How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith6/20/2023 Smith “had never been taught that the largest slave rebellion in US history happened just miles from the city that had raised me … that the Louisiana Purchase was a direct result of the Haitian Revolution”.Ĭolossal, sculpted to endow Robert E Lee with an appearance of valor no captioning could rectify, the ignoble commander’s New Orleans monument is gone now. In a time when youth of color, despairing of the elusive American Dream, seek Wakanda instead – with many whites afraid to acknowledge either privilege or disparity and the role, since the beginning, slavery has played in both – the way “the word” about our history has been passed is with half-truths and delusion, but most of all through denial. It answers the title’s question with often elegant emphasis. This is an elegiac discourse, sometimes a trifle overwrought. But because of his scholarly curiosity and zeal, his quest includes many more. New Orleans, the poet-author’s home town Jefferson’s Monticello the revisionist tourist attraction at the Whitney Plantation the infamous maximum security prison at the 16,000-acre Angola Plantation Blandford Cemetery, a Confederate shrine with Tiffany windows Galveston Island, commemorating Juneteenth New York City, enriched by slave-based enterprise and Gorée Island, with its gate of no return, in Senegal.Īll are stops on Smith’s pilgrimage. Engaging our nation’s “curious institution” – “our un-atoned original sin” – the book purports to examine just eight sites.
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