Adam Harris

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?

The idea that what you have to do, what I tried to do when I was a teacher, and what I try to do as someone who writes about history, is not necessarily to convince the reader to believe X or believe Y, but it is to lay out all of it.

I'm actually not interested in if you think Thomas Jefferson was evil or good.

What I do want you to do is sit with the fact that he both wrote the Declaration of Independence

And he also wrote notes to the state of Virginia that black people are inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind.

What I want you to do is to sit with the fact that he wrote, you know, that all men are created equal and that he enslaved 600 people, including four of his own children.

My role is not to tell you what to think, but what I do have to do is present the evidence.

What a teacher does have to do is present the evidence.

What a museum does have to do is present the evidence to say, this is the totality.

This is the full picture.

My understanding is that the presidential house doesn't say,

anywhere, George Washington was an evil man.