Adam Harris

and experiences in America.

And what I mean by that is I think, you know, let's take slavery, for example.

The president of the United States said that the Smithsonian Museum, for example, spends too much time talking about how bad slavery was.

For me, my sense of things is that it is not the case that this administration

believe slavery didn't happen or not even that they believe that slavery wasn't bad.

I think they understand that it was bad, but what happens is if you talk honestly about the horror and the brutality and the cruelty of what slavery was, you then have to talk about how the residue of that system continues to inform the contemporary landscape of inequality today.

And I think it would fundamentally reorient people's relationship to not only the history of this country, but the contemporary reality of this country.

And that's something that I think that so many folks in this administration want to avoid because they want to be able to tell themselves that the America that they believe to be true, the America that exists today, is one that...

that is the result singularly of people's hard work or deservingness when there's obviously another story to be told there.

And I think the other part of this, too, is that if you have to tell a new story about Washington and you begin to tell a new story about Jefferson, that includes the sort of unsavory, so to speak, parts of their legacy, which is to say the more honest parts of their legacy.

If you have to tell a new story about these men, it also means you have to tell a new story about America's founding.

If you have to tell a new story about America's founding, it means you have to tell a new story about this country.

And for many Americans, if you have to tell a new story about America, it means you have to tell a new story about yourself.

And that taps into something that is like existential, that serves as a catalyst to like a fundamental crisis of identity, because who people believe they are is consciously and subconsciously tied to a story of America that they have been told over the course of generations through school, through family, through community.

And when you untether them from that notion of reality that they've come to believe, it's incredibly jarring.

Yeah.

You know, what's interesting is that this is the pushback against Black progress, Black history.

That in and of itself is not new.

What scholars of Black history and historians talk about all the time is that in moments in which there are periods of Black social, political, and economic progress—

there is often pushback to that progress.