Joshua B. Hoe interviews Clint Smith about his book “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With The History of Slavery Across America”
Full Episode
My Guest: Clint Smith
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection “Counting Descent.” He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation.
His writing has been published in he New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Poetry, the Paris Review and others…he was also the co-host of a criminal justice podcast himself back in the day….and is the author of the new book How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Notes From Episode 111 Clint Smith
You can find “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America” from Loyalty Bookstore or any bookseller.
Clint recommended the book “Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration,” by Reuben Jonathan Miller.
Full Transcript:
Joshua Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 111 of the DecarcerationNation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Clint Smith about his book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, The Paris Review, and others. He also used to be the co-host of a criminal justice podcast himself back in the day.
Welcome to the DecarcerationNation podcast, Clint Smith; I can’t tell you how excited I am to talk with you.
Clint Smith
Alright, appreciate it. I’m, what did I say? A longtime listener, first-time caller?
Josh Hoe
Great. I’ve never heard that one before. That’s great. I always ask the same first question; it’s kind of the comic book origin story question. How did you get from wherever you started in life to where you were writing a book about reckoning with the legacy of slavery?
Clint Smith
Yeah, I grew up in New Orleans, born and raised, and Hurricane Katrina was my senior year of high school. And so I finished my senior year in Houston, Texas, and then went away to college in North Carolina, Davidson College. Our claim to fame is that Steph Curry went there. And Steph is actually my classmate. And this is a small school of like1600 people. So we all knew each other pretty well. And then I became a high school English teacher after I graduated, and was teaching in the Washington DC area, and was thinking a lot about, as I was teaching, the political and historical, and social landscape that shaped the lives of my students every day and became more and more interested in gaining a deeper understanding of why these communities look the way that they did, why the communities I was teaching in were plagued with so many issues that plague black and brown and indigenous Americans. And then I went to graduate school at Harvard, where I studied the relationship between education and incarceration, wrote a dissertation on the relationship between education and incarceration, specifically, with regard to how people sentenced to juvenile life without parole make meaning of what education means while they’re incarcerated. And so I did a qualitative study, interviewed a couple dozen people to try and get a sense of what education means to you when you are told as a 15, or 16, or 17-year old that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a cage, and worked on that dissertation. And then at the same time, I started working on this book, How the Word is Passed. And the origin story of this book is that in 2017 when I was watching the Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans. I was watching statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis taken down, and I started thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority-black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. And what does that mean? What does it mean that to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard; to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Highway; that my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy; that my parents still lived on a street named after somebody who owned 150 enslaved people? And what are the implications of that? Because we know that symbols and names and iconography aren’t just symbols, they are reflective of the stories that people tell, and those stories shape the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy, and public policy shapes the material conditions of people’s lives. And so there was a very clear throughline for me between the work that I was doing in my dissertation and sort of understanding, as the scholar, Saidiya Hartman would say, how the afterlife of slavery has shaped our contemporary landscape of mass incarceration, and understanding the sort of origin of black/white inequality, through better understanding and coming to understand slavery. And so with this book, what I wanted to do was go to different historical sites across the country, and understand how not only New Orleans was reckoning with or failing to reckon with its own history, but how different historical sites and locations across the country were being honest about their relationship to that history or failing to be honest.
Josh Hoe
Interesting that at the very beginning of your story you started to talk about the hurricane. And I just immediately started to wonder if that experience made you think about the fragility of the things that we’ve built as a country and how things change and how things are vulnerable. What was your experience with that?
Clint Smith
Yeah, I think what it certainly did was give me a deeper sense of how everyone can watch the same event transpiring, or see the same things happening, and come up with completely different stories about what that means, and completely different stories about what they’re seeing. And it was a reminder of – how I alluded to before – that narratives are often what shape our understanding of the history, of what the history of the country has been, of who we are today, and what we see happening in front of us, and what communities do or don’t deserve. I myself, in terms of our family, our home was destroyed. My sister and I finished the school year in Texas, as I said, but my family is back in New Orleans now. And you know, we are fortunate that we didn’t lose anyone close to us. And we were able to rebuild and find a different home, in a different part of New Orleans and sort of rebuild our lives there. But I think part of what Katrina made clear was both the way that narratives shape how we understand what is happening in our country, and also the extent to which so many of the fissures of American society, and so many of the manifestations of inequality are always bubbling under the surface. And then you have extraordinary events that bring them to the surface, you have Katrina, you have a global pandemic, you have, you know, whatever the case may be that makes clear to more people how unequal our society actually is. And I think when I was young, it gave me a lens through which to understand how government responded differently or would respond differently to people who looked like me when they are in crisis than it would to others. Like even when I didn’t have the sociological framework, or the sort of historical context as a 17-year-old to understand, name, specifically, I was able to look and see like, there’s no way that if New Orleans was a majority white city, if these people in these homes and on these rooftops are white, that what is happening would be happening; there’s no way that if the people in the Superdome were white, that this would be happening in the way that it is. That felt very clear to me. Even when I didn’t have the language of a social scientist with which to name and identify it specifically.1
Josh Hoe
That seems like a great way, in a strange way, to jump into the book. You start the book at Monticello; was your thinking that few people have ever fully embodied our founding contradiction more completely than Jefferson?
Clint Smith
Yeah, I think that that was absolutely some of the motivating factor to go to Monticello, because Jefferson, I think, personifies so much of the so many of the contradictions and hypocrisy and sort of cognitive dissonance of this country in the sense that America is a country that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations to achieve upward mobility and accumulate wealth, in ways that their ancestors could have never imagined. And it has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed to create that opportunity for the other group. And in both of those stories are the story of America. And you have to hold both of those things side by side. And I think with Jefferson, similarly, you know, Jefferson 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 wrote in one document that all men are created equal and wrote in another document that black people are inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind. And so, you know, he, I think, carries and again embodies so many of the many contradictions that we see manifest themselves in the history of this country. I want to go to that place and understand how an institution that is ostensibly committed to telling the story and capturing the legacy of Jefferson, a bold and honest story. Did they tell an honest story? Did they tell a full story? Did they tell a transparent story? When we talk about Monticello, are we making sure that we’re not only talking about Jefferson and his family, but also the hundreds of enslaved people and enslaved families who lived on that land across generations; the Hemmings, the Fossett’s, the Grangers, among others, who, who in many ways that land belongs to more than it belongs to Jefferson. I mean, Jefferson was away from Monticello for extended periods of time, for a significant portion of his life, in DC and Paris and Philadelphia, and New York, in his various positions with the US government. And it was those enslaved families who built memories, who built communities, who fell in love, who got married, who had children, who made that space, what it was both sort of emotionally, and quite literally. And so I wanted to open the book with Monticello because I think, to understand, to your point, this sort of origin story of this country, we have to more fully understand the totality of the legacy and the totality of the sensibilities of one of the people who was most central in making this country what it was.
Josh Hoe
Teresa, one of the people you met at Monticello said, we’re not challenging history, we’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived there, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories. We are currently facing calls for banning certain kinds of teaching entirely, and some are even calling for live streaming of teachers so that parents can ensure no controversial subjects like race ever get discussed. Your book is about how we pass the word; is what they are doing at Monticello a guide to a better way or a path to navigating these disputes?
Clint Smith
I think Monticello is an interesting place because it is a place that has changed its curatorial process over time, right. So if you talk to somebody who went to Monticello 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, it is likely that their experience at Monticello was very different from my own. It is relatively recent, considering how long Monticello has been a museum and an institution that hosts people, it is relatively recent that they have a slavery at Monticello tour, you know, tours specifically focused on Jefferson’s relationship to slavery, as well as the enslaved people who live there. In 2018, I believe, they started a tour and an exhibit specifically dedicated to Sally Hemmings and the Hemmings family. And so it is one of the reasons I wanted to go to Monticello because I think they are responsive to new information, they are responsive, and recognize their unique position in serving as a model for what responsible curation looks like. And also responsive to the shifting political environment in which it has clearly become unacceptable, over the course of the last several years, and people have become more cognizant of the fact that a plantation can and should only be understood as a site of intergenerational torture and exploitation. And that if you’re going to tell a story about Monticello, you can tell a story about, you know, the innovations that Jefferson made, the political documents he wrote, his interest in different types of trees, different types of science. I mean, he had interests across the board that were vast and often impressive. But you can’t tell any of that without telling the story about how that was made possible. And his life was made possible – every facet of it – by the labor of enslaved people. And so, so yeah, I think that Monticello is a really interesting model. And also, just logistically – I think before the pandemic they had almost half a million people come into Monticello every year. And so it is probably the most famous plantation in the United States, if not the world. And they have a really unique opportunity to help people who might not, you know, pick up a book about the history of slavery, or listen to a podcast about the history of slavery, to use that 60-minute tour to help shift people’s understandings of Jefferson and of this country in ways that can be I think, really transformative. And I saw that during my tour; there were two women who I went up to, Donna and Grace after the Slavery at Monticello tour. And they had clearly been so unsettled by what they were hearing. And I went up to them, and I was like, you know, can you tell me a little bit about how you’re feeling or about what you just heard? And they said, he – they were talking about the tour guide, a guy named David Thorson – they said, man, he really took the shine off Jefferson. I had no idea that Jefferson was an enslaver; I had no idea that Monticello was a plantation. And these are people who got on planes, who rented cars, who got hotel rooms to come to this site as a sort of pilgrimage, to see the home of one of the founding fathers, and had no idea that this person enslaved hundreds of human beings. And so I think, yeah, Monticello and other plantations really have a unique opportunity to tell the story and to help more people understand the history of slavery in a really unique way.
Josh Hoe
You mentioned David Thorson, and he had a quote that I think summarized a lot of the struggle in the book in a lot of ways: when you challenge people’s conception, particularly white people’s conception of Jefferson, you’re in fact challenging their conception of themselves. I’ve come to believe that there is a difference between history and nostalgia. And somewhere between the two is memory. I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts. And that nostalgia is a fantasy of the past, using no facts. And somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion. I mean, history is kind of what you need to know. But nostalgia is what you want to hear. After writing the book and taking this journey, what have you learned about correctly navigating memory, history, and nostalgia?
Clint Smith
No, I think that David was absolutely right. I mean, sometimes when you’re writing a nonfiction book, you find these characters who are so, so good, and so three-dimensional and so interesting that you could have, you know, if I were writing a novel about the same subject, I could have never made up a character as good as David. And some of the quotes that he had were just gems, like this one. And I think he’s right, because part of what I realized in my journey is, for so many people, this history is not based on primary source documents, or empirical evidence or historical fact, it is a story that they are told. And it is a story that they tell. It is an heirloom that is passed down across generations, it is something that people carry with them. It is something that is informed and shaped by their family and their lineage and their community. And so when David says that when people when some people see Jefferson challenged, what they see is the story of America challenged, because their sense of self is so linked and entangled in a specific type of story of this country, and their relationship to it, and how they’ve situated themselves within it, that it becomes, for some people, this existential crisis, where who they believe themselves to be, is so deeply wrapped up in the mythology of this country, that it becomes hard for them to simply accept new information because that new information to them means that who they believe themselves to be in the world is not fully accurate. And I think the question is, to what extent are people going to be willing to learn a new story and to accept a new story about this country that might have been purposeful, that they might purposely not have had access to? Or that was kept from them for a variety of ways, or that they didn’t want to hear? But what does it look like to listen to that, to gain a different sense of understanding about this history? And to let that inform how you move through the world moving forward?
Josh Hoe
It’s interesting, you mention that because next you headed to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, and John Cummings, who is the current owner of that plantation, changed the entire model of how history was represented in that place, from the perspective of ownership and everyone who works there. A second thing I feel you’re investigating the book is a very different kind of tourism. For instance, on one hand, you have Monticello and the Whitney Plantation, and on the other side, you have Angola Prison, the gift shop and tours, Confederate reenactments, Confederate gravesites. Is that fair? And what did you conclude about – for lack of a better term – slavery tourism?
Clint Smith
Yeah, it’s interesting, because I think that part of what I wanted to do in the book was capture the vast and inconsistent landscape that is embodied within and exists within the topography of this country. I wrote a book about nine different places, and how they reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery, but I could have written a book about a hundred thousand and nine. You know the scars of slavery are just [baked] into the landscape of this country, everywhere you go. And what I wanted to do was to find places that represented similar things that were happening in other places, right, so I went to Monticello and wrote about Monticello and Jefferson and slavery. I could have easily gone to Montpelier, and written about James Madison, I could very easily have gone to Mount Vernon and written about George Washington and each of those plantations in their respective relationships to slavery as well. But my hope was that in going to Monticello, you gain a sense of what an institution like that is doing and what they’re grappling with, similar to Angola [Prison]; I went to Angola. But I could have also gone to Parchment [Prison] in Mississippi, I could have also gone to prisons in Alabama, and these places in which the land upon which they are set is stained with the blood of enslaved people, in the history of enslaved people. So each of these places, the way that they tell the story of slavery is very much shaped by their institutional sensibilities today, right? So how Angola tells the story of slavery, is kind of non-existent, in at least in my visit there, in part because I think it implicates that space, it implicates the institution, and I think there is an opportunity for Angola to be more honest about its history. But up to this point, there hasn’t been. I mean Angola is interesting. I did get an email from – let me back up, just to provide context for people – Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the country. It is 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the island of Manhattan. It is a place where 75% of the people held there are black men, over 70% of them are serving life sentences. And it is built on top of a former plantation. But what I tell folks is that if you were to go to Germany, and you have the largest maximum-security prison in Germany, and it was built on top of a former concentration camp, which the people held there were disproportionately Jewish, that place would be very clearly and rightfully a global emblem of anti-semitism, it would be abhorrent, it would be disgusting, we would never allow a place like that to exist because it would so clearly run counter to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities. And Angola is a place that is not, in my experience going there, was not interested in interrogating its relationship to this history. And what’s more, it had a gift shop, it had a gift shop in which you could buy shot glasses and coffee mugs and sweatshirts and on some of the paraphernalia, it said Angola, A Gated Community, almost to make a mockery of and belittle the conditions of 1000s of incarcerated people who continue to be held there, many of them serving life sentences. And so that obviously is a very different way of telling the story of slavery or failing to tell the story of slavery, and how it has informed that land, then in a place like Monticello does, and so I think, or the Whitney, and so those represent kind of two different ends of the spectrum of how the story is told. And I kind of tried to capture the places in between.
Josh Hoe
So much of the story of incarceration in America, in my opinion – I’ve said many times that it would be impossible to walk into a prison or jail in the United States and not immediately see the racial disparities – is bound up in the history of race relations and slavery and Jim Crow and convict leasing and everything else. And you’re talking about how they’ve overwhelmingly failed to come to grips with this history at Angola. When you’re walking in, you write that below the words Louisiana State Penitentiary, was a photograph of two dozen black men being marched into fields, each of them carrying a long black hoe, they’re wearing an assortment of gray sweatshirts and white t-shirts that rendered their bodies almost indistinguishable. To their far-right was a white woman on horseback, her long blonde ponytail extending from beneath her black cap and down her back. they existed in this photo, not as individual people, but as a homogeneous, interchangeable mass of bodies. As you mentioned, Angola is literally a former plantation, also a brutal place where, you know, they were essentially selling prisoner and slave labor. And that was before it became the prison it is today. As you were interacting – I know you had several conversations with the tour guide and people like that – they seemed almost dismissive to a certain extent, or at least uncomfortable enough to be dismissive in those conversations. Why do you think this place that’s literally built, a living monument to this kind of legacy, that people seem so unwilling to actually confront that truth?
Clint Smith
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because one of the things – I used a pseudonym for the tour guide, calling him Roger. And one of the things that Roger said was, you know because we were on this tour, they were sort of busing us. I was with this group of other writers and artists who were there for a sort of retreat. We were not at Angola for a retreat, we were in Louisiana for a retreat. And part of it meant going to the Whitney, going to Angola, thinking about how our work around incarceration in our various types of writing and art was informed by this history. And so we went to these places. And I asked probably about halfway through the tour, as he was giving the history of Angola, but sort of conspicuously leaving out its history as a plantation. I said, are we going to talk to about the relationship that this place has to slavery, and he was kind of like, you know, I can’t change what happened here. And so I like to focus on what we’re doing moving forward. And, you know, he kind of went on to talk about how people could get college degrees now and how they were reforming solitary confinement and all of these things that are supposed to reflect the progressive nature of the institution. But I was really struck by this idea of, I can’t change what happened here. And then implicit within that, because of that, we shouldn’t talk about it. And I thought that that was emblematic of a much larger sensibility that exists across this country where people are like, that happened a long time ago. Why are we still talking about it? Why are we focusing on this, we need to just move forward. And it’s almost it’s own gaslighting in a way, right? This idea that this happened a long time ago, this was in the past, we don’t need to talk about it. But I talk all the time. And part of what this book is trying to do is convey to the reader how recent this history was. When I was taught in elementary school about slavery, it felt like I was taught about it as if it happened during the Jurassic period, almost like it was like the dinosaurs and the Flintstones and slavery.
Josh Hoe
Just to interject real quickly, I always remind people that Jim Crow technically ended in 1967, which is the year I was born. So it’s not that long ago.
Clint Smith
I think all the time about the woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture, alongside the Obama family in 2016. She was the daughter of an enslaved person, not the granddaughter, the great-granddaughter; the woman who helped the Obama family ring the bell that signaled the opening of the new Smithsonian Museum in 2016, was the daughter of someone born into slavery. My grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved. So when my four-year-old son sits in my grandfather’s lap, I imagine my grandfather sitting on his grandfather’s lap. And I’m reminded that this history that we tell ourselves was a long time ago, really wasn’t that long ago at all. And the idea that this institution that was only a few generations ago, in which there are people who were alive today, who loved, had relationships with, who knew people who were born into bondage, the idea that that would have nothing to do with the contemporary landscape of inequality looks like with what an institution like Angola looks like, with what a place like New York City looks like, or any of the other places like Angola, is both morally and intellectually disingenuous. And I really hope that the book, in going to these physical places, and describing the sensory detail and creating physical and emotional intimacy can help the reader understand not only our physical proximity to this history in terms of the landscape but our temporal proximity, right? That again, it really wasn’t that long ago. And I think you see that and you feel that in a different sort of way when you’re at a place like Angola.
Josh Hoe
It’s also really strange that reaction because given, you know, that he works at a place where that legacy is alive, that is a monument to that legacy. He has the ability to change it every day, in every way he interacts with every person he meets. So it’s just really weird that he would put it that way, or that people do that kind of weird dance. You talked about going on a tour of an actual unit. And I remember when I was incarcerated, those tours would come in and it felt pretty gross and exploitative, almost like we were kind of animals in a zoo. What did you think about that part of the visit, now after you’ve had some time to reflect?
Clint Smith
I think I wrestle with that in the chapter itself. I remember when we were walking around the death row unit, it did feel profoundly uncomfortable. Because you know, it was sort of this panopticon infrastructure where you can walk around in a circle, and there’s a sort of central operating unit in the middle of it, where a lot of correctional officers are seated so that they can see everybody in the cells around them. And I think similar to you, I think I grappled with this openly in the chapter, I was like, I don’t know if it’s a good thing for us to be here. I don’t know. I’m not sure what the right way to interact with folks is; is saying hello going to be a good thing? Does it feel like we are treating them, is this animalistic, is it dehumanizing? Is it humanizing, you know, for them, for us to say hi, to try to have a conversation? And I don’t know what the answer was. I talked about it with Norris Henderson, who I was on the tour with and who was incarcerated himself at Angola for almost 30 years. And he said that you know, in that moment, because we were with him because so many of those men know him, and know his intentions and know-how he moves through the world and know how he is always looking out for them and thinking about them, that that specific sort of visit would not be one that is seen as making people feel as if they were, you know, zoo animals or, make it feel as if it’s this dehumanizing experience, in part because he, when we were walking around, he knew so many people, right? Like, people go up, and they’d be like Norris Norris, cause I think he regularly visits there. And obviously, he’s been really involved since he got out of prison in advocating for prison reform and advocating – he led the fight to get rid of non-unanimous juries in Louisiana a few years ago. So he’s doing some really remarkable work. And so that mitigated a little bit of my anxiety around it, but it was tough. And it was, for me, as a writer, I wanted to name that. I think not naming it directly, not naming that, that I felt conflicted about my presence there, would do a disservice to my attempts to capture the nature of what I was seeing and experiencing there. And so I always try to be honest in my writing; I think there’s some people who might say that it was okay, it’s ethical to write about, if you’re doing something like that in order to write about it, and bring it to people’s attention, that that’s okay. And there might be people who feel differently. So I just tried to be as honest as I could and do the best I could at honoring the lives and humanity of the folks that I met.
Josh Hoe
You went from Angola to the Confederate Soldier Cemetery at Blandford. What an interesting and potentially scary choice, especially given some of the things you witnessed there. What got you to and through that experience?
Clint Smith
It’s so interesting writing a book like this because you have an idea of the places that you think you’re going to go when you start. And, you know, I did go to some of those places, like I really wanted to go to Monticello, I really wanted to go to the Whitney and I went to both of those places and wrote about them. But I had no intention when I originally conceived of this book of going to a confederate cemetery. And I was actually going to visit, I thought I was going to write a chapter on civil war battlefields. And so I went to this Civil War battlefield memorial in Petersburg, Virginia, which is part of the larger infrastructure of the National Park Service. And I went on the tour, and I was talking to the tour guide, and I was telling him a little bit about my project. And he said, No, you should really consider going to this Confederate cemetery down the road. It might be really interesting for you to take a look at another Confederate cemetery. I went to the Confederate cemetery. And it quickly became an experience that, in so many ways, served as a sort of anchor of the book in some ways, because I think it so clearly reflected what I alluded to before, about how history is memory based on stories that we tell and stories that we hear. And that shapes our understanding of who we are in relationship to this country and this country’s history. And so I went to Blanford and I ended up spending the day. I went there for an initial visit, and then came back because I saw a flyer for Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration that was happening a few weeks after, and so I came back for that visit, or for that celebration, and had conversations with these Confederate reenactors, these Neo-Confederates, these Sons of Confederate Veterans, United Daughters of the Confederacy; I really wanted to understand how someone comes to believe so many of the things that they were espousing, that slavery wasn’t a central cause of the civil war, that slavery wasn’t even that bad, and it has been blown out of proportion that you know, that the war, the Confederacy, was just attempting to protect their way of life from Northern invasion, both physical and militaristic, as well as cultural invasion. And it’s interesting, because you’re like, all you have to do to understand what the Confederacy was about, is look at the documents that they wrote, as they were seceding, you know, a state like Mississippi in 1861 says very clearly, and directly, our position is thoroughly aligned with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interests in the world, right. So they are not vague about why they’re seceding from the union and why the war is about to be fought. They are quite clear about it. So I ended up there almost by accident but gained a lot of clarity on how the lost cause continues to manifest itself today, because again like I’ve said, it’s a story. I met a guy named Jeff and Jeff talked about how he and his grandfather used to sit in the gazebo in the middle of the cemetery. You know, it’s one of the larger Confederate cemeteries in the country, the remains of 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried there. And he would sit there with his grandfather and his grandfather would sing these songs and tell him stories about the men who were buried in this field. And then he would go on, and now he tells the same story to his granddaughters. And he tells them about the people in that land. And they sing songs, and they sit in the gazebo, and he talks about how much he loves to come at dusk and watch the deer sort of scamper through the tombstones. And for me, that is so clarifying, because it’s clear, it makes clear the emotional tenor, and the emotional texture is wrapped up in how Jeff understands the story of the Confederacy because the story of the Confederacy is wrapped up in his love and relationship to his grandfather, right. And so if he’s to, if he is to accept a different story about his grandfather, or accept a different story about the Confederacy, it would shatter so much of, so many of the stories his grandfather told him, which would shatter his understanding of who his grandfather was, which would shatter his understanding of who he believed himself to be in the world, because so much of that is informed by having been raised by this man. And so again, like I said, at the beginning, this becomes a sort of larger existential crisis for people in ways that become difficult for them to navigate. 1
Josh Hoe
How do you navigate that yourself being a black man having this conversation in this place, surrounded by people doing Confederate reenactments and things like that; it just seems like you’d almost have to be living in two spaces in your head at the same time. How did you prepare yourself mentally and psychologically for that? Or did you? What was that experience like?
Clint Smith
I went with a friend. So I didn’t go by myself. I went with a guy named William, who’s a dear friend of mine, and who’s white. And so part of it was just the logistics of making sure that I wasn’t going to something like that alone. But I’m really driven by curiosity, I didn’t want to approach these folks from an antagonistic standpoint, I didn’t want to make it feel like I was trying to attack them or do a sort of gotcha. I really wanted to ask them questions, try to understand why they believed what they believed. Because I think that if I were to have approached them with some sort of antagonism or some sort of, I’m trying to show you how wrong you are, then they’re not going to open up to me, and they’re not going to be honest. And I don’t think that does a service to my project, or what I’m trying to do or what I’m trying to learn. And so, you know, part of it was just trying to make sure, I think it’s very easy, let me say, for people like that to become these sort of two-dimensional caricatures, who people see as these sort of like, redneck, you know, backwards people who lack any sort of emotional depth or empathy. And that’s not true. That’s not a true reflection of who so many of these people are. The thing about the Sons of Confederate Veterans is that a lot of these folks are the folks who you’re in the grocery store with, and in the line at the bank with, and who might be the parent or grandparent of one of the kids your kids go to school with, who are the grandparent of the person on the soccer team or the parent; we try to make it feel as if it’s distant from us, but it’s really not. And I think it’s more helpful and more interesting and more honest, to recognize that these people are full human beings, that they are three-dimensional and complex and full of contradictions in the way that so many of us are. And they manifest themselves in what is clearly a very, really egregious, and dangerous way. But we shouldn’t run from, and I didn’t want to run from, an attempt to understand them to the extent that I could, fully as people who are making decisions that are informed by a set of familial and emotional and psychological sensibilities, that to them feel very rational, even if it doesn’t feel rational to me.
Josh Hoe
One of the stories that we’ve told ourselves for a long time is how far we’ve come since the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow. But in another powerful quote from the book, when you visit Galveston, you say: in 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Black Americans owned about 0.5% of the total wealth in the United States. Today, despite being 13% of the population, black people own less than 4% of the nation’s wealth. This year, almost concurrently with your book, Juneteenth became a national holiday. What are your feelings about the symbolic and real importance of the holiday, compared to how far we still have to go, considering what’s happening in terms of racial reckoning?
Clint Smith
I think there’s a sort of both-endedness to it. To be clear, I think Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday is important. And I think it matters, I think it matters that we have a holiday that has come to represent the end of one of the worst things we have ever done. I think we should have had this holiday 156 years ago. It is clear that in and of itself, the holiday is not enough, and I think part of what we are experiencing in this country – Black Americans particularly – is this sort of marathon of cognitive dissonance, where Juneteenth becomes the first federal holiday in over four decades. And at the same time, you have a state-sanctioned effort across state legislatures through the country, throughout the country, that are attempting to prevent teachers from teaching the very historical context from which Juneteenth arises. And so it’s this sort of weird cognitive dissonance that one experiences that is reflective of the dissonance black Americans have long felt in this country. And it can both be true that Juneteenth is important, and that, again, it is by itself, not enough, and that there need for material resources redistributed, and a different set of policy interventions and legislative interventions in order to repair the harm that black Americans have experienced. But I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter. Because that would be doing a disservice to the generations of activists, and particularly black activists in Texas, who have been fighting for this day for a long time. So I think it’s like so many things, you can say, this is a good thing, and also say that it doesn’t mean we are where we need to be.
Josh Hoe
We’ve covered a lot of ground, but people should know that we haven’t even really scratched the surface of the book. You also visit my birthplace, New York City, and finally, Goree Island, Senegal. I guess, to conclude about the book, the book is called How the Word is Passed; How do you, after all this journey, feel that the word should best be passed, for lack of a better way of putting it?
Clint Smith
I think part of it is that we have to be honest, you have to be honest, about what happened here. And I just think about how – I talked about Jeff, how he tells his granddaughters the same story that his grandfather told him. And I think we have to recognize that a different story needs to be told, right? Like, what would it look like if Jeff, instead of perpetuating the myths and the lies of what the Confederacy was to his granddaughters, what if instead, when they walked around that cemetery hand in hand, he looked around and he looked at them and he said, these are your ancestors, they fought a war, a terrible thing. And you should recognize that you do not have to be defined by that. You are not your legacy,or who you are in the world, is not singularly shaped by the decisions that these people made. And you can make a different set of decisions. You can be part of telling a different, more honest story. And I think that there’s so many of us who can. We can tell a different story about why this country looks the way that it does today so that we better understand that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is not simply because of the people in those communities. But it’s because of what has been done to those communities, generation after generation after generation. And I think that better understanding our history, better understanding our proximity to that history, and better understanding how that history has informed our present allows us to more fully understand, again, why our society looks the way that it does, and to understand that it’s not an accident, that it is the very direct and sort of logical result of a lot of decisions that have been made over time.
Josh Hoe
So this year, I’ve been asking people if there are any criminal justice-related books they might recommend to others. Do you have any personal favorites?
Clint Smith
Yeah, I just read Halfway Home by Reuben. And it’s just like, this is one of the best. You know, my dissertation was on the relationship between education and incarceration. I hosted a criminal justice podcast, alongside Josie Duffy Rice, and so I’ve read a lot of these books, I think a lot about these things. And there’s such a remarkable, robust landscape of literature and scholarly work that so many journalists and activists and scholars have done. But Reuben’s book – Reuben Jonathan Miller – man, that book was, it was just doing something that I had never seen before. I mean, it was kind of – a couple of the reviews have said this, but it’s like a sort of sociological memoir. Because Reuben’s own family and his brother were incarcerated. And, he writes about that, in the book, alongside the sort of long-term qualitative study that he engages in, and is putting his experience with his brother in conversation with his research. And it has this really beautiful method section at the end, where he rejects the idea that his proximity to this issue, by nature of his family members being incarcerated, somehow prevents him from looking at it in ways that are, quote-unquote. And that proximity is something that allows him to tell a story in ways that provide another level of emotional and psychological texture to help readers better understand the impact and the intimacy of the impact of mass incarceration and the afterlife of mass incarceration, after somebody is released, have on the people who love them. And so it was just so thoughtful and so rigorous and so beautifully written. It is one of my – in the sort of criminal justice canon – it has quickly moved up the ranks for me. So Halfway Home by Reuben Jonathan Miller was really, really excellent.
Josh Hoe
It’s such a weird experience for me because it’s one of the few books I’ve read, where literally every person but about two in the book that he describes are people that I know. So it was really a weird thing to read that kind of a book for me, but amazing. So before we wrap up, I thought I would ask a soccer question. We have the Euro Final Gold Cup, Olympics, World Cup qualifying. And of course, Ted Lasso Season 2, all on deck. What are you looking forward to?
Clint Smith
Oh, man, shout out to Ted Lasso, I love that show. Really, just like some of the most endearing characters on television right now. I don’t know when this is gonna come out, but the Euro Final is on this coming Sunday. And you know, I actually just wrote a piece for this, for The Atlantic, that will come out either today or tomorrow, about how I find myself rooting for England, in ways that I don’t always fully understand. I think part of it is because I’ve been following British soccer teams for such a long time. But part of it is also because the British soccer team or the English soccer team is full of so many immigrants now, like so many immigrants from the Caribbean, so many immigrants from West Africa, and that the team sort of demographically has come to represent like a “new” England and a sort of England that people – obviously most clearly through Brexit – are often afraid of. And that this team also, just like the players, really, really beautifully advocate for a more just and equitable world in their various individual and team capacities, they do a lot of work on racial justice, LGBTQ rights, homelessness, school lunches for children, all sorts of things. And so I find myself really inspired by those guys. And yeah I hope they win. I hope, as they say, that it comes home. And then obviously very hyped for the US Women’s National Team. I’m their biggest fan, President of the Fan Club. And the Olympics, hope that they can hold it down. There has just been a lot of good soccer, the Copa America finals coming up, Brazil versus Argentina, there’s a lot of good soccer this summer. So I am just trying to do my best to let my editors allow me to write about it so that I can say that I’m watching soccer for work.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question: what did I mess up? What question should I have asked but did not?
Clint Smith
I don’t I don’t think there’s anything you should have asked or messed up on. This has been a real pleasure. And I’m excited to have finally been able to sit down with you.
Josh Hoe
Is there anywhere, in particular, you’d like people to find you online, or a particular place you’d like them to find the book?
Clint Smith
I hope that people will buy the book from independent bookstores. Loyalty Bookstore in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, Maryland, which is my local bookstore, carry signed copies. And it’s a local black-owned, queer-owned independent bookstore. And so if you are interested in supporting black bookstores, then please consider buying from them. And you can find me at Clint Smith Third, @clintsmithiii, basically everywhere: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, my website.
Josh Hoe
Thanks so much for doing this. It was really a pleasure to have you on. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.
And now my take.
This was in many ways one of the most challenging interviews I’ve ever done, not because of anything that Clint did or said. But because I had so many questions that I wanted to ask, and only one hour to ask all of those questions. I hope I was able to give you a good overview of his amazing book, and inspire you to read what is clearly going to be one of the most important books of the year.
Right now, as I’m recording this, there are a group of people carrying out a hunger strike at the Moose Lake Facility in Minnesota, a place where people who have already served their entire sentences are detained indefinitely under a questionable legal doctrine called civil commitment. Some of you might recall that I did an episode about this several years ago. Since 1994,of the 743 people committed to Moose Lake, only 14 have been released. All but 14 have been kept in legal limbo, many of them for decades, based on some pseudoscience, suggesting that they are legally dangerous and therefore can be detained. The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, the organization of people who specialize in this area, do not believe this is a valid practice. This is pseudoscience, and people are essentially detained, perhaps forever, not because they committed a crime, but because someone is afraid they might commit a crime in the future. And so even though they have already served their actual sentence, they are often never released. How bad is this? As the Perilous Chronicle put it in a recent article: To date, 89 people have died while in the MSOP (Minnesota Sex Offender Program) aking it six times more likely that a detainee will die in the facility than be discharged without provisions; six times more likely that a detainee will die in the facility, die for something that is not a crime, than be discharged without provisions. There is almost no difference between what is happening in Moose Lake and what was shown in the movie Minority Report. This is future crime. And it’s even more pseudoscientific than the psychics in that film. Look, here’s the bottom line. I know people hate the kind of crimes committed here. But every single one of these people already served their sentences for those crimes. These laws allow these people to be held indefinitely for crimes they never commit. An English poet once coined the term “lawless law” to describe law that is inherently corrosive to the legitimacy of law itself, that people can be detained simply because a government entity believes that they are dangerous. And this is basically what’s happening here. Nobody is safe. What is unpopular can quickly become what is considered dangerous, and due process is what protects us all from tyranny. This cannot stand, and we should all be standing in solidarity with the people at Moose Lake during this hunger strike.
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