Smith takes the reader on a journey to nine places that are potent with the legacy of slavery, to see how the stories they tell reflect, distort, or deny that history.
Smith visits:
- Monticello, the plantation home of Thomas Jefferson,
- The Whitney Plantation, a non-profit that seeks to educate the public about the slavery,
- Louisiana State Penitentiary, always referred to as Angola,
- Blandford Cemetery, best known for a mass grave of Confederate soldiers,
- a Juneteenth celebration in Galveston, Texas,
- the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City,
- the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, and
- Gorée Island in Senegal, which was a holding station for kidnapped and enslaved people before they were forced onto ships.
Smith, who is a poet and also writes for The Atlantic, tells these stories with a blend of research, interviews, and personal reflection, and with a warm, open-minded, open-hearted approach that I found very engaging. How the Word Is Passed has won a boatload of awards, and there's no shortage of reviews online, so I'll just share a sample of some passages from the book that resonated deeply with me.
* * * *
I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicity blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.
Many Jewish people, especially of earlier generations, felt deep shame that European Jews "allowed" themselves to be rounded up and slaughtered. Rape survivors believe they "let" themselves be raped.
The section on Angola was absolutely wild, one of those "I thought I knew how bad this was" moments.
The conditions under convict leasing [from Angola Prison] were often as gruesome as anything that had existed under slavery. . . . As one man told the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1883, "Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him. If sick, get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts, we don't own 'em. One dies, get another."
From W.E.B. Du Bois in 1928, quoted in How the Word is Passed. I love hearing the states' rights argument demolished.
Each year on the 19th of January, there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest Confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristrocratic birth, and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing -- one terrible fact -- militates against this, and this is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterally declare, "Of course, he never fought for slavery." Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. . . . No, people do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. . . . Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not, he was a fool. If he did, Robert E. Lee was a traitor and a rebel -- not indeed to his country but to humanity and humanity's God.
I also especially loved the sections on monuments and naming of public places. I want to see all the names on Vancouver Island restored to Indigenous words, especially those place-names that recall the architect of the residential "school" system: Duncan, Campbell, Scott. And most of all, I want to see the ridiculously named British Columbia wiped off the map and restored or updated. Here are several passages about that. Turns out we're all supporting white supremacy.
It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the insitution of slavery; it is also that we, U.S. taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation. A 2018 report by Smithsonian magazine and the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund (now Type Investigations) found that over the previous ten years, U.S. taxpayers have directed at least forty million dollars to Confederate monuments, including statues, homes, museums, and cemeteries, as well as Confederate heritage groups. And in Virginia, the subsidizing of Confederate iconography is a more than century-long project.
In 1902, as Jim Crow continued to expand as a violent and politically repressive force, the state's all-white legislature created an annual allocation of the state's funds for the care of Confederate graves. Smithsonian's investigation found that in total, the state had spent approximately $9 million in today's dollars. Much of that funding goes directly to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which received over $1.6 million in funds for Confederate cemeteries from the State of Virginia between 1996 and 2018.
Why should we restore names?
The creation of any monument sends a message, whether intentional or not. I think of the statues around the country of people who presided over Native genocide or forced resettlement, and how a young Indigenous child might experience that pedestaled figure.
More from W.E.B. Du Bois:
The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments -- the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. To the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain, on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: "Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery." But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: "Died Fighting for Liberty!"
Smith, driving around his hometown of New Orleans:
"Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee."
"Take a left on Jefferson Davis."
"Make the first right on Claiborne."
Translation:
"Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender."
"Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation."
"Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas."
On the ancestry of Black Americans:
In my experience -- as both educator and student, as researcher and writer -- there was little mainstream discussion of who Black people were before they reached the coasts of the New World, beyond the ball and chain. This was something I had heard when I lived in Senegal, a decade prior, that we Black Americans were taught so little of our traditions, our cultures, our voices before we were taken and forced onto ships that carried us across the Atlantic. As Sue pointed out, the risk is that Black Americans understand our history as beginning in bondage rather than in the freedom of Africa that preceded it.
Language matters:
A statement like "Black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color" . . . that passive construction makes it seem as if segregation was completely natural, which absolves the enforces of segregation . . . from any sort of culpability.
This immediately reminded me of a familiar whitewashing: "Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier." Allan and I have often noted how this phrasing conceals the truth. It sounds like Robinson was the first Black person good enough to break through to the major leagues. How about "Black people were not allowed to play in this league because of the racism and discrimination of the teams' owners"? Or perhaps, "As in society overall, the owners of Major League Baseball teams supported segregation and discrimination, and did not allow Black players on their teams."
On this episode of "It Wasn't Only in the South", this is about slavery in Dutch New Amsterdam.
According to historian Jill Lepore, for every 100 people taken from Africa, only about 64 would survive the trip from the region's interior to the coast. Of those 64, around 48 would survive the weeks-long journey across the Atlantic. Of those 48, only 28-30 would survive the first three to four years in the colony. [Historians Ira] Berlin and [Leslie M.] Harris refer to New York at this time as "a death factory for black people."
From a teacher in Senegal:
Part of what Hasan teaches his students is that we cannot understand slavery and colonialism as two separate historical phenomena. They are inextricably linked pieces of history. Slavery took a toll on West Africa's population; millions of people were stripped from their homelands and sent across the ocean to serve in intergenerational bondage. The profound harm continued during colonialism, with much of the contenent stripped of its natural resources instead of its people. Hasan reflected, "In both situations, in slavery and colonization, what you have is a system of plunder. First, in slavery, we have a plunder of human beings. Africa had been ripped of its people. And colonization is a plunder of natural resources. Both are plunder systems."
I'll close with the passage that was immediately and profoundly resonant to me, as I wish it would be for all American Jews. My notes say "xref zionism".
What would it take -- what does it take -- for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn't mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn't make the story true.
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