Clint Smith on Telling the Truth About America’s History
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. In an executive order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," President Trump targeted the Smithsonian. Under the order, exhibits that "divide Americans" will be defunded, including portrayals of race and racism at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

We talked to Clint Smith, Atlantic staff writer and author of How the Word is Passed, a reckoning with the history of slavery across America about the battle over how American history is told. Talk coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrival.

What does it mean to tell the truth about American history? The Trump administration's executive order targeting the Smithsonian bashed the organization for an exhibit that stated that, quote, "Societies, including the United States, have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement." Is it ideological to say this?

It is to any real standard of evidence absolutely true. We're talking about a country, ours, that built chattel slavery atop a new and emerging idea about racial groups. There is no disputing that.

We want to talk about history, our history, the telling of our history this morning. And we have the perfect guest. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of How the Word is Passed, a deep and rich and invigorating and depressing book about how the history of slavery is memorialized in this country from Monticello to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Welcome to Forum, Clint. It's so good to be here.

So I just want people to know what's in this Trump executive order, you know, called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Says basically, you know, it is the policy of my administration to restore federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums.

Two solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect union, an unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. I just want to hear that. Like, what do you think?

First off, I just I think it's strange that we would only want to tell or that there are people who would only want to tell a singular story of America's greatness in ways that are inconsistent with with any country in world history and inconsistent in the way that we conceive of ourselves. Right. So as a person, as a human being.

There are things in my life I've done that I am proud of. And there are things in my life that I've done that I wish I could do better. Mistakes that I've made. Things that I'm not proud of. And America is the same thing. America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their ancestors could have never imagined.

And has 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. You can't just pick one and not the other. You can't tell this story, not that story. You have to hold the cognitive dissonance of America, the contradictions of our country, the sort of inconsistency of our aspirations and our actions all at once.

in the same way that we do for ourselves, in the same that we do for our loved ones, because we are three-dimensional, complex, contradictory human beings. And it is hundreds of millions of us who make up this contradictory, complicated country. And so just on a sort of basic level, it seems bizarre that we would hold this country to a standard that we don't hold ourselves or our loved ones to.

You know, the executive order is sort of all over the place. I mean, on the one hand, it says, you know, we're the greatest country, this great democracy. And on the other hand, the administration doesn't want any history that would make people feel bad or is divisive. I mean, when you whitewash history in that way, like, what would you even call that kind of narrative?

I think it is a narrative that is attempting to justify the contemporary landscape of social, political, and economic inequality as a sort of inevitability, as something that is a sort of natural state of the world. But what happens when you understand

the history of inequality, what happens when you understand, you know, so many of the things that are documented in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, when you understand that the, you know, in 1860, 4 million enslaved, the 4 million enslaved black people in this country were more than all the manufacturing in America combined. When you understand that the New Deal, the sort of great catalyst of intergenerational wealth over the course of the 20th century, that sort of

turbocharged millions of Americans into the middle class in ways that were previously unimaginable.

When you understand that the greatest catalyst of intergenerational wealth over the course of a century was given to white people and largely not given those same opportunities, Social Security, the GI Bill, so many other benefits of the New Deal weren't given to black people primarily in the South where black people were so saturated and primarily located. When you understand the history of housing segregation and redlining and the ways in which so many black people

people were systemically prevented from having access to homes that would accrue wealth and allow them to pass on intergenerational wealth to their homes. I mean, these are just three sort of examples across history, but the list goes on and on and on. And so what happens is if you don't understand those things,

then you look at the world and you start to believe that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is somehow because of the people in those communities rather than because of what has been done to those communities or extracted from those communities generation after generation after generation. And so a failure to understand history creates a failure to understand the world that we live in today and a failure to understand why racial inequality is as uneven in a contemporary context as it is today.

You know, one of the things I loved about your book is that you have all these interactions with white people who are encountering this history, perhaps for the first time. You know, maybe you could talk to us a little bit about the beginning of how the word has passed, where you go to Monticello and you kind of get a...

three-dimensional picture of Thomas Jefferson as a person, as a slave owner, as a leader, and the effect that it has on the people who go on this tour with you. Yeah, I've been thinking, you know, my book came out four years ago now, but I've been thinking about it a lot recently because we've been adapting obviously everything that's been going on, but in part as a result of what's been going on, we've been adapting it into a young reader's edition that'll be out in September. And so I've been spending the last year or so trying to to

to take this idea, this project and make it relevant and applicable and appropriate for people 10 and above. And so you're catching me at a particularly good time because I just reread the Monticello chapter this morning. And so when I go to Monticello, you know, most people know that Monticello is the home of Thomas Jefferson. He is the third president of the United States, one of the sort of intellectual founding fathers of this country.

And I went there because I think that Monticello is in so many ways, or Jefferson, rather, is in so many ways a sort of microcosm of the cognitive dissonance of America. As I just said, America is a place that has provided

Remarkable opportunities for millions of people across generations. But those opportunities have often come at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people. And I think Jefferson embodies that cognitive dissonance. 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 is someone who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and wrote in his book, his sort of manifesto notes on the state of Virginia, that black people were inherently inferior to white people in both endowments of body and mind, as he put it.

the slave was incapable of love to the same extent their white counterparts were, incapable of presenting or sustaining complex emotion. Phyllis Wheatley, the sort of foremother of African-American letters, the first black woman to publish a book of poetry in the history of this country, and said that her work was below the dignity of criticism, that it wasn't even worth engaging with because he didn't believe that black people had the emotional or intellectual capacity with which to create art.

And so I think about that, and I think about how that's a version of Jefferson that I was never taught. And so when I go to Monticello, part of what I'm trying to understand is how does this institution that is dedicated itself to telling the story of Jefferson, how are they, which story about Jefferson are they telling? Are they telling the

the sort of great man on the Shining Hill upon whom Noah Spurgeon should be cast, or are they telling the more complicated story and more honest story, the more empirically grounded story, the fuller story? And so I'm there and I'm on a tour with a guy named

David is this older white gentleman, very professorial disposition, and he is leading this tour and there's about 12 of us on it. And he talks about, this is the Slavery at Monticello tour, so there are multiple tours you can take in Monticello, and this is one that's specifically focused on slavery.

And David is really presenting a lot of the information, a lot of the letters Jefferson wrote, a lot of the things he said on notes on the state of Virginia, many of the things that I just shared about how Jefferson feels about slavery. And as I was here watching David give this presentation, I was also watching these two women who were

standing next to me and their names were Donna and Grace. And as David was saying all these things that Jefferson said about black people in slavery, their faces turned white, their mouths hung agape. They were clearly unsettled by what they were hearing. And so I went up to them after and I introduced myself and I said, you know, it seems like you were really unsettled by so much of what David was saying. I'd love to hear what you thought. And I'll always remember Donna turned around and she was just like,

Man, he really took the shine off the guy. She was just like, I had no idea Monticello was a plantation. I had no idea Jefferson owned slaves. I had no idea who Sally Hemings was. And these are folks who bought plane tickets, rented cars, got hotel rooms, who came to this site as a sort of pilgrimage to see the home of one of our founding fathers and yet had no idea that he was an enslaver. And that was such an important moment for me because it was a reminder that even just a few years ago, amid the sort of social upheaval

transformation brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement and how so much of our society talks about race and history, that even amid that, there were still so many people who don't understand the relationship of slavery to our founding and don't understand the relationship of slavery to our founding fathers. And again, when you misunderstand or don't even begin to understand the relationship between slavery and our founding, then you fail to fully understand America as it exists today.

I mean, there's also this sort of sad echo in what your grandmother told you about what she was taught in school, too, that she wasn't really taught the history of black people at all, really, except as sort of a an adjunct to this larger story of white America.

Absolutely, yeah. My grandmother was born in 1939, Florida, and sort of shared with me so much of the story of her childhood and her upbringing during Jim Crow in this state. And there was this part of... There's a sort of shame that she felt for having been taught herself as a young black child that

there was something wrong with black people or that Africa was that black people were rescued from Africa that slavery somehow helpful to black people in a global context because it rescued black people from the savagery and the backwardsness of Africa and brought them into this would have like white Anglo Saxon Judeo Christian civilization of the United States and and it was so strange to hear her that shame but it was so revealing at the same time yeah

We're talking about the Trump administration's efforts to eradicate, quote, improper ideology in National Museums curriculum and history. We're joined by Clint Smith, poet and Atlantic staff writer. His books include How the Word Has Passed and The Poetry Collection Above Ground. I want to hear from you. What history are you afraid might be erased by Trump's order? 866-733-6786. Forum at KQED.org. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the Trump administration's efforts to eradicate what they're calling improper ideology in national museums, curriculum in American historical institutions. We're joined by Clint Smith, who's a poet and Atlantic staff writer. His books include How the Word is Passed and The Poetry Collection Above Ground.

We'd love to hear from you. Maybe you work in an institution that might be targeted or has been targeted by this executive order. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786.

What history are you worried might be obscured by Trump's order? Give us a call. 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media. We're on Blue Sky and on Instagram. We're KQED Forum, or you can join the Discord community, of course.

I want to talk a little bit about the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. It's a place that you've been to a bunch of times, of course. But just to connect to what you were saying before the break with your grandmother, one of the things that really struck me about the passage in your book in which you're kind of

Talking about this history how it's presented there how it Presents in your grandmother's presentation to you She says and you kind of use this refrain of you know, I lived it. I lived it And one of the most disturbing things about this order to me is that there are all kinds of marginalized people Who have lived through these histories and know that they are real? That will no longer

see that reflected in our national institutions? And I've just been trying to think through, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on sort of like what you think that does to people to see that kind of erasure. Oh, I mean, I think it has a hugely harmful impact on their sense of self, their sense of the value of their own history.

I mean, you know, as to sort of build on your point, you know, I was walking through the National Museum of African American History and Culture with my grandparents the first time that I visited with them. This is a few years ago now. And I was pushing my grandfather in his wheelchair.

And his cane is laid across his lap. He's born in 1930, Jim Crow, Mississippi. And my grandmother, as I said, born in 1939, Jim Crow, Florida, walking a few paces ahead of us. And we were walking through this museum. And I had this moment where I was watching them look at the exhibits in the museum and see the casket of Emmett Till and see the photos of lynchings that exist that line the walls and to see the...

to hear the stories of people who were talking about their experience living through Jim Crow. And my grandmother, when I asked her about it later, she had this refrain that you alluded to, and she kept saying, I lived it. I lived it. I lived it.

And for me, you know, the thing that I think all the time about, and I wrote this in the essay recently about the Smithsonian for the Atlantic, is that the woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture was a woman named Ruth Bonner. And she rang the bell alongside the Obama family in 2016 to sort of signal the opening of this museum. And it's so striking because Ruth Bonner is the daughter of

of a man who was born into slavery. Not the granddaughter, not the great-granddaughter. The woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a woman whose father was born into slavery. And my grandfather's grandfather

Was enslaved so in my you know six year old and seven year old sit on my grandfather's lap I imagined my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's land and I'm just reminded that this history We tell ourselves was a long time ago simply wasn't that long ago at all I mean slavery existed in this country for about 250 years and has only not existed for you know a little bit over 150 and so you have an institution and

that existed for almost a century longer than it hasn't. An institution in which there are still people alive today who knew, who loved, who were raised by people born into chattel slavery. And so the idea that some would suggest that that history has nothing to do with the contemporary landscape of inequality or that history is irrelevant to our contemporary social, political and economic infrastructure.

they're being morally and intellectually disingenuous because it has everything to do with the world we live in today. And so when you seek to extract those artifacts that represent that history from museums, when you seek to remove those stories from our textbooks, when you try to ban books that explain that history from our classrooms,

And certainly it harms the people who experienced it, but those stories are going to be with them forever. They know what happened. They know what they lived through. The much more harmful thing is what happens to all the people who don't feel proximate to that history. What happens to all the people for whom this is a sort of historical or intellectual abstraction rather than something that continues to impact the lives of people who are still with us today.

Yeah, I mean, just thinking about the Bay Area and our communities here, I mean, nothing makes sense if you don't understand the way that redlining and segregation worked in these communities, you know?

You could just look around and you say well Why does this place look like this and you'd have if you if you extract that component like it literally you can't make sense of it It's an constitutive of our reality now, and I think that the reason so many people Whether some are consciously cognizant of this and for some it's a sort of unconscious state of being but I think the reason so many people and specifically so many white people in America are fearful of Having to tell a new story about discrimination

this country or wary of having to tell a new story about this country or uneasy about it is because it also means that then you have to tell a new story about yourself. And when you have to tell a new story about yourself, you have to question your sort of position within the sort of larger social, political and economic ecosystem. And so part of my contention is that part of what the Trump administration is attempting to do is to

remove the history. The necessity of a new story. Exactly. And tell people that actually you don't have to tell yourself a new story. You can keep the story that you were telling. Even if that story is distorted, dishonest, misrepresents the truth, doesn't include the multiple layers of truth that exist across this country.

Because then you're able to say, "Oh, the reason I do have this or the reason I don't have that is because of this group of people or is because I worked really hard and this group of people didn't." But if you don't understand, if your only conception of why you have something and other people don't is because you believe that you worked hard or you were told a story that you worked hard or your parents worked hard or your grandparents worked hard and that other people's grandparents or parents or themselves did not.

then it allows you to make up a story about what you deserve, your sense of value, in a way that does not represent, again, the fact that you can have two people who work equally as hard, but if they're starting from fundamentally different backgrounds,

different social and economic context and have fundamentally different sort of intergenerational backing or lack thereof, then that hard work will manifest itself in fundamentally different ways. But again, when you tell a new story about Jefferson, it means you have to tell a new story about America. When you tell a new story about America, it means you have to tell a new story about yourself. When you tell a new story about yourself, it means you have to tell a new story about

Just who you are in the world like you're it's your it's the it becomes a fundamental question of identity and for many people that serves as catalyst to a sort of existential crisis that they don't want to engage with but the truth is we all grow up with

hearing stories from people we love and then we get older and we realize that some of those stories aren't true and it is up to us the onus is on us to sort of unlearn and unwind ourselves from these stories some of which may have occurred in good faith many of which occurred in bad faith but it is our responsibility to say actually that is not reflective of reality and and as a

a person who wants to move through the world with honesty and generosity and grace and humility, I should understand fully the history of my community, the history of my family, and the ways that different facets of my own identity shape how I move through the world relative to other people. Love that. Let's bring in some callers here. Let's bring in Gregory in San Francisco. Welcome, Gregory.

Hi, thank you so much. First of all, to Mr. Smith, this is bringing catharsis to just listen to you speak in today's reality. I wanted to share a little bit of a story that I think speaks to the theme about telling the truth. And specifically, I love how you're talking about the complexity of even good people or

people who want to do well might be caught up in this one-sided story versus multiple truths. My son is a beautiful black boy in middle school, and we have constantly been struggling with how to support him in a school that he appreciates with friends where the N-word is constantly said and unaddressed.

And most recently, he, after years of this and constantly negotiating with the school, you know, he actually lost his temper at one point and used the N-word, again, not surprisingly in the context, but also as a way of sort of pushing back.

And he was quickly given the consequence that he had to provide apologies to the teachers that heard it and apologies to all the students that heard it, which was he, it was not lost on him, the irony that he was the one who was held accountable for it. And so what we did

to your theme about telling the truth and what truth we're afraid to lose was we're like, no, you should have consequences. We don't want you, you know, doing things that are going to put you at risk. But we actually sat as a family and researched the history of the N word. And we said, that has to be part of your apology. Like if, if, if, if this is happening isolated from education about the power, the purpose, the history, then we'll use this as an opportunity to do that. It's a shame that as a,

middle school student he had to be the one to do it but this is what's happening when we are erasing our education and our museums and our arts and so I just wanted to share that story thank you so much yeah Gregor appreciate that I mean I also worry Clint kids young people right now are

where they're getting their history, where they're getting their culture. There's this sort of incredibly uneasy place in American culture right now where black culture is widespread and consumed by everybody. But maybe black history is not in quite the same way. And so people are consuming culture that's built on histories and legacies and communities that they're not actually a part of and don't totally understand.

And it has it has worried me, you know, just like this, the combination of this great visibility and popularity of some parts of black life, but not all of them. I think that's absolutely right. And so well put. I mean, black culture is is ubiquitous. Black culture is is the sort of.

In so many ways is a sort of glue that brings That holds this country culturally certainly Together is the thing that is that we are sort of known around the world for it so much of our music so much of our fashion so much of the entertainment industry is is interlinked with or directly reflective of black culture But you but there is a real

about, you know, what does it mean for a country to, for black culture to be so ubiquitous, but black history to be constantly under threat. And, you know, it's an interesting, it brings up a sort of

larger question of like, how do you tell the story of black life in this country? Um, which is, I think something that, uh, that people of, of good faith who really want to, like, you know, it sounds like this father and so many others and so many teachers and people I know and myself, you know, uh, someone who's taught black children, who's raising black children, who, uh, how do you tell the story of black life in ways that, that,

reflect the complexity and the duality and the heterogeneity of the black experience, which is to say, I grew up in New Orleans in the sort of 80s and 90s, and I was not taught blackness.

black history or the history of slavery, for example, in a way that was at all commensurate with the impact and legacy that it left on this country. I remember as a kid growing up being inundated with all these messages about all the things that were wrong with black people, that the reason there was so much violence and poverty and crime in New Orleans was because of something black people have done or failed to do.

And I was inundated with these messages and I didn't have the language or the historical context or the intellectual toolkit with which to push back against it. So what happens is when you're a kid especially and you're inundated with these messages from politicians, from celebrities, from the news, from media, I will remember being like, "I know this is wrong, but I don't really know how to say that it's wrong, so maybe

Some of it is right. It gets very confusing. And what happens is that you begin to internalize some of this information about you, about your loved ones, about your community. And it wasn't until so many years later when I read books and watched films and encountered artists and journalists and scholars who gave me the language to fully understand the history of this country and the history of black life in this country and what black people have experienced that I was able to sort of

rid myself of a sort of intellectual paralysis that I think had had a hold on me for so long and so so In saying that it is so so so important for us to teach black children all children all people about the history of Subjugation and violence and oppression that black people have experienced. It is also profoundly important for us not to fall into the trap of

suggesting that black life in this country is singularly defined by that history. Because what we know is that black life is far more robust than that, far more expansive than that, far more joyful than that, viewed with resistance and

And so when I teach my own kids, you know, I have a six-year-old and a seven-year-old, you know, their little library is full of books of, you know, there's Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And there's also little books about the little boy who wants to grow up and be a scientist and the little black girl who wants to grow up and be a doctor and the little black child who wants to grow up and be a Pokemon, right? Like all of it. You know, you got to, I want them to understand that their lives are only...

I want them to understand a history that I did not necessarily understand and to grow up with that context. And I also want them to know that their lives are not tethered to that history and that they can, that they're only limited by, their futures are only limited by their imaginations. You too can evolve into Charizard. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, now there's so many, when I was a kid, there was 150 Pokemon. Now there's like a million. I can't keep up.

Let's bring in Laurent in San Francisco. Welcome. Lawrence, is that the name? Oh, Laurent. Hey. Hi, my name's Lawrence. I'm in San Francisco. And I wanted to just validate what Clint Smith was saying around how recent the history of slavery is. My dad, he was born in 1946.

A lot of the families that were enslaved did not leave the land after abolition and they stayed as sharecroppers. My dad, who was born in 46, was born on the same land as his enslaved ancestors and picked cotton as a child. And that's just one generation away from me. I'm in my mid-50s. So that influenced my life. Yeah.

And so it's not so far back. And that's influenced my family dynamics. The other piece of it is our history is just flat interesting. If you were able to step back and just look at it dispassionately without the emotion, it's an interesting history that we need to preserve. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Lawrence, I really appreciate that. Sorry about your name there. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Clint, these points of just the closeness of this history always really hit for me because people do want to pack it away. And even the way that we present history, you know, black and white photographs,

you know, of Little Rock or Selma or whatever, when we also have Kodachrome of those same eras, you know, bright colors, you know, it's almost like this history gets presented as something that is deep in the past when really it's right near the surface. - No, I mean, we talk about the history of slavery like it's something that happened in the Jurassic period. Like it was the dinosaurs, the Flintstones and slavery all at the same time. And it's so, again, I cannot emphasize enough

That there are people who are alive now who knew and loved and were raised by people born into bondage. I mean, the thing that I cite in my book and that many scholars of slavery use as a way to explain.

present first person testimonies of people who lived through slavery is the Federal Writers Project. And the Federal Writers Project was part of the sort of larger landscape of... WPA. Yeah, the WPA, the New Deal legislation. It was hiring writers to go out and interview people of different walks of life. And one of those areas was hiring for...

Formerly enslaved people. And so they did this in the late 1930s. But again, like thinking about the late 1930s, there were people who lived through slavery who were being sharing their story about enslavement. And this is this is not that long ago. This is 1938. We're talking with Clint Smith about history at a time when the Trump administration is going after museums and that what they call the teaching of improper ideology. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here.

We're talking about museums, history, American history, black history, and the Trump administration. Joined by Clint Smith, poet and Atlantic staff writer, his books include How the Word is Passed and The Poetry Collection Above Ground. I want to add another guest into our conversation. Keejo Lee is Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs at MOAD, the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco. Welcome.

Thank you so much, Alexis. It's wonderful to be speaking with you. Yeah. So people may or may not know, but some grants have been cut to Moab. Do you want to just give us that little capsule history of what's happened so far for you all?

Absolutely. So MOAD, like many other museums, has been pretty deeply impacted by the elimination of IMLS or the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences funding. And so at MOAD in particular, it supports two of our major programs, one being our Emerging Artists Program, which serves Black Bay Area artists by offering them

a $10,000 honorarium, usually their first ever solo exhibition in a museum context, curatorial support, as well as travel stipend and other things, and as well as our Moet in the Classroom or MIC initiative, which serves Title I schools. Yeah.

So when you read the Trump executive orders, I mean, there's been multiple in this field, but, you know, this one specifically, what's it like for you as you read the actual language of how this order has been presented?

Well, I mean, it feels, you know, very directed at American histories that they are looking, they are targeting and hoping to erase and or efface. And this is something that I can speak from a particularly Black perspective has been part and parcel of what

institutions like MoAT are hoping to unpack. So when I hear the language, when I see those lists of quote unquote eliminated words, which include things like Black inclusive, you know, at moments in which we have an administration that's declaring the end of Black History Month as we are celebrating Black History Month. It is simultaneously, I think,

ironic, unsurprising, as well as fueling for, you know, activating us to continue to do the work that we do. I mean, there's no way for a Museum of the African Diaspora to not be Black.

And to not to think about enslavement and its afterlives, right? But also, we are so significant in attending to the fact that trauma is not our only generational inheritance. So too is joy.

And so I think that in hearing the ways in which our history is being described as unpatriotic, when in fact at the soul of patriotism is critique at the heart of love, is the ability to look at the one that you love and to say, we are going astray.

To your point about surprise, Jed writes in to say, it's tragic, comically sad we're forced to have these conversations in 2025. I'm an 83-year-old black man, an artist influenced by Amiri Baraka, and I'm pretty sure that W.E. Du Bois and Malcolm X wouldn't be surprised. What about your response at the museum there? Are you going to change things? Smithsonian is in a tough spot. We haven't really been hearing a lot from the people running that museum. But how about you all?

Yes, I mean, we plan to continue the work that we have been doing undeterred. And so for our part, we've joined with other museums in Northern California, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, SFMOMA, Asian Art Museum and others.

to respond to these cuts to IMLS and to express how they undermine the essential role that many US institutions serve. So we do not plan to change the work that we're doing. In fact, I feel that we are even more committed to that work as programs for underserved communities are being cut so significantly. - Let's bring in another caller. Let's bring in Leo in Palo Alto. Welcome, Leo.

Hi, this is Leo Palo Alto, and I wanted to add a story, a historical story. It doesn't have to do with black history, but it has to do with my family's history about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. My grandmother was incarcerated in a camp in World War II based on her race, and I see a lot of parallels between that

And what the current administration is doing with immigrants today, and I'm worried that that history is going to get erased, and we're just going to replicate those same mistakes. I already see ourselves replicating those mistakes right now. Yeah. And, yeah. Yeah, no, that's a good... I just want to add that it's not...

It's not just our, I mean, black history, Asian history, I mean, it's all American history and a lot of shameful things that happened in the past. And we just have to work together to make sure all of our history is, you know, preserved so we just don't replicate those mistakes of the past. Yeah.

You know, just on on this topic, you know, Katie writes as an immigrant Chinese American, I'm afraid that the Asian community's history will also be diminished. I'm afraid that Angel Island will not exist. All the writings on the wall that will never be seen in the public eye. The struggle for a better life of people. Remember last week's show on Thursday. I'm afraid that we will not acknowledge all the contributions all ethnic people have contributed to make this country great and prosperous.

Clint Smith, do you want to just respond to a couple of these things, sort of the interweaving of different communities' histories? No, absolutely. I mean, I've been thinking about this actually for a while now. My next book is about World War II memory. And so, How the Word is Passed is thinking a lot about the memory of slavery in the U.S. or lack thereof. And so, this book is taking a similar conceit, a travel all over the world, Japan, Korea, Germany,

England, France, Argentina, and then domestically travel to Arizona, spend time with former Navajo code talkers. And then in California, I went to Manzanar. And Manzanar is one of the internment camps in California, one of the places where Japanese and Japanese Americans were incarcerated.

And I went last year to a pilgrimage, an annual pilgrimage that the Japanese American community holds in honor of their families who were held in Manzanar. And it was so remarkable because one of the most beautiful things about it

was the way that this community so intentionally puts their experience in conversation with the experience of so many others, right? And so the speakers included black Americans and they put the sort of struggle for Japanese American reparations in conversation with the struggle for black American reparations. There were Palestinians there. There were Palestinians.

people from different immigrant communities there, there were undocumented people there, there were... And so there's a very intentional effort from many of the survivors and descendants of Japanese and Japanese Americans who were incarcerated to recognize that what happened to them does not exist in isolation, right? And you hear this now, you hear, you know, as our guest just said, you know, people who are seeing the parallels, who are literally seeing the

the law that was invoked in order to incarcerate their family members being invoked to deport people today without due process. And then, you know, so many people who are descendants of black people who are black people themselves recognize the history of,

you know, slave catching and slave catchers and the ways that people, during the fugitive slave law, that people could come into communities from the South and snatch black people up from the street. And it didn't matter if they were

formerly enslaved or if they had been free and lived in New York their entire lives, that there was no due process, that there was no, that you were just, you were rendered criminal because of the color of your skin, because of your identity, because of your background. And we see this throughout history. And so I think the heartening thing is that communities across ranges of difference are recognizing the interconnectedness of their experiences and drawing solidarity from that.

You know, Keejo Lee, I was wondering, given the international context that Clint's mentioning here,

When you see what the Trump administration is doing here in the US and you kind of look across the diaspora and the nations in which African people with their roots in Africa have found themselves, do you see any parallels to what other countries have done to try to erase or bring this history forward? Are there any interesting kind of comparative cases?

That's a really great question. I think that having spent some time on the African continent, in many countries there is this striving to bring one's cultural identity

to the fore, right? And sometimes with an opposite opposition. So I would say I'm thinking of places like DRC where there's a striving to have this liberatory potential be expressed in the consistency of resistance, right? To authoritarian rule with an equal and opposite, right?

undermining of that intent happening. I think it happens across the world. I think about the ways in which Haitian revolutionary tendencies are undermined by this idea that they are somehow inferior to and

and the complications between what goes on in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, right? So there are these ways in which there are two narratives competing on a single tiny

And so I think that we see that there are always, and especially through art and with artists, that they are the ones who are the truth tellers, who are revealing and who are truly making a visual record of not only what has taken place, but how we can imagine the world otherwise, right? In tandem. So these ways in which a government entity or a,

may want to suppress that voice. It is indeed the role of museums to stand up and to not to necessarily fall on one side or the other, either it is to be able to present in full

these histories and legacies. And I just wanna point out that the, and acknowledge that none of this exists in a vacuum, right? So even as I'm recounting these ideas of what's happening with black people across the world, I can also think about what happens in say conflicts in Southern India about who gets to claim what rights

who gets to represent, right, Indian mess. And so I think that there are these complications that happen globally and that there has to be a coalition around how we can and how it is always better to sit with the truth than to try to erase it. Kee Jolie, Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Clint, I'm going to bring in one more call for you here. Nirali in San Diego. Welcome. Hi, Alex. Thank you so much for taking my call. Yeah, I'm going to...

I just, I guess maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I'd love to hear that at the beginning of a call. Yeah. Go ahead. You know, at least you don't give it a prompt. But, I mean, I love this conversation. I think it's fantastic and wonderful that we're having these. But my pessimistic voice

right now is that, you know, these are... We're intellectually competent humans that are having this conversation. And I'd like to believe that the audience of Forum, you know, is also these intellectually competent humans. And, you know, we're having these discussions. We all know, or at least I would like to assume that we know how important Black history is, how important not whitewashing history. We know this. But we're not having...

This is not about the people who understand this. Like the people, there is a huge population that doesn't care. They don't care. They would rather believe their revisionist history. It is convenient. I mean, if your grandmother, say, was like part of the Little Rock, like in the history books, yelling and screaming at the children, then, you know, that wasn't old history, like someone was saying earlier.

If they're given an excuse or a reason to not have to acknowledge that, then why not, right? I mean, I think we're having these conversations, and it's hard because it makes me really upset, of course, that all of this is happening, but then at the same time, I'm like,

So we're just sitting in a circle talking about this stuff, but what are we going to do about it? Because this is, you know, what are we going to do about it? Because we can sit here and try and fund the museums. We can have the conversations, but are we having conversations with people who are not willing to listen? Niral, I appreciate that. I want to give you a chance. What do you think?

Yeah, no, I take her concern seriously. I mean, and I think that part of what we need to recognize is that one of the, we're talking about the Smithsonian broadly in this conversation, but there are so many, I mean, we, one of your guests just, you know, came on and is running a local iteration of a museum and that,

But those museums of black history and black historical sites and black life don't only exist in California and San Francisco and Washington, D.C. They exist across America. But these are the museums whose funding is so precarious, whose existence is so precarious, you know, in the proverbial middle America, in the Midwest, in the South. It is these places that are often the places where

For example, the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, which is a place that I talk about in my book, one of the first and only plantation sites in this country that is singularly dedicated to telling the story of that plantation from the perspective of enslaved people.

It had its funding, federal funding, stripped away recently. And that is a place where people in—it's an hour outside of New Orleans. It is not in a sort of hub, metro, metropolitan hub. But it is a place where if a teacher brings their students there, they are encountering slavery in a way that they might not—

and being made proximate to it in a profound, profound way. And I want to say that there are so many teachers. I know it doesn't always feel this way when we have this sort of macro political conversations and are looking at things in red states, blue states in the aggregate. But there are so many teachers in, you know, ostensibly red states who recognize

Who really want to do their jobs well and not because of an ideological project but as we started this conversation Because it's an honest project right like that's the that's the whole thing about what we've been talking about This is not and should not be reflective of like one's ideological disposition and one's political position These are just people who are trying to tell the truth and there are so many teachers in states throughout throughout the south in states that voted for trump and states that um

You know, there are many people who want to do their jobs well, who want to tell the truth, who want to give students all the information with which to make informed decisions. And these museums and these historical sites play an enormously important role in their pedagogy. And so I think to the extent that we can continue to support those institutions, but also it shows why it's so important on a local level, on a municipal level, on a state level, to ensure that we are working to support teachers and educators

Um, and school districts who are trying to do right by, uh, you know, teach the way they teach history and, and to ensure that the only people who are showing up to these school board meetings are not, uh, the people who are talking about how badly they want to ban, uh,

you know, certain books, but also the people who are affirming the importance of this history. You know, these decisions by local governments are often made by they listen to the loudest people in the room. And if the only people in the room are the people who are acting in opposition and in bad faith, then we can't be surprised by what the outcomes are. Well, Clint, we will be here for you when they come to try and ban your book for young people. It's going to happen. Indeed.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Clint Smith, poet and Atlantic staff writer. His books include How the Word is Passed and The Poetry Collection Above Ground. Thank you so much, Clint. Thank you.

Last listener comment. I got a five on the AP history exam and majored in history, but what I was taught was so incomplete. Skimming through my son's history book written by the Columbia history professor Eric Foner, I noticed how it acknowledged and chronicled how slavery was an economic engine that fueled not just the South, but also the North. The power of the American economy was built on slaves, and we should never forget that. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Sutter Health. From routine heart care to life-changing transplants, Sutter's team of dedicated doctors, surgeons, and nurses all work together to keep patients' hearts healthy. Learn more at SutterHealth.org.

For decades, China's economic rise has been symbolized by the unstoppable force of low-cost manufacturing. But today, a new and far more disruptive wave of competition is unfolding. One that threatens not just Western manufacturing, but also the West's geopolitical dominance.

I'm journalist James King, and in my new audiobook, Global Tech Wars, from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, I'm unpacking what China's rapid technological ascent across cutting-edge industries like artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and surveillance technology means for the future.

Find Global Tech Wars at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, Audible, Spotify, and wherever audiobooks are sold. Hey, I'm Jorge Andres Olivares and I'm hosting a new show, Hyphenacion. Unlike many other hyphenated Latinos in the U.S., our cultures and our communities inform our choices, like with money. We had that pressure to be the breadwinner. Religion. I just think Jesus was what we would now define as Christ.

and family. We're not physically close and we're not like that emotionally close either. So join me and some amigas as we have easy conversations about hard things. Catch Hyphenation from KQED Studios wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.