Clint Smith > Quotes

“I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about 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 about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“...I'm left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we've been told. What would it take - what does it take - for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn't mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn't make that story true.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“it would be nice to be something in a museum one day because that’s what I’ve been told means you’ve lived a meaningful life but I think instead I might like to be in a garden where even after I die the residue of me can help grow something more beautiful than I ever was”
― Clint Smith, Counting Descent

“When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Across the United States, and abroad, there are places whose histories are inextricably tied to the story of human bondage. Many of these places directly confront and reflect on their relationship to that history; many of these places do not. But in order for our country to collectively move forward, it is not enough to have a patchwork of places that are honest about this history while being surrounded by other spaces that undermine it. It must be a collective endeavor to learn and confront the story of slavery and how it has shaped the world we live in today.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Just as he did during the Slavery at Monticello tour, David did not mince words. "There’s a chapter in Notes on the State of Virginia,” he said to the five of us, standing in front of the east wing of Jefferson’s manor, “that has some of the most racist things you might ever read, written by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in it. So sometimes I stop and ask myself, 'If Gettysburg had gone the wrong way, would people be quoting the Declaration of Independence or Notes on the State of Virginia?' It’s the same guy writing.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Tell me, at what velocity does joy travel?”
― Clint Smith, Counting Descent

“While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

“I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“I’ve come to realize that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory,” he said. “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about 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 about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“do you know what it means for your existence to be defined by someone else’s intentions?”
― Clint Smith, Counting Descent

“This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“We are charred vessels vestiges of wood & wonder anchors tethered to our bows. It is the irony of a ship burning at sea, surrounded by the very thing that could save us.”
― Clint Smith, Counting Descent

“To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.”
― Clint Smith, Counting Descent

“It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“So much of the story we tell ourselves about history is really the story that we tell about ourselves, about our mothers and our fathers and their mothers and their fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. Throughout our lives we are told certain stories and they are stories that we choose to believe -- stories that become in our identities in ways we are not always fully cognizant of”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Before I left [Monticello], I wanted to understand how much of David's role as a former military officer -- responsible for protecting and promoting this country's foreign policy agenda at home and abroad -- was something that felt, if at all, in tension with his role [as a tour guide] now. 'I was born in the United States of America. I served the country for thirty years, so I actually believe in the idea of America,' he said, straightening up in his chair. 'Are we exceptional? No. Have we had unique advantages based on geography, based on a whole host of factors? Yes. Did a group of people come together in 1776 and conceive of an idea that was pretty radical in its time and then create a system of government, through the Constitution and its amendments, that was pretty radical and pretty novel? Yeah. Have other countries found their own way? Sure. So I believe in the idea of America. I don't believe that this country was perfect. I don't believe it is perfect. I don't believe it's going to be perfect. I believe that the journey to make this a better place is worth the effort and that the United States, if you conceive it not so much as a place to be in but an idea to believe in, it worth fighting for.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Hasan emphasized that the question was not whether his country *deserved* reparations but, not unlike the debate in the United States, "What are we going to repair?" Hasan was not opposed to figuring out the logistics of financial compensation, but he emphasized the need for a sort of moral compensation. "Some people prefer a sense of memory," he said. "Once you get money, you say, 'Okay. Now you received money. We repaired everything. Don't talk about it anymore.'" That is not the outcome Hasan wants. What he wants is an apology for what happened, and then to have that apology, that reckoning, inform how economic, cultural, and political decisions are made moving forward.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live.

Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence.

The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.”
― Clint Smith

“The Lost Cause was not an accident. It was not a mistake that history stumbled into. It was a deliberate, multi-faceted, multi-field effort predicated on both misremembering and obfuscating what the confederacy stood for. And the role slavery played in shaping this county.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“[Angola Prison] 'This place really is just like the plantation was. Just to utilize all the free labor they can get,' Norris continued. 'They lost all that free labor to emancipation, and now how are we going to get that free labor back? You've got all these folks wandering around with no real skills, don't know what to do, well, we can create laws to put them back in servitude, and that's what they've done. Where do they work? They go right back to working convict leasing, working these same plantations they were freed from.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Race is a by-product of racism. In fact, race doesn’t exist.” Damaras said this in the way a person might say water is wet. “Some of you look surprised.” She adjusted her feet and straightened her back. “It’s a social construct. There has never been any scientific or genetic evidence to back up the concept of race. Despite it being false, it has woven its way into the fabric of all of our societies.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“poor ain’t poor unless you name it so & kids prefer playing to counting so there was never much time to wallow in anything but laughter.”
― Clint Smith, Counting Descent