Clint Smith

there are realities.

The fact that George Washington transported people back and forth and wrote to other people to say that, hey, how can I get around this law that says that I can't keep people here for longer than this period of time?

Those are just realities.

You cannot change the facts of the situation.

You can only change how you remember those facts and if you decide to publicly display those facts.

And in a sense, right,

What we have seen over the last year and change in a really aggressive fashion is that effort to remove those public memories of the facts that happen in this country.

Yeah.

This idea that history isn't so far away, that we are not living outside of history, that we really are living inside of history, and that his passing really signals that that truth continues and it becomes incumbent on that next generation to pick up the mantle of carrying that truth forward.

I think part of my project is to ask us to hold all of the both andedness of what it means to be human in the context of our personal lives, in the context of our identities, in the context of our history, because I think that is the most perhaps central element of being human is accepting that we are a bundle of contradictions.

Like there are values that I have

There are things that I believe I hold firmly and I am cognizant of the way that I fall short of those values every single day.

I don't think that makes me a bad person.

I think that makes me a person who's reflecting on the fact that, okay, well, I say I care about this or I say this matters to me or I say I'm not the kind of person who does this.

And today I fell short of those things.

My hope is that every day we wake up

and try to get a little bit closer to the version of ourselves that we want to be relative to the version of ourselves that we are.

That's like an ongoing praxis.

It's not necessarily trying to cross a finish line, but a recognition that this is an ongoing part of what it means to be alive.