Adam Harris

And I think the implications for it are that if you don't, like, I remember being a kid growing up in the 90s in New Orleans and being inundated with these messages about all the things that were wrong with black people, that the reason there was no, there was so much violence and poverty and inequality in the black community was because of something that black people had done or had failed to do.

And it was coming from the media.

It was coming from politicians.

It was coming from celebrities.

It was coming from, you know, everywhere.

And I remember this feeling of hearing these messages and not having the historical context or intellectual toolkit with which to push back against it.

And what I felt and experienced as a child was a sort of paralysis.

It was like an emotional paralysis where I knew what I was hearing was wrong, but I didn't know how to say it was wrong.

I didn't have that language.

And it wasn't until years later when I encountered the scholarship and I encountered the art and I encountered the film and I encountered the history

that explain that like, oh, the reason one part of New Orleans looks one way and another part of New Orleans looks another way is not because of the people in those communities.

It's because what has been done to those communities or what's been extracted from those communities, generation after generation after generation.

And when you learn that history, it is so profoundly freeing and so profoundly liberating because this country can't lie to you anymore.

I mean, I think it goes back to what we were saying before.

Part of what you—I was a high school teacher.

And so, you know, I feel very strongly about the idea that, you know, the Trump administration would suggest that part of why, you know, you shouldn't teach so much about Washington-owning slaves or Jefferson-owning slave people or, you know, why the presidential house should remove these things is because they—

They don't want, they would say because they don't want so much emphasis on it, and they would say that teachers and museums are attempting to indoctrinate students.

They use the language of indoctrination.

And what I find to be true is that there is this attempt to conflate or to make it so that the teaching of empiricism, like of primary source realities, to suggest that that is somehow an ideological project rather than

an empirical one, right?