That observation launched Smith’s research into how the stories we share shape our understanding of our own history – and how we engage with that history now.
“I started looking around New Orleans, and I was like what are the different places that are telling the story honestly, what are the places that are running from their responsibility to tell the story and what are the places that are doing something in between,” Smith questioned.
“Part of what animated this was a recognition that as a kid growing up in New Orleans in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was inundated with these messages about all the things that were wrong with Black people. Sometimes they were explicit, sometimes subtle, but that Black people were responsible for the crime and the violence and the poverty that they were disproportionately experiencing,” he added.
Clint visited historical sites, plantations, memorials, monuments, and neighborhoods across the country to examine how these stories were told. He found the complicated nature of the American story was particularly apparent in Monticello, the home place of Thomas Jefferson, and a plantation where hundreds of people were enslaved.
“Jefferson in so many ways personifies the cognitive dissonance of the American project, which is to say that America is a place that has provided unparalleled unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors could never imagine,” Smith said. “And it has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed. And both of those things are the story of America.”
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