2025, how it tells the story of itself.
4:40 Speaker 01 So David was making a point about how so many of the people that he speaks to, who come on these tours to hear about Jefferson and are sort of surprised to encounter such an honest accounting for who Jefferson was as not only a philosopher, statesman, a politician, a president, but also as an enslaver. And so David has these ideas of history, memory and nostalgia with the idea that history is what happened. Nostalgia is the story of what we want to have happened. And memory is the thing that kind of exists in between. And so I thought that was really apt because that's how our memories are formed. There's this kind of amalgam of the stories we've been told by the people around us,
5:25 Speaker 01 by the people we love, by our families, by the sort of information ecosystem that's around us. And some of those things are aligned with empirical fact and reality, and some of them are not, but all of them sort of come together, fact and fiction, to shape our understanding of the past and thus our understanding of ourselves.
5:45 Chris Duffy? It's interesting because so much of your books, but also so much of the issues going on in the world today have this intersection between the things that we want to be true about ourselves and the world and the things that are actually true. It seems to me from reading your work that you're someone who really cares deeply about honesty as a principle, as a virtue, as something that we really need to strive for. Can you talk to me about why honesty is so important to you?
6:11 Speaker 01 Especially, I mean, generally as a virtue. I think it's, I think it's incredibly important. I'm a father of two young kids and it is central to my sort of pedagogy of parenting and how I try to create kind, thoughtful, generous human beings. And in the context of history, I think if we're not honest about what has transpired over the course Of history, we end up misunderstanding the reason that our world looks the way that it does today. I mean, what drove me to write How the Word Is Passed, which is a sort of examination of the memory of slavery in the United States and places that are engaging with that memory honestly, and places that are engaging with it a little more dishonestly.
6:53 Speaker 01 Part of why I wanted to do that was because I remember growing up in New Orleans in the eighties and nineties and being inundated with all these messages about all the things that were wrong with black people, how the reason black people didn't have the same health outcomes, the same economic outcomes, the same social outcomes, that we didn't have the same opportunities, where our communities look certain ways, was somehow because of something black people had done wrong, or something that black people had failed to do. And it wasn't until many years later that I discovered the scholarship and the writing and the art and the film that gave me the language, the toolkit, the information to help me understand that actually, the reason one community in New Orleans looks
7:36 Speaker 01 one way and another community in New Orleans looks another way is not because of the people in those communities, but what has been done to those communities or extracted from those communities, generation after generation. And the origin of that, in terms of black-white inequality in New Orleans and across the country, begins with enslavement. And I am someone who grew up in New Orleans, which is the heart, was the heart of the domestic slave trade, and I am the descendant of enslaved people. Like, 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 left on this country. And there were so many gaps in my own understanding, so many gaps in my own education. And this book was an attempt to fill those gaps, because in doing so, it allowed me to look at the country with
8:19 Speaker 01 a different level of clarity, with a sort of clear-sightedness that made it so that I couldn't be lied to anymore, that made it so that I was able to sort of more fully situate myself and the inequality that existed around me in a historical context that provided an understanding of why that inequality existed in ways that re-encounter to these sort of...
8:43 Speaker 01 More insidious and ultimately incorrect narratives that it was somehow the fault of certain people rather than of policy.
8:51 Chris Duffy? You you wrote in the acknowledgements section of How the Word Is Passed that one of the the main drivers for you in writing this book and a goal that you hope to live up to is that the students who you taught when you were a teacher would be proud of this book and that it would have been the kind of book that you could teach to them. You also have talked about how, you know, both in in your own parenting and in the ways that there's this kind of like, public pushback around like, what we can talk to kids about, that that you have to kind of protect kids from stuff. And and yet, I think anyone who has actually worked with kids, especially as a teacher, knows that kids are so much more capable of understanding complex nuance and and hearing really hard stories. And and in fact, that when you don't tell them, they still kind of know something is
9:36 Chris Duffy? up and they kind of figure out their own version of it. When it comes to these stories of like, the brutality of slavery, of the ongoing injustices in the United States, but also around the world, how does that honesty play out in the sense of, I guess, trusting kids that they can actually like, use it to to make sense of the world rather than be destroyed by it?
9:57 Speaker 01 There's a bad version of this, where you are just inundating a young person with information about like, all the terrible things that Black people have experienced over the course of the last 400 years in this country, in a way that they experience as a sort of paralyzing force, more than an emancipatory one, Black children, to be sure. And so I think what you have to do is strike this delicate balance of at once communicating to young people and being honest and being clear about the centuries of violence and oppression and subjugation that Black people have been subjected to, while also not falling into the trap of implicitly or explicitly suggesting that is all that defines the Black
10:41 Speaker 01 American experience, because it is so much more expansive than that. You have to understand the history from which we come, the violence from which we have emerged, in order to understand where we are as a community, as a people broadly defined today. And you have to also provide space for
10:59 Speaker 01 Young people to imagine a set of possibilities for themselves that exist beyond the violence, that exist beyond the subjugation, that exist beyond slavery and Jim Crow. Because I think sometimes what can happen is in an effort not to overwhelm, like a good faith effort, not to overwhelm black children or children in general. We can move away from this history, or soften this history, or sidestep this history, and talk about, you know, the more expansive, joyful elements of black life. And I think that's deeply important, profoundly important. But if we don't talk about the other part, then what happens can be a version of the sort of misunderstanding that I grew up with, where you look around and you see inequality, you see racial inequality,
11:43 Speaker 01 you hear certain things about, oh, well, this community, you know, looks this way because these people don't work hard enough. Maybe there's a biological thing or a cultural thing. And if you have not given someone the history and the context and the tools to understand, that's not correct, then it's very human to sort of fall into the trap of making assumptions about why certain people in certain communities look the way that they do. And I just, I wrote this book because I wanted to write the sort of book that I felt like I needed in my high school American history class. And I have a young reader's edition of the book coming out because I wanted, I imagined an even younger version of myself sort of wanting access to this history. Because I can't begin to explain how liberating it was,
12:26 Speaker 01 how emancipatory it was, how empowering it was to be given information that allowed me to make sense of why the world in front of me looked the way that it did. That's why it is so important to teach history across a range of different experiences, race, immigration, LGBTQ issues. You know, the list goes on and on. And I think that when we explain how systems of oppression have shaped the contemporary landscape of inequality, it disabuses us of the idea that individual people are singularly responsible for the circumstances they find themselves in. Which isn't to say that people don't have agency,
13:10 Speaker 01 but it is to say that our agency exists within the context of a set of larger historical forces that have shaped it. And I think that's so important because suddenly People are not blaming themselves or their family for failures that are reflective of something that exists beyond them and not just and are not just reflective of something they have or haven't done.
13:30 Chris Duffy? I'm so glad you put in that broader context, too, because, you know, this show, obviously, a lot of people who are listening are in the United States and are living in the remnants of this history, but there's also a lot of people who are listening outside of the United States and other countries and in other continents. And I think that this is a pattern that exists globally and a really important piece of understanding truth and history and how things come to be. We often only learn a small little piece of them. I'm curious to address a little bit of the like, what feels to me like pushback around this kind of idea for people who don't want to learn like this more accurate idea of history is people, they say some version of like, you're rewriting history, which is funny because, right, like, you're not rewriting, you're just examining the thing
14:15 Chris Duffy? that actually happened. But then there's also this sense for people like me, who are, I'm a straight white man, that somehow, understanding this is going to make me feel bad or guilty in a way that is unfair.
14:28 Speaker 01 I've always found it strange, that idea that we would be asked to hold multiple truths or multiple realities at once and alongside one another is something that instills a sense of fear or a sense of guilt within people. And so, for example, you know, we talked briefly about Monticello, but Monticello is so interesting to me. And I wanted to go and sort of examine Jefferson and how the legacy of his enslavement is remembered because I think that Jefferson, in so many ways, embodies the cognitive dissonance of America, which is to say, America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors
15:12 Speaker 01 could have never imagined. And it is also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed. And both of those things are the story of America. It's not one over here and one over there. You get to talk about this one and not talk about that one. Both of those things. Are central to understanding what America has been and continues to be. Jefferson is somebody who, again, sort of personifies that that tension. He is someone who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world and is also someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. He's someone who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that black people are inherently inferior
15:57 Speaker 01 to whites in both endowments of body and mind. All I'm asking us to do is to sit with the duality and the complexity and the contradictions and the cognitive dissonance of what America is. So I am a straight black man. And so I at once am a part of a community that has been historically oppressed in this country. And I am also part of a group of people who have historically oppressed women. And so I I am, I live with the benefits, the insidious benefits of patriarchy as much as I live with the insidiousness of anti-black racism. And it's the same with class, right? Like, class is is another factor here.
16:42 Speaker 01 And so I think it's black scholars and so many scholars, Kimberley Crenshaw and all, have have talked about intersectionality for a long time. And and it's, to me, it's like a very simple thing to ask us to do is to sit with the multiple facets of our identities, the multiple facets of our histories. And there are some things that we should feel guilty for and ashamed for. There is much that America should be proud of and there is much that America should be ashamed of. That's OK, because that that is a version of all of us. But that doesn't mean you have to be static in that space. It means you recognize the things you're not proud of, the things you're ashamed of. And you say, OK, how can I become a better version of that? How can I improve on that?
17:22 Speaker 01 How can I sort of grow so that is not a defining feature of my identity in the same way?
17:29 Chris Duffy? It's interesting, the idea like when people wrestle with the idea of knowing that their ancestors did something bad. To me, you can know that, and it doesn't mean that you are a terrible person. It means that there are things that I should know about so that I can understand the legacy of how I got to be where I am and what I would need to do to make the world better, is my particular take on it. But it's hard to wrestle with that, too. And I think some people really don't want to wrestle with it at all.
17:54 Speaker 01 I think that's absolutely true. I think part of my project is to ask us to hold all of the both-and-ness of what it means to be human in the context of our personal lives, in the context of our identities, in the context of our history. Because I think that is the most, perhaps, central element of being human, is accepting that we are a bundle of contradictions, accepting that we are a bundle of inconsistencies, accepting that the version of who we are relative to who we want to be and who we've been are not always where we imagine it to be.
18:35 Speaker 01 Like, there are values that I have, there are things that I believe I hold firmly, and I am cognizant of the way that I fall short of those values every single day. I don't think that makes me a bad person. I think that makes me a person who's reflecting on the fact that, okay, well, I say I care about this, or I say this matters to me, or I say I'm not the kind of person who does this, and today, I fell short of those things. My hope is that every day, we wake up and try to get a little bit closer to the version of ourselves that we want to be relative to the version of ourselves that we are. It's not necessarily trying to cross a finish line, but a recognition that this is an ongoing
19:20 Speaker 01 part of like what it means to be alive. Each day, we wake up and examine and reassess and reflect on things that we've done to bring ourselves closer to the sort of person we want to be and the sort of world we want to build, and the things that we've done that maybe have taken us a few steps back. And I think we do that until we're in the ground. And I think that's okay. I think that's how it's supposed to be.
19:48 Chris Duffy? Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, and we will be right back.
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22:46 Chris Duffy? And we are back with Clint Smith. We've been talking about like content, the actual substance of your writing. But I want to talk to you about form, because I think it's really interesting that you are a poet and that you clearly spend so much time and have such a virtuistic ability to pick words and to put together a sentence and a phrase. So your collection of poems Above Ground and your nonfiction book, How the Word Is Past, they're dealing with the exact same subjects, right? There's poems and sections of the book that are about the exact same subjects. How does it change when you are trying to communicate one of these ideas or to get some of the facts out there when you're doing it through poetry versus when you're doing it through a narrative nonfiction project?
23:30 Speaker 01 I came of age as a writer, as a poet. And so I think that poetry is my sort of literary north star. It is the thing that orients and animates all of my writing, regardless of if I'm writing poems, or nonfiction, or history, or whatever the case may be. Part of what poetry has done in my life is pushed me to pay attention to things that I otherwise may have overlooked. An example that I give people sometimes is, you know, there's a tree in front of my house. And I can walk past that tree every day. But it's something different when I walk up to that tree. Like, I pick a single leaf. And I look at it and I examine the sort of border of the tree and the sort of
24:15 Speaker 01 place on the edge where a caterpillar is taking a bite. And I see parts of it that are browning and yellowing as the seasons change. And I see parts of the sort of veins of the leaf and can count how many specific veins emerging from the stem there are in that leaf. And then look at another one and see the ways in which it's both similar and different. It's my experience and understanding of that tree becomes fundamentally different because I've literally just stopped to look at it and pay attention to it in a different way. And for me, that's what poems do. Poems are almost like a meditation practice for me in that way. I began as a spoken word artist and so participating in slam poetry events and
24:56 Speaker 01 poetry is something that I experienced as an oral force, as an auditory force, even before I experienced it as a written one. And in that way, I'm always thinking about the music of the language. I'm always thinking about how it sounds out loud. Every single draft of my poems or of my nonfiction, I read out loud, just dozens and dozens of times. And that for me, my voice becomes the best editor. And like, I know when a line needs another beat or when I need an extra syllable on a word or when I need to take a breath or pause in a certain moment.
25:29 Chris Duffy? It would be professional malpractice, I think, if I didn't ask you if you'd be open to reading us a poem from above ground. On mine, it's on page 19, "Ode to the First Smile."
25:38 Speaker 01 I haven't read this one in a long time. "Ode to the First Smile. At first, I wasn't sure if it had really happened. Perhaps my eyes were wishing for something that wasn't there. But then you did it once more, as if to remind me I shouldn't doubt the creasing of your small eyes, the soft crescent of your flowering mouth unfurling at the edge. It happens as I am reading you a story about a turtle who spends each day going on adventures with other creatures of the sea. And as I read about the turtle's conversation with his dear friend, the octopus, suffused with jokes of seaweed and tentacles and how coral reefs always stay up beyond Christmas, you lift the borders of your mouth and swing your arm in delight.
26:23 Speaker 01 The hater says too early that it was probably only gas and the spasms of new muscles." But we know better than to explain away such rejoicing. Besides, only one in 1,000 baby sea turtles will survive into adulthood. And we are reading about one of them. And he is talking to an octopus. And they are making Hamaphonist jokes about the winter holidays. And what a glorious example of a miracle this is. Why would we not praise the flesh in all its fledgling movements? Why would we concern ourselves with how the turtle arrived in the water? When we could simply celebrate the fact that it is swimming safely out at sea?
27:02 Chris Duffy? How is it allowed for you to take a poem about a first smile and a little baby sea turtle? And then just rip my heart out like that? And also make it about these big existential life things as well? I mean, that is, to me, that is in some ways like the quintessential Clint Smith experience. Right? It's like, it's beautiful. It's small and personal and funny. And then it is also huge and universal and profound.
27:33 Speaker 01 I appreciate that so much. That means more than I can say.
27:37 Chris Duffy? I think also that I really appreciate about you, which I think maybe people who aren't familiar with your work or aren't familiar with poetry might be surprised by is there's sometimes this idea that poets are self-serious. And I think there's also an idea that journalists are self-serious, especially journalists who work on big, heavy subjects. And you have such a good sense of humor. You are clearly not a person who takes yourself too seriously. But in some ways, just the title of the poem is so perfect that it sums it all up, which is on page 43, I'm not going to give it away. If you could start by reading the title of the poem.
28:11 Speaker 01 Indeed. "It is Halloween night and you are dressed as a hot dog. Why we have chosen to bundle you into a costume of cured meat, I do not know. But your mother is dressed as a pickle and I am dressed as a bottle of ketchup. And together we make a family of ballpark delicacies." You have yet to eat solid foods, but after you look at yourself in the mirror, you begin to chew on your costume, clearly compelled by this mystery mix of pork and beef and puree of other unknown meats. We place you on the couch next to a large stuffed bear in hopes of taking photos to send to your grandparents, because who are we to deny anyone the joy of an infant wrapped in processed meat?
28:54 Speaker 01 But you are just a few months old and thus unable to sit up straight for very long. So you fall over onto the lap of the bear and your mother and I look at each other, realizing the perfection of what has appeared before us. So we snap a dozen photos of the stuffed bear eating the human hot dog baby, which sounds unsettling, but is actually adorable, and send them to the family group chat right away. You're probably annoyed, but we are delighted and it doesn't even matter if we make it out of the house anymore because the mission has been accomplished.
29:26 Chris Duffy? I love that so much. And I truly think in the absolute hall of fame of poem titles, "It is Halloween night and you're just as a hot dog" has got to be in the top, the very, very top tier of all time.
29:39 Speaker 01 Shakespearean.
29:40 Chris Duffy? It's absolutely Shakespearean. That is Shakespearean. Something that, that, that strikes me is, you know, you play with humor. You also play with the way in which being a parent and thinking about your own personal relationship to your kids also makes you think about this broader lineage and this broader legacy. What advice would you give if someone is listening and they're becoming a parent for the first time to think about starting this story of your family in a new way and also going backwards to think what, what has come before?
30:12 Speaker 01 So I should first say that I am in no position of, of authority to give advice on, on any parenting related matters, but.
30:24 Speaker 01 What I will say is that I hope people extend themselves grace because it's hard. It is having a baby, having a young person, having a child, co-parenting, becoming a family unit in a way that's fundamentally different than just having a partner is a beautiful, remarkable, awe-inspiring, and exhausting, difficult, humbling experience. You know, we've been talking so much about the both-and-ness of American history, of who we are as people. I think parenting is almost the most sort of both-and-ness thing
31:07 Speaker 01 in the world. I can at once be so, like, look at my child and see their first smile, or their first laugh, or the first book they read, or the first time they help a kid out, help them up when they fell off the slide at the playground. Any of these moments where you look and you just are in awe of the fact that this person is biologically or otherwise of you, that you are tasked with raising this little human and ushering them into the world with as much humility and generosity and kindness as you can.
31:48 Speaker 01 And while all of that is happening, you can be operating on two hours of sleep and have spilled the baby food all on your clothes and have had somebody poop on you and have had your child say something that is so upsetting because you've told them not to say that thing a million times. I think that makes it even more meaningful because it is not all joy, and it is not all pain, it is not all awe-inspiring, it is not all exhaustion. And it makes you, I think, more fully appreciate the totality of the experience because it is a reflection of, again, what it means to be beautifully and complicatedly human.
32:32 Chris Duffy? I wonder if there's a connection that you see, because I can see how there could be one, between that overwhelming awleness of parenting and that sometimes desire to flatten it just into the good. And people's desire to not reckon with all of history, with all of the things happening at one moment and to just say, no, it was just good. We should just be proud to be from this country or from this place. I feel like they come from similar places. The idea that like to acknowledge it all is to risk cheapening it or to risk destroying the good part somehow.
33:08 Speaker 01 What I experience of this is a sort of, I think specifically American iteration of it, but a desire to present to the world like an unblemished version of your life. And that, that the presentation and performance of such unblemishness then bestows upon you a feeling that is what makes your life worthy or valuable or meaningful. I think this existed long before social media or smartphones, but I think it has been exacerbated by social media in which we feel as if we have to present sort of highlight reels
33:53 Speaker 01 of our lives and perform our lives in a certain way. That is not necessarily reflective of the fullness and complexity of it. And I think that's changing and beginning to evolve. Like, I think that how young people use social media, for example, is not without its issues and problems, but also in my experience, like captures more of the fullness and complexity than like us millennials did. Then I think people are like, actually, you know, I'm going to show you this, talk about and illuminate other parts of my life that are not just like, life is amazing, look at me on the beach in Malibu. That does exist, but I think it's shifting in some spaces.
34:35 Speaker 01 And then I think that is a microcosm of a particular vein of American desire to suggest that we are the best country that has ever existed. And in saying that we are the best country that has ever existed, that we always have to sort of talk about that greatness. But people's very identities, the story they tell about themselves, the story they tell about their families, the story they tell about their communities are inextricably linked to the story that we tell or don't tell about America.
35:14 Chris Duffy? We're going to be right back after a quick break.
35:26 Chris Duffy? This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. What connects a hidden laboratory in the Amazon, giant pandas in China's mountain forests, research relating to the ocean, and communities living alongside wildlife in India? That's what you'll hear on season six of Planet Visionaries. Stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold, brings you real stories of discovery, determination, and research and initiatives relating to
36:09 Chris Duffy? environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
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37:56 Chris Duffy? And we are back. So in Above Ground, I, obviously, I picked two poems that are very much like about the experience of parenting and about a young baby, and they're very sweet, fun poems. But you also have poems in here that deal with violence, that deal with war, that deal with systemic racism, that deal with all sorts of really, really heavy things. And so how do you keep that joy and that love and that beauty? And acknowledge and work on the horrors of the world without just being destroyed by it?
38:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's incredibly difficult. A couple of things. So I'm, at the end of How the Word Is Passed in the epilogue, I interviewed my grandparents. My grandfather is born in 1930, Jim Crow, Mississippi, and my grandmother is born in 1939, Jim Crow, Florida. And I'm spending time with them and I'm walking through the National Museum of African American History and Culture with them. And I'm pushing my grandfather in his wheelchair and my grandmother is walking a few paces ahead of us. And we're in this remarkable museum, this museum here in Washington DC that is attempting to capture the, as we've talked about, the sort of fullness and the totality and the complexity of the black experience.
39:12 Speaker 01 And, you know, as a result, it has exhibits within the museum that are so painful and so devastating. And it also has exhibits within the museum that instill me with like so much pride and so much joy and so much gratitude to be a black American and to be part of this tradition. And so I'm walking through the museum with my grandparents through one of the particularly difficult sections. And I'm watching them look at the museum exhibits and these sort of photos on the wall.
39:48 Speaker 01 And my grandmother has this refrain and she keeps saying, I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. As I said, my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. So when my little kids sit on my grandfather's lap, imagine my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's lap. And I'm reminded that this history we tell ourselves was a long time ago, wasn't that long ago at all. And I think about how his grandfather was someone who was born into an experience that is simply unimaginable for me. And I think about how for centuries, from the moment enslaved people arrived on these shores, they were fighting for freedom, they were fighting for emancipation, they were fighting for liberation.
40:31 Speaker 01 And what that also means is that over the course of the 250 odd years of enslavement, the vast majority of people who were fighting for and aspiring towards freedom never got a chance to experience it for themselves. But they fought for it anyway, and they aspired towards it anyway, because they knew that someday somebody would. And I think about what responsibility that bestows upon me. And so what do I need to do in my life to ensure that I am attempting to build a better world, even if I may not see the fruits of that labor myself? My life is a testament, my children's life and the freedoms they have are a testament to what millions of people did that they did not get to experience that I now get to experience.
41:12 Speaker 01 And how can I be a part of that tradition of attempting to both at once sit in gratitude for that which has been given to me from people who worked to provide that for me? And also work toward doing the same thing so that people in the future are able to reap the benefits of the better world that I and we tried to build for them.
41:37 Chris Duffy? The very last line of How the Word Is Passed is, "At some point, it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history, but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it."
41:48 Speaker 01 It is the question, and I think that the last several years of our social and political lives collectively demonstrate that it is, that experience is uneven, that experience is inconsistent, that experience is...
42:07 Speaker 01 Geographically and racially and politically divergent. The very thing that might look like an honest reckoning to one person may be felt as and experienced as treasonous, unpatriotic by another. Part of what I learned in writing How the Word Is Passed, you know, I went to all sorts of places. I went to prison, you know, the largest maximum security prison in the country. I went to one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country. I spent time with the descendants of enslavers, the descendants of the enslaved. Even when you do not agree, even when you find someone's views abhorrent,
42:51 Speaker 01 I think it is important to take seriously where those views come from and why they exist. Because if we don't, if we turn one another simply into caricatures and say that the reason certain people are doing this is because they're just, they are evil and they have no soul. And I think the emotional impulse is one I understand. And I also think that it is important for us to take seriously the emotional texture that is animating beliefs that we find to be incredibly harmful or incredibly frightening. Many millions of people in this country do not want to talk about slavery,
43:33 Speaker 01 think about slavery, be taught about slavery, have their children taught about slavery, read books about slavery, watch films about slavery. They don't want anything to do with it, as well as many other things that are part of the American historical project. And I think it does mean that we have to continue to try to make sense of what is animating such retrenchment. Because if we don't understand what's animating the retrenchment, then we're just going to have a bunch of folks talking past one another and we're going to be caught in the sort of political fissures that we continue to experience today. I see some of the things happening in our country right now. How can I be both clear and forthright about what the implications of this will be?
44:16 Speaker 01 How dangerous, how profoundly ungenerous, how evil the actions themselves are without turning people into static, irredeemable caricatures?
44:33 Speaker 01 And some days I'm better at it than others.
44:35 Chris Duffy? Well, Clint Smith, thank you so much for being on the show. I cannot recommend more highly your books and your work, and I really appreciate you taking the time to be here.
44:44 Speaker 01 Absolutely. This was a pleasure.
44:47 Chris Duffy? That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening to our show. Thank you so, so, so much to today's guest, Clint Smith. You can find his books and more information about him at clintsmithiii.com. That's Clint Smith the third dot com. If you haven't already read How the Word Is Passed or his poetry collection Above Ground, I strongly recommend checking them out. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team that embodies both handedness, and not just because it is both TED and PRX. On the TED side, we've got Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Cheng, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney
45:30 Chris Duffy? Lot, Antonio Le, and Joseph DeBryan. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who reckon with the truth every day. And on the PRX site, they are historically good at making podcasts. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again for listening. Please share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it, with someone who you think would get some meaning from it. And we will be back next week with even more episodes of How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again, and take care.
46:03 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them in and out of court, and that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human, and your gift will be matched five times.
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