What we call history isn't a fixed thing; it's a narrative, contested and fought over, changing over time. Right now, the United States is in the midst of a massive historical battle over its own narrative, specifically the legacy of slavery and race in America. The backlash to that fight is spilling into public policy as Republican state legislatures push to regulate the way students are taught about the founding of our country. In Clint Smith's new book "How The Word is Passed", Smith studies our understanding of slavery through the stories we tell of it. He travelled to the cemeteries and plantations and prisons home to these stories to see up close how they reckon with – or fail to reckon with – their own relationship to our country's legacy.
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Chris Hayes Podcast with Clint Smith | Why Is This Happening? – Ep 164 | MSNBC
Thank you Chris Hayes, for your work.
I’m British. I’m proud to be British, and I’m proud of our contributions to the world. But you can’t be both proud to be British _and_ intellectually honest if you don’t grapple with the fact that a lot of our contributions to the world were made possible by the suffering of others, and that my ancestors did a lot of evil as well. There’s a word that I’ve found extremely useful in coming to terms with the fact that a lot of what I learned in history class was leaving out the bad stuff, and that word is _incomplete._ My history lessons were not _lies,_ they were _incomplete,_ and I become a fuller and better person by understanding the wider story that was left out.
Chris says that we need to comes to grips with the fact that the stories people tell each other are lies, but that’s the wrong way to look at it, and it’s that attitude that makes it so difficult to get through to people. The stories aren’t lies (well…some are, but most aren’t). They’re honest experiences; but they’re incomplete. Jeff should _absolutely_ tell his grandkids the stories that his grandfather told him, but add in the _other_ stories, the ones he’s heard from his friends, about the other side as well.
First of all, “evil” is the word of child. Nobody is evil. Everybody is a shade of grey. Secondly, I can think the British Empire was a marvellous achievement whilst also know that the methods used to acquire and secure the empire wouldn’t be tolerated today. But history must be seen within its historical (social and political) context. Trying to use a narrow and ill formed picture of the past to score political points, as the “1619 project” does, IS intellectual dishonesty. And remember, “civilisation” is a just a story we tell ourselves.
P.S. I’m English.
What a load of whoeyy. If we won let them count the ballots ,we won big. Then we can shame them as they deserve??? Childish not too?