Clint Smith

So there are a couple of things that that does, right?

When you start to question one of the decisions, it also makes you question the other things, right?

If you start to say, well, this person that we've painted as someone who did an unqualified good did also unqualified bads.

Yeah, there are a handful, right?

It's the renaming of Confederate memorials and Confederate monument.

It is the U.S.

Naval Academy removing books from their library.

It's the Air Force stripping back the teaching of the Tuskegee Airmen.

And actually, one of the things that Clint was saying about people having to reassess their own legacies, right?

I remember we had a conversation about his book where he was saying, you know, if you are having to ask questions about the ways that your grandparents, right, the people who took you fishing and the people who, you know, you sat on their laps and they read books to you when you were younger and you have all of these great memories of them.

If you have to reassess how they got to do the things that they got to do, then it really does, like...

jar you and makes you fundamentally reassess your own sort of standing in the world.

And so this sort of broader project of saying, well, if we pare back some of the things that the Tuskegee Airmen had to do to become the Tuskegee Airmen, right, Black History Month sort of calls us to remember that these great people did great things, but the question is, like, why did they have to do those great things?

Why did Jackie Robinson have to integrate baseball?

Why did Martin Luther King

have to deliver his speech at the March on Washington, right?

It is because the nation did not have this clean story of progress.

And actually, to that point, right, it is to say that it's the actions of each individual, right?

It is, you think historically, it's like, oh, well,

Frederick Douglass actually didn't have to write those things that he wrote.