Brittany Packnett Cunningham

And if you think that you're going to be a librarian or a teacher who conveys that information, then say goodbye to your job.

That's what we've done.

And we were doing that before Trump.

I want to be really clear.

He made it real obvious.

But the proper people's history of the United States, to borrow Zinn's phrase, has rarely been taught to most people.

That's why a place like TikTok is ripe to be overtaken because suddenly people are learning their real history.

Because in that more democratic space, suddenly to your FYP comes a professor of Africana studies and African-American studies who's there to tell you the truths that you never knew.

There's somebody who, I don't know, picked up the people's history in the United States and read a page to you on TikTok and suddenly you want to go buy that book too.

There are people who bought Michael Harriot's Black AF history, right?

And said, oh, this is interesting.

Let me talk to my audience about it.

And then that thing keeps hitting the New York Times list.

That's why people want to squash that particular platform.

And now the algorithm doesn't work.

We can't compare ourselves to the people who got an A on the group project when we keep being determined to not even complete the group project, right?

That lets us off the hook as a country in a way that is deeply violent and problematic because all it does is open the door for us to do this again.

In another 50 years for people to say, this is not the America I know.

This is not the America I have ever known.

When did we become this country?