Adam Harris

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.

So after the Civil War and after Reconstruction, there was obviously an intense sort of pushback to the progress that was made following the Civil War through Reconstruction.

Then after the Civil Rights Movement, there was an intense pushback.

And what we're seeing now is a pushback to much of the era of both Barack Obama's presidency, but then later the Black Lives Matter movement, which sort of intensified following the murder of George Floyd.

But it is important to note that even while we are experiencing the echoes of this history and we're experiencing the sort of nature of the sort of cyclical elements that are there, this also is a pretty unique iteration of it in the way that it is

Like in the context of the civil rights movement, there was intense pushback or even during the civil rights movement, right?

So much of the pushback, you know, it would come from states and it would come from extrajudicial forces.

But it was, you know, what the civil rights leaders were appealing to was the federal government to come and protect them.

Oftentimes, yeah, I don't think that we have seen a level of antagonism from the federal government who historically said,

You know, the federal government or the Supreme Court in the context of the Warren Court have been the thing that allowed Black folks to have some sort of support outside of the context of their specific geographic and political reality in a certain state or in a certain community.