Adam Harris

It's not one over here and one over there.

You get to pick this one and not pick that one.

Both of those things are the story of this country, and you have to hold both of those realities alongside one another.

Well, I think when we think of ourselves, when I think of who I am as a person, I'm someone who's done things in my life that I'm proud of.

And I'm someone who's done things in my life that I'm not proud of because I'm human and I make mistakes.

And what I try to do and what I try to teach my children is you acknowledge those mistakes.

You try to learn from those mistakes to become a better version of yourself in the future.

And so if that's the standard that I hold myself to, the standard I hold my children to, the standard I hold my friends and loved ones to, why would I not hold my country

to that same standard.

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.