“People are operating from a sense of fear … especially when it comes to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” is how author and journalist Clint Smith describes the climate in America.
Smith, who wrote the bestseller, "How the Word Is Passed" is the keynote speaker Wednesday, March 26, for Habitat for Humanity of the Charlotte Region’s annual affordable housing symposium. He talks to WFAE’s Gwendolyn Glenn about the focus of his message.
Clint Smith: Part of what I hope to bring to the symposium is a bit of historical context to sort of situate what contemporary housing looks like and how it's part of a sort of larger ecosystem of social and political forces. And how we cannot understand any facet of social inequality today outside of its historical context, and it is only through understanding that history of a particular city, state, region, country, that we can more fully understand that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is not simply because of the people in those communities — but instead is because of what has been taken away from those communities generation after generation after generation.
Gwendolyn Glenn: You plan to also talk about how memory and history shape society’s understanding of justice, particularly in relation to systemic racism and its impact on some of these marginalized communities. Explain that for me.
Smith: So, I wrote a book called "How the Word is Passed: Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America," and the history of slavery is one that is so central to our ability to understand the world that we live in today. You know, we are often made to feel as if slavery is something that happened in the Jurassic period. Slavery existed for 250-some-odd years and has only not existed for slightly over 150 years. And so you have an institution in which there are people alive today who had relationships with people born into chattel slavery. And so, I say all that — because, for me, when we think about memory, how history shapes our present, it's important to be clear on how the stories that we might have been told actually have so much to do with what our social, political, and economic systems look like today.
Glenn: For people who might still not get the connection of the importance to this and how what's happening today in terms of things like affordable housing and racism — what do you say to them who say 'OK, how do we connect this?'
Smith: It's important for us to understand that people who came out of slavery in 1865, that those folks were almost never given any sort of meaningful resources that would give them access to the levers of upward social and economic mobility. You know, they didn't get access to the Homestead Act that so many white Americans had access to — which allowed them to build land and moving west and to different parts of the country. They didn't get access to so many of the federal and state grants that afforded them the opportunity to purchase homes in certain areas.
Obviously, moving forward, there's redlining, which prevented Black people from buying homes. And what we know is that housing is the primary means by which people generate wealth. And the inability to generate intergenerational wealth goes on to shape every other facet of people's lives.
Glenn: What are your thoughts in terms of Charlotte and its marginalized communities? Because the Chetty report came out 11 years ago saying that those who are in poverty have very little chance of getting out of poverty.
Smith: What's happening in Charlotte is in many ways a microcosm for what's happening in so many cities where it is so difficult for people to get access to housing, to buy a home. Part of what happens is that there's a lack of a foundation in the lives of people, especially in the lives of young people. And so you have these stories of young people — because the rent keeps increasing where they live, or because there's a lack of affordable housing, they have to keep moving. Inadequate housing is one of the — if not the primary disruptor — to so many people's lives. And it is a national problem.
Glenn: Getting back to your book, "How the Word is Passed," you said at one point in the book that a reckoning was happening. Do you think that still is the case?
Smith: I think what we're experiencing is the backlash to the reckoning. Historically, in any time that Black people have experienced upward mobility, in any time in which there has been a collective reassessment of the treatment of Black people, making amends for the harm Black people have experienced — any time that has happened throughout American history, what comes next is an intense backlash. What comes next is people who are unwilling to accept the idea that they should have to tell a new story about America.
You know, one of the places that I go in my book is Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, our third president of the United States. Jefferson sort of embodies and personifies that contradiction, that tension. He is someone who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world and is also someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime — including his own children. He is someone who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and wrote in "Notes on the State of Virginia" — which is his memoir, his manifesto, of sorts — that Black people are inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind, incapable of love to the same extent as their white counterparts.
And I think about how the people at Monticello — what they tell me all the time — they say that they try to tell these stories, more honest story about who Jefferson was — and yet every single day they said so many white Americans come and they're like, ‘Why are you lying about Jefferson? Why are you trying to be politically correct? Why don't you tell the truth?’ I say all that because what we're experiencing now is reflective of the fact that there are so many people in this country who — when you ask them to tell a new story about Jefferson, for example — you're asking them to tell a new story about this country. And when you're asking them to tell a new story about this country, you're asking people to tell a new story about themselves. And that's a really scary prospect for a lot of people.
Glenn: You were a former teacher in Prince George's County in Maryland. How do you feel about what's happening now with especially the history of African Americans being watered down?
Smith: To say it's unfortunate would be an understatement. I think it does a disservice to our country. America is a place that has done things that we should absolutely be proud of. And it's done things that we absolutely should not be proud of, and that we should learn from, and try to grow from. And so much of what African American history affords us is the opportunity to understand the ways in which our country has failed to give everyone the opportunities that it promises in these founding documents. And it also gives us the opportunity to revel in what Black people have been able to do despite centuries of systemic and structural obstacles. The idea that we would suggest that teaching Black history is somehow at odds with what a patriotic, quote, unquote education looks like, to me, is morally and intellectually disingenuous. And if we fail to teach our young people the fullness and the complexity of this country, then we're failing to help them understand why our country looks the way that it does today.
Glenn: And how do you see this playing out? Are you optimistic that there will be positive changes going forward?
Smith: What I know is that from the moment enslaved people arrived on these shores, they were fighting for freedom. The vast majority of people who fought for freedom never got a chance to experience it for themselves. But they fought for it anyway, because they knew that someday someone would. And so I think about what is my responsibility to attempt to fight for the sort of world that I want to see, that I want to live in, that I want my children to live in. Even if I — or even they — might not be able to experience for themselves. But we do it because that's what was done for us.
Author and The Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith will be the keynote speaker at Habitat for Humanity of the Charlotte Region’s annual affordable housing symposium Wednesday, March 26, at 6:30 p.m. at Central Piedmont Community College. Habitat for Humanity of the Charlotte Region is a WFAE underwriter.
