Immersed and enlivened by a brutal history

Before he became a New York Times bestselling author, Atlantic writer, and later MacArthur genius award recipient, Clint Smith was a high school teacher in Prince George's County, Maryland. His How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America is his tour of eight sites that broke open his understanding of where he'd come from and what shaped all his fellow Americans, Black, white, and others. It's a book so carefully written to provide an accessible story that it seems almost effortless -- and then you realize this author knew what it would take to reach the young people he most sought to influence. It's a wonderful book for all of us and we should be grateful to his students for teaching him how to teach.

The sites are Monticello (Thomas Jefferson's estate); Whitney Plantation (Louisiana); Angola Prison (Louisiana); Blandford Cemetery (Virginia); Galveston Island (Texas); New York City; Gorée Island (Senegal, West Africa); and his New Orleans hometown. Each could be read separately but together the panorama is deep, deeply researched and deeply felt.

Two drew me in most. Whitney is a plantation built by slaves to enrich its owners but now offered up to tourists not as a specimen of antebellum gentility suitable for weddings, but as the slave industry complex that it was. I have seen the other kind; I want to see this one. The other experience that captured me was his tour of Angola Prison, one of the most famous hellholes in the country. (How did he ever manage to get the opportunity for such a tour?) He took a moment to sit in its famous electric chair where 20 men have been killed by the state since 1976. He describes feeling that he was invading prisoners' privacy -- and felt their need for someone to look straight at them. Most inmates are serving life sentences.

In Galveston, Smith attended a kind of children's pageant marking Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating emancipation, which originated there. Students from an educational enrichment program run by the Children's Defense Fund donned costumes and retold the history of European conquest and enslavement up through 1865.

I watched these young people read to the audience parts of the history that placed our country in context. I felt, in that moment, envious of them.

Had I known when I was younger what some off these students were sharing, I felt as if I would have been liberated from a social and emotional paralysis that for so long I could not name -- a paralysis that had arisen from never knowing enough of my own history to effectively identify the lies I was being told by others: lies about what slavery was and what it did to people; lies about what came after our supposed emancipation; lies about why our country looks the way it does today.

I had grown up in a world that never tired of telling me and other Black children like me of all the things that were wrong with us, all the things we needed to do better. But not enough people spoke about the reason so many Black children grow up in communities saturated with poverty and violence. Not enough people spoke about how these realities were the result of decisions made by people in power and had existed for generations before us.

After college, when I was doing more reading on my own, I began to understand all that has happened to our communities, to our people, over generations -- it was liberating. I had language to name what I felt but had never known how to say.

People sometimes believe that if they talk to Black youth about the historical legacy of slavery -- and the intergenerational iterations of systemic racism that followed -- young people will feel overwhelmed and shut down. But there is enormous value in providing young people with the language, the history, and the framework to identify why their society looks the way it does. Understanding that all of this was not done by accident but by design.

That did not strip me of agency; it gave me agency back to me. I watched these young people share this history; and I dreamed of what it might mean if we could extend these lessons to every child.

How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what has happened here?

Somehow I missed this book when it made a splash in 2021. I highly recommend it now. We need it, especially in our moment of calls for censorship.