(gentle music) ANNOUNCER: Welcome, everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.
Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.
My name is Chrisstina Hamilton, the Series Director.
Today brings us the third installment of our fall series and our first remote conversation featuring Ken Burns and Isabel Wilkerson with Lynette Clemetson moderating.
First, I want to thank our partners without whom this event would not have been possible.
The event today is part of the University of Michigan Democracy and Debate theme semester with support from Wallace House and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
And a big thanks to our streaming partners, Detroit Public Television, and PBS Books.
Before we join our guests today, a few words of introduction.
Our lens on history powerfully influences how we envision and shape the future.
Today's conversation brings together two of our country's most accomplished storytellers, Ken Burns and Isabel Wilkerson, to discuss the complexities of the American narrative.
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2016 for championing the stories of an unsung history.
She is also the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism.
Ken Burns, known to many of us, has been making documentary films for over 40 years.
Since his Academy Award-nominated "Brooklyn Bridge" in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made.
To lead the discussion today, we have a most capable guide, Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House, the Night Wallace Fellowships, and Livingston Awards here at the University of Michigan.
A long time journalist, she was a correspondent for "Newsweek" magazine, a national correspondent for the "New York Times," and Senior Director of Strategy and New Initiatives at NPR.
Here at Wallace house, she works to sustain and elevate the careers of journalists, foster civic engagement, and uphold the role of free press in a democratic society.
And now I will turn it over to Lynette Clemetson to lead us forth.
Over to you, Lynette.
Hello, I'm Lynette Clemetson, Director of Wallace House.
Thank you, Chrisstina, for that introduction.
And what a pleasure it is to be joined by two of our country's cherished storytellers, Ken Burns and Isabel Wilkerson.
Lynette, thank you so much.
I'm so honored to be here today.
I'm sorry that we're not in person in Ann Arbor, but at our own remote locations.
And I'm so honored to be here with a person whose work I admire as much as anyone's.
I think "The Warmth of Other Suns" is the best nonfiction book I've read.
And "Caste" is rearranging my molecules right now as we speak.
Isabel is one of my heroes, and I'm so happy that we could be together.
Lynette, thank you so much for inviting me and for including me in this incredible conversation.
Ken's work is so groundbreaking that I'm so thrilled and humble and honored to be here I want to start with an expression of gratitude, which I'm sure many of our viewers joining us here today share, because the two of you, though neither of you is a historian, have devoted your careers to helping us document and understand our history as Americans.
Some parts of that history have certainly been well known and embraced, but other parts of that history, we know, have been forgotten, submerged, or willfully distorted.
And in a year like this one, a year in which we're facing challenges on so many fronts, having an honest conversation about our history, hopefully, can help guide us forward toward our shared goals and realities and solutions.
So we're gonna start by sharing a bit of work from each of you, and then just seeing where the conversation takes us.
Ken, I would like to start with you.
I have to say that trying to prepare for a conversation with you is overwhelming.
And overwhelming, I think, is an understatement.
You've been making films for 40 years, which amounts to hours upon hours upon hours of potential research.
But for the purposes of this conversation, I'd like to start with your film "The Civil War," a nine-part series that first aired in 1990.
The first episode in that series is called simply "The Cause."
The film begins with Frederick Douglass discussing the contradictions and the promise and reality of America.
And it ends with historian Barbara Fields, in 1990, talking about how we are still fighting the Civil War.
And those comments were in 1990, but I think if we were to ask her today, it would be the same in 2020.
Let's just watch a clip of those two moments to get us started in the conversation.
MORGAN: "In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky, her grand old woods or fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes and stark, round mountains.
But my rapture was soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave holding and wrong, when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters.
I am filled with unutterable loathing."
Fredrick Douglass.
I think what we need to remember, most of all, is that the Civil War is not over, until we today have done our part in fighting it, as well as understanding what happened when the Civil War generation fought it.
♪♪ William Faulkner said once that history is not was, it's is, and what we need to remember about the Civil War is that the Civil War is in the present as well as in the past.
The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future, also established a standard that will not mean anything until we have finished the work.
You can say there's no such thing as slavery anymore.
We're all citizens, but if we're all citizens, then we have a task to do to make sure that that, too, is not a joke.
If some citizens live in houses and others live on the street, the Civil War is still going on.
It's still to be fought, and regrettably, it can still be lost.
Regrettably, it can still be lost.
That's as sobering an idea as any to end that reflection on.
What do you think of when you see that clip, those clips, in the context of today, Ken?
Well, first of all, I'm tremendously honored to be joining Penny Stamps again and to be with you, Lynette, and particularly with Isabel, whose work "Warmth of Other Suns" is one of my favorite nonfictions, and who's astonishing "Caste" is just rocking my world.
You know, there's a separation between that Frederick Douglass quote and Barbara Fields of about 11 1/2 hours, which is the story of the Civil War.
There was about seven or eight minutes that proceeded Frederick Douglass's quote, a kind of introduction, the setting of the stage.
And then there's a couple of minutes after Barbara, but I think in some ways, it's most chilling at the end, because, obviously, particularly this year, the stakes have never been higher with regard to her warning, which is absolutely right.
I think, when we made the film, we felt the burden and the long shadow of a kind of popular conception of who we are that was, at least in film, the two big mammoth towers that blocked out any sunlight was "The Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind," both of which suggest that a homegrown terrorist organization, our Al Qaeda, the Ku Klux Klan, were somehow the heroes of this drama, and the rescuers of it, and that slavery really had nothing to do with it, that African Americans preferred to be in slavery.
And so for us to set the stage of the reality of slavery, particularly the chapter that will follow Frederick Douglass's quote, and then go through the whole thing, soup to nuts, and then come out at the end and remind people, I think, of the most important thing.
Time is a human construct.
And human nature remains the same.
We're repeating these patterns and themes.
You know, Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
If he did say that, it's a perfect way of understanding these kind of enduring themes and motifs that crop up.
There's a sense that it repeats.
It never has.
Or that we're condemned to repeat what we don't remember.
Lovely, but not true.
It's just a sense that we had an opportunity, at least with that film, now 30 years old, to remind people the real stakes that, in the South Carolina articles of secession, they didn't mention nullification or state's rights or economics.
They mentioned slavery, period.
That was the cause.
And we spent, in the intervening years since the Civil War, forget about what led up to it, the compromises that permitted it to carry on, but we've lived the decades since the Civil War inventing this mythology and encrusting it with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia.
And it was our intention to just try to, at least for the beginning, see if you could scrape some of those off and give a reality of what it was like and a different view of America.
Frederick Douglas is a devastating, devastating comment on us, both the U.S. and us.
And Barbara is, of course, the warning, the warning.
It's still going on.
We brought it out three years ago, well, a little bit over three years ago when Charlottesville happened.
And it seemed kind of instantaneously fresh, and watching it again, just even now, makes me want to weep for my country, the same country that Frederick Douglass was concerned about, the same country that Barbara Fields is, was, is concerned about This issue, the cause, is of course a perfect pivot to Isabel's most recent work.
But your current book, "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent," which we all have with us here, echoes something altogether different.
Rather than bringing to life vibrant journeys, you are pushing us, in "Caste," to grapple with something much more fundamental, the hard-coded structure of our society.
As Ken put it so succinctly, the cause, from its inception, likening our American system to a caste system akin to those in India and Nazi Germany.
What I found interesting about the early chapters of the book is I felt that maybe you were anticipating that readers might struggle with this argument of seeing our system in this way.
And so, one of the things that you do early in the book to walk the readers into this notion is that you start by talking about the United States like an old house.
It's a very gentle way into a very difficult concept to wrestle with, and a difficult way of seeing ourselves.
And I would love it if you could just read a bit of this section for us.
I'd be happy to.
I'd like to say first, though, how honored I am to be here and participating in this just so central and important conversation.
Just watching those clips, I was reminded of the magnificence of Ken Burns' masterpiece, which helped to essentially set the record straight on what the Civil War was really about.
I think that it stands as a testament to not only his brilliance, but also to how necessary this work still is.
I'm reminded, speaking of Charlottesville, of just how far we have yet to go to get on the same page as Americans about our basic history.
And that was one of the things that animated this book that I've just done, and so I'm happy to read that section that you made mention of.
America is an old house.
We can never declare the work over.
Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation.
When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought.
Choose not to look, however, at your own peril.
The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away.
Whatever's lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not.
Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of an action.
Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you, until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.
We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.
Many people might rightly say I had nothing to do with how this all started.
I have nothing to do with the sins of the past.
My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves.
And yes, not one of us was here when this house was built.
Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it.
But here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation.
We are the heirs to whatever's right or wrong with it.
We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
And any further deterioration is in fact, on our hands.
What's clear to me in reading both your book and rewatching Ken's films is that it's all there that our history is documented for us to access and think about, and it's an act of will that we ignore it.
And so I would love to hear you talk about why you chose to walk the reader into this subject in this way.
And maybe some of what you've encountered in trying to talk to people about this subject as you've been out discussing the book.
Well, one of the goals of this is to, in some ways, hold our country up to the light and to try to see things that we otherwise might not see.
I view myself, you have this metaphor of the old house means that in my world here, my role is I'm the building inspector who is going and looking at the house very closely and delivering my report to the owners, which is all of us.
And so when you think of it that way, it's a reminder of what has gone before and what we're dealing with now and what might be necessary, what is necessary to move forward.
But you can't fix what you can't see, you cannot repair what you don't acknowledge.
And so all of this is an effort to try to say that the history is what we have to grapple with if there is any hope of really working through these things.
Another metaphor in the book is the idea of when we go to the doctor.
You go to the doctor, and before the doctor will even see you, they hand you this clipboard with all these pages on it, and on those pages are questions, questions about your medical history and not just your history, but often your parents' history and your grandparents' history, because the doctor knows that he or she cannot begin to diagnose properly and accurately, whatever it is that is ailing you, unless they know the history.
So history is so central to how we go about our lives, we know how central it is with that.
How much more important is it when it comes to dealing with our own country, particularly with the upheavals that we are currently experiencing.
The other reason why I wanted to look more closely at the idea of cast is that with the first book, more of the sons, I actually don't use the word racism, which is a word that is accurate to describe much of what we are experiencing now and in the past.
But there is another way of looking at it, and I've found that in researching the experiences of people during the Jim Crow South, where it was actually against the law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together in Birmingham, that's how extreme it was, and how often petty and specific some of their restrictions and boundaries were.
I've found that the word racism alone did not fully capture all that I was describing and what they were enduring.
And so I came to the use of the word cast in part, because it was capturing the hierarchy, the embedded ranking of human value that was endemic to that world.
It was also capturing all of the restrictions and the boundaries that were created that went beyond just how you feel was beyond hate or ill feeling.
It was about a structure of control over an entire group of people that in fact, affected everyone wherever they happen to be on the cast system.
And so I was, I ended up using a word that had been used by anthropologists who had gone into the Jim Crow South in the 1930s and '40s.
And it studied that in real time at the depth of that phenomenon, and which, of course went on for nearly a century after reconstruction.
And so they emerged from their research using the word cast, which is a reminder of the infrastructure of the divisions that have been created.
And so that's how I came to the use of the word cast, and I think that it's particularly useful for us today because we have to acknowledge that there has been progress from the time of the Jim Crow South.
And there has been legislation during the 1960s, but again, a reminder that there was legislation of civil rights, legislation of the 1860s and '70s and then there's the legislation of the 1960s.
And so this is a reminder, however, that we are not living necessarily with the classical, formal, legal, you know, racism of our forefathers era, but we're living with the permutations with a mutation of this.
We're living with this under the shadow of something that I'm describing as bigger than what we might have assumed it to be, and that is the embedded infrastructure that dates back to the founding of the country, even before there was a United States, going back to the colonial Virginia, in which this bipolar hierarchy was created and that we've been living under it ever since.
And so this is an examination of what we've inherited from the time of the colonial era.
And it's so interesting that, you know, this book, of course, is a book that you finished not knowing what 2020 would, in fact.
As you look at this work, this year, does it make you think differently about any of the arguments that you made?
No, in fact, I think that's one of the measure of the authenticity of a work of storytelling speaking to Ken's during universal and profound work.
That if it is authentic and rooted in truth then it will be, it will show itself to be accurate, regardless of the circumstances.
I mean, I did not know, did not know as I was working on this, you know, for years, had no idea what would happen in 2020.
It so happened when I was there, there was enough time to insert a little bit about COVID-19, but it was not written with an eye toward that.
It's written as a history of how we got to where we are the subtitle is the origins of our discontent.
So if the origins are there, the bees are the origins and whatever ensues beyond this is an outgrowth of those origins, but the origins are there and they say are part of our history.
So I did not anticipate what was going on now, I could not, in fact, what I do is not about the moment anyway.
These things have to be universal and in some ways, timeless and applicable to any human situation.
I mean, there's a question that people often ask about anything that they, us, phenomenon that they don't understand or people's behavior that they don't understand.
That the why is it that those people are doing what they're doing?
And my response to that is there's only one answer to that question, and that is what the human beings do.
What do human beings do in that circumstance?
Once you have thought about a research, what do human beings do in a particular circumstance, then the behaviors and responses of people begin to make a little bit more sense.
It doesn't mean you agree, it just means that you are on the way to understanding.
And so what we've seen in 2020 with COVID-19 is, has been in some ways, a, you know, a revelation to have been a revealing of this cast system that I'm describing, where you have people who are more likely to be at risk of contracting, getting sick, sickened by it, and then dying from it.
Where are the people who are in the, what I would call the subjugated cast, the subordinated cast, going back to, you know, for generations and centuries.
The people who were on the front lines, who were, you know, stacking stuff, stacking the shelves in a grocery, the people who were driving buses, people who were delivering packages to people who have the luxury of being able to shelter in place, and thus putting themselves in greater risk of contracting the disease.
So this is a continuum that we're observing, and if the phenomenon that I'm describing is accurate, then you would see the aftereffect, you would see the shadow under which we still live.
And so that's what I think brings together all of its work.
The history is the history, and the question is what can we do to get all of us on the same page about our history?
And Ken, Isabel used this metaphor of a doctor's office and trying to create the narrative of your family history, to better understand your ailment in a particular moment.
And you're doing something similar with a new project of yours called UNUM.
And it is, especially for people like me who find themselves swimming in all of these films and trying to figure out which narrative to turn to for what.
UNUM helps people interested in his putting together our narrative so that we can understand our current situation by taking clips, related clips from your various films and allowing people to absorb them on a continuum.
Can you talk to us a little bit about UNUM and how the project works and what you hope people will do with it?
Yes, so, first of all, let me just say that I don't think I've ever finished a film, always in the distant past, I mean, count on the fingers of one-hand films that are within the last 20 years of when they were released.
So what you'd call recent history where I haven't been so completely stunned by how contemporary everything is, and this is what Isabel is talking about.
That I can finish the civil war and Barbara Fields is resonant in 1990.
You know, she's bringing up homelessness in a particular way of expressing part of the decay of the house or part of the pathology, in the doctor's office or whatever the moment was then, but it speaks and it clearly translates to the present.
And so this happens every film, and I promise that, you know, every time we make a film, it may take 10 years to work on it.
The Vietnam series, I used to go out on the stump and say, you know, "What if I told you I'd been making a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration?"
The film came out in 2017 after a new administration came in the fall.
And it was about a white house in disarray obsessed by leaks about our president certain the press was making things up about huge big document drops of stolen classified material that destabilized the political situation about asymmetrical warfare and accusations that a political party reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to affect that election.
All of those things were true about the Vietnam war when I began work in 2006, and all of them were still true when I finished the work editorially, you know, we lacked the editing in December of 2015, a month before Donald Trump and faced, the voters for the first time in the Iowa caucuses out of which he was not supposed to emerge, and so you just are stunned at every film.
And so gradually, we were trying to find a way to your question, Lynette, to try to curate what seemed to be evergreen themes in American history.
It might be as simple about freedom and attention between a collective freedom.
What we want, what you need, and personal freedom, what I wanna do and how those clash, and sometimes support one another about race, of course, about hard times, about politics, about war, about leadership, art, innovation, all sorts of stuff.
And so the idea is that this body of work, which as you pointed out is takes weeks to watch.
It has in it, the seeds of a kind of guide, an index, if you will, to where we've been and the way in which you can connect the dots and understand the pathologies of two or three generations ago.
I mean, take inherited diseases that sometimes skip a generation or move in one particular way, depending on the nature of it.
All of those things are present and as an anthropologist, I'm happy to hear, and I'm so drawn to the use of the word cast, not only to give the title to the book, but meaning to the actual infrastructure that Isabel is talking about, because it also allows us to be free, at least partially from these tropes that as usage, as Lynette, are weighing us down racism, and all of a sudden, the blinders are up and we can't talk, but maybe by recasting it in a new light, no pun intended, you've got the opportunity to really see a new.
So UNUM is in a way, an attempt to do that, to sort of draw connections and to say that, you know, Ecclesiastes said, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there's nothing new under the sun."
That suggests, as Isabel was just saying, that human nature doesn't change.
And so we know that human nature relating to a certain set of circumstances will do this.
You can study that, it's a sociological phenomenon, and we've got the history, we've got the facts just to back it up.
And so if history does rhyme, then what better way than sort of charting these epic verses through the selection of things that help you get a certain perspective on the events of today and begin to understand they're part of a continuum.
I mean, as a historian, in a funny way, you can't help, but be optimistic, even in the face of all of the backwards steps, we take all the time, because there are aspects of human nature in which you hope that human beings can be appealed to, and at times they are appealed to.
And so it, the storytelling the narratives have as a purpose to borrow from Isabel's original reading, first reading is that we have a beautiful house on the outside, you know, and we just need to do the actual work.
You gotta go down into the basement when it's stuff.
Look, I live in a house that was built in 1820.
Everything you said is true, even the metaphor holds so completely, and you just got to go down there and you gotta say, We have to figure out what to do to stabilize this foundation, what to do to keep it from leaking, what to do to, as you say, you know, equalize those columns.
It's a tough task, but what I find so extraordinary in what I do, what gets me up every day is a sense of, you know, it's really bad right now.
Right now, we are in the most desperate, I think situation we've ever been in our country.
It is hanging by the thread, and yet there's a sense, we can get through this, we can get through this.
And there is, I think in Isabel's work, a fundamental sense in the first book of the hero's journey, the quest.
How do you get out, escape the specific gravity of that cast of those circumstances?
Are you gonna find yourself into that cast system in another place?
Yes, but something's been moved, molecules have been rearranged.
And so to now, we have the kind of blueprint of what the infrastructure is that that permits us to do that, and UNUM is one modest variation of, I think the huge, enormous service that Isabel has done for us with this magnificent new book.
And both will help people at the end learn how to find UNUM, and I would really recommend people spend some time clicking through it and trying to put together narratives that challenge your individual views on.
the points of our narrative and how we ended up where we are.
But I would love to hear the two of you talk just a little bit more, can you use this word optimism?
(Ken laughs) A challenging concept, for people right now but I think that, you don't mean optimism in a sort of Pollyanna ish.
No, no, no.
It's okay, it's not that bad.
I don't think that's what you're trying to say.
But there is a place for optimism, that can help us move forward.
And I would just like to hear you two talk to one another a little bit about what optimism might mean for you in a moment like this and how you can look at your work and glean slivers of light, might be coming in.
So I do wanna reiterate what I said, I think this is the most dangerous moment in the history of the United States.
In terms of its survival since its formation.
Having said that, it is also true, that none of us get out of this alive.
There is not going to be an exception made in your case or my case, and that we will live forever.
We are all dying, and therefore the human experiment is, ends in failure for each of us.
And you could conceivably just be wrapped up in a fetal position but we don't do that.
We raise families and tend gardens and write books and, do all sorts of things.
And that is a kind of what my friend Wynton Marsalis calls, "keeping the Wolf by the door."
The blues is not a complaint, the blues is saying, it is bad here in this caste system, but you know what?
You don't get me, you don't know me in that way.
And I think that the lessons of history throughout, is, for me at least in American history, that's my bailiwick have been, to provide my storytelling because that's in fact what I am and you pointed it out.
Either of us are licensed academic historians.
We just chosen that to practice our interests.
Leads you to believe, that there is for forward progress, that history is a rising road, that it has the possibility of being better.
And that's why we all keep going each day in the face of these things.
And, I do feel optimistic in the long run, in the short run I'm scared, out of my wits, you know?
Yeah, I would say that I would not have, I wouldn't put as much time into the work that I do if I didn't have some level of, I would say hope almost, as opposed to maybe optimism.
The difference between those two words.
"Warmth of Other Suns" was 15 years, so I often say if it were a human being, it'd be in high school and dating.
That's how long I took on that book.
And so you don't spend that much time on something, if you don't think that there's something that can be gained from, something that people that, our country, readers can gain from knowing some of them might not have otherwise have known.
I gained some hopefulness from the response to the work and I can only begin to imagine the response that Ken's had to the body of, filmmaking, that that is a testimony and archive in itself about our country's history.
Groundbreaking in so many ways.
And so that one of the things I've discovered when "Warmth of Other Suns" came out.
I would hear time and time again from people, regardless of their background or where in the country they might be.
They would say to me time and time again, I had no idea.
I would just hear it so often I could just sort of wait for the moment when someone would say it.
Because they...
Fundamental facts about the experiences of millions upon millions of people had just not been known by so many others.
And, people said that to me, time and time again.
So it got to the point where I was viewing this book.
I was viewing this as in some ways, if you think about it, if you don't know your history, then history itself is news.
So that, "The Warmth of Other Suns" you might say, in my case and I know I can't speak for Ken obviously, but I can imagine that the people... you're hearing the same thing.
Is that, people think it's history until they turn on the news.
And then they're able to see the connections themselves.
The goal of this, is that until you know, then you, in some ways it's an unfair expectation that people act upon something that they don't know.
The question is what do you do when you do know?
So the goal of this is to, is an invitation, as Ken so beautifully said.
It's an invitation, to get to know more about one's country than we might've thought we know, had known.
And without knowing you can't act with conviction or even with wisdom, I mean this is a call for wisdom as we go forward, so.
I'm hopeful that the knowledge that people gain from knowing their history can begin to affect how they see, our fellow citizens and how they see the country and how they see us as a species in fact.
And see that we all have so much more in common than we've been led to believe.
Harry Truman said, "The only thing that's really new "is the history you don't know."
I just, I mean, I think that in David McCullough's, masterful biography but I've never forgotten how powerful that is, it dovetails with what Barbara Fields just said and said 30 years ago and actually 32 years ago, Lynette, when we actually did the interview, "That history is not was, but is," quoting from Faulkner and many other people who understand, the fact that it's just going on right now.
And I think it, what Isabel spoke to is a kind of existential thing.
As you know more, as you accumulate knowledge, you are in a way, a priori obligated to refine that knowledge into understanding or wisdom is the word that you used.
And that's what we have to do, we have to take this experience and my experience with every film that we've done is that I had no idea.
People say that all the time, "I had no idea, I had no idea.
"I had no idea about this."
And we're working on a film now that it touches on a great deal of Isabel's work on the history of the Holocaust in relationship to the United States.
The way our systems and our infrastructures, Isabel would say, "Influenced the Nazis."
You know we are...
I'm doing a film on the history of, the from Emancipation to the Exodus.
That is about, a period that people know nothing about reconstruction and the collapse of reconstruction and the post reconstruction years.
And the first two decades of the 20th century, which were about as dangerous to African-American's as any other two decades in the history of the United States in terms of lynching and just out and out brutality.
And they echo all of the headlines that we can read today.
It's one of the things that also runs through your work.
You've both used this term, wisdom and this obligation.
Once you know and obligation to really think about the history and how it's applied and find some way to act.
I mean, one of the reasons we're having this conversation today, at the university of Michigan students are engaged in, what is being called the Democracy and Debate Theme semester.
And trying to give young people tools for thinking about history and thinking about their power, and how you put that to good use, for the betterment of our democracy.
And, it's complicated because I think there's also a counter narrative, that somehow to be, word often used is, patriotic, that you don't think critically about our structures and our systems.
And you don't, that you don't question.
And, even in the weeks, Ken, in which I was going back to watch your films in preparation for this.
This concept was introduced, through the news cycle of a push to introduce what was being called Patriotic Education.
KEN: Yeah.
Into, the school system to somehow, right the wrongs of students being taught a certain kind of history.
And I thought about, when I...
When that popped into the news, and I was sort of deeply thinking about so many of your films and rereading cast and looking at "The Warmth of Other Suns" and thinking about the misuse and appropriation of this word patriotic.
KEN: Yeah.
And what it's being used for.
And you both take on this notion of questioning in your work and Ken, I want to, just spend a moment looking at a clip from your film on the Statue of Liberty.
When we think of the center of our democracy and again of how we want to see ourselves as Americans, people often, the Statue of Liberty is, is a symbol of who we want to be as Americans.
And in your film, the writer James Baldwin talks eloquently about the Statue of Liberty, but about the myths that it helps us to perpetuate.
And I would just like to watch a clip from that film and then talk about it.
I suppose it goes on two levels, one is inside when it's outside.
So that finally, or first of all perhaps, liberty's individual, passion or will to be free.
But this passion, this will is always contradicted by the necessities of the State.
Everywhere, as long as we've heard of mankind, as long as you've heard of States.
I don't know if it'd be like that forever.
It for black American, for black inhabitants under this country, the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke, meaning nothing to us.
That's a film from the mid 80s that I made.
I was fortunate enough to meet and interview him.
That statue now has Emma Lazarus poem at its base.
It wasn't intended as a gift to immigrants or to celebrate the immigrant experience.
It was a gift from France to...
Originally was gonna be to Mrs. Lincoln, to celebrate the survival of the Union, despite her husband's ultimate cause, no one said a word about welcoming immigrants, at its inauguration in 1886.
And I do think we end up with these kind of false narratives of who we are and we begin to believe the whole argument about the 1776 project to replace the 1619 is just a phony, false dialectic.
We don't need that.
I mean, I've, all my films have been about the US but they're also been, as I suggested earlier, about us.
Two letter lowercase plural pronoun.
And the thing that I've learned, is there is no them, it's just us and anybody who tells you there's a them, which is what these false narratives and these imposed dichotomy suggests, they're wrong.
This new film on the Holocaust and the U.S. will begin, at least right now with... We haven't gone, we're just in the early stages in the editing room with Emma Lazarus poem.
But by the end of the prologue, you'll hear the Opus, a poem by some people who believe that the doors should have been shut a long time before, and to keep everybody out.
And both of those are national poems.
You know what I mean?
We just know the Emma Lazarus one, 'cause we'd like to believe that.
And what I think for us is to, in every subject that we investigate, to dive very very deep in and in to it.
And not look for that kind of, it's not like the cable news that feels obligated or used to feel obligated to invite the Flat Earth Society in to discuss stuff.
It's not a flat earth, right?
But we do want people who will take us on a different and more complicated journey.
And James Baldwin in the case of the Statue of Liberty Film does that, it's not apostasy for the sake of it.
It's actually just trying to realize that we have so many competing and contradictory and overlapping and shared narratives that you can't contain it.
And to suggest there could be a 1776 project that we'll go back to, morning again in America with White Picket Fence is to forget that, going back to that political military narrative, that American history is only the succession of presidential administrations, punctuated by these very heroic wars.
Belies the fact that more than a quarter still to this day, more than a quarter of our presidents owned other human beings.
How can you not do that?
Why is the 1619 project in any way contradicting a 1776 project?
I mean, it's just a false kind of political narrative to try to create the false dialectic that there is a them amidst the us.
And that's part of the reason why you construct castes, to make sure that we, us are separated from they, them.
And, all of this is in the end, kind of beside the point, particularly if you can reveal as Isabel does, the architecture of it.
And particularly as both of us try to do is tell the intimate bottom up stories as well as the top down stories.
So that you're not just meeting the Jefferson Davis's and Abraham Lincoln's, but you're meeting the Elisha Hunt Rhodes and Sam Watkins of the story.
And, Spottswood Rice and Frederick Douglas.
Is it, Isabel in your work, in "Caste", you follow this journey and it is not just a backward look in, look at how at the inception and how our society was structured, but at the tension that moves throughout our history, as we wrestle with this, kaleidoscope, right?
And how we are looking through it and what... How we want that view, to be oriented.
And there's a passage in the book where you talk about one of the points, that would be a more current manifestation of this tension that is in the James Baldwin clip about how people view Confederate monuments and what they represent to people.
And this this actual attempt to physically, you know, turn over the kaleidoscope.
It's actually a great metaphor for this section of the book and it would be great to have you just read a bit of that.
Yes, I'd be honored to.
So at two o'clock in the morning on April 24th 2017, a SWAT team positioned its sharpshooters at its strategic locations at a dangerous intersection in downtown New Orleans.
Canine units patrol the grounds and perimeter.
At the center of the targeted area men in face masks and bulletproof vests went about their perilous duty in the darkness.
Others had refused to risk their lives for this, declined even to attempt the operation.
After the death threats and firebombing that preceded this moment.
These men and face masks were the only ones willing to take up the mission.
They were removing the first of four Confederate monuments in the city of New Orleans.
Tensions have been building since 2015 when Mayor Mitch Landrieu a fifth generation Louisianan, whose ancestors have been in the state since before the Civil War, decided it was time for the Confederate statues to go.
That June a gunman inspired by the lost cause of the Confederacy massacred nine black parishioners as they prayed at the end of Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The city tested the idea with the public in New Orleans.
At one hearing a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience.
A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from another side.
He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general.
But there are no statues of Rommel in Germany.
Quote, they are ashamed, unquote he said.
Quote, the question is, why aren't we?
The city finally found a construction company willing to take on what it become hazard duty in a virtual war zone.
It could be seen as karma that the only construction crew willing to risk their lives to remove the Confederate statues was African American.
Due to the dangers of the operation, the company charged four times what the city had anticipated to remove the three largest monuments and said the company would only go in if there was police protection.
By now the city had few other options if it wanted the statues is gone.
Mayor Landrieu gave a speech that day to remind citizens of why this needed to happen.
Quote, these monuments celebrate a fictional sanitized confederacy unquote he said.
Quote, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for unquote.
They were more than mere statuary.
Quote, they were created as political weapons unquote, he would later write.
Quote, part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.
How do people react when you read that?
You know, because this is very current.
It's one thing to grapple with something that feels generations back that you can have some separation from.
This is something that is happening right now and that people feel deeply emotionally charged about, regardless of which side you are on.
And so how do you, how do you discuss this sort of, this sort of thing, and again, this idea of myth and the kaleidoscope and how we can be patriotic and be optimistic and hopeful and want to be moving toward the best version of us?
And still want to change things?
That is such a great question and so beautifully put.
I mean the question is, who do we want to be?
But part of that the answer that is who do we who have we, who do we think that we have been in the past?
I mean, this, I realize that, even as I was reading this just now and as I think about the work that went into this book and also warm is that so much of this in some ways, is not only about history and not knowing the history, but it's about memory of what people think they know.
You think about Charlottesville and that was not just about the history.
It was about the memory of what has happened and how we remember things differently based upon what we've been exposed to and what we believe to have happened.
And so it's not just you know, getting people to to know the history, but also how are we remembering the history.
And I'm also, you know, to tying in the idea of the kaleidoscope and also of the Statue of Liberty.
It's also a question of what we are each seeing.
You know, what are we focusing in on.
I mean, we see the Statue of Liberty Emma Lazarus' words.
And then, but there's a there's an aspect of the statue that we don't look at as much and that are the chains at the base of the feet that were from a French perspective, also in what research I've done into the Statue of Liberty, I'm not an expert on the Statue of Liberty, but in that this was this came about as a sense of, of celebration by the French, by some of the French, of the end of enslavement, the end of the Civil War.
The end of this all came up in the era of recognition that people were now being freed.
And that the that those chains, the broken chains also represent freedom for humanity, but for freedom for the people who've been enslaved.
And so that is a question of like, the kaleidoscope.
The kaleidoscope, what is it that you see as a kaleidoscope turns?
What are the the colors and the fragments that attract one's eye as they look?
As we're all looking at the same thing in certain people, we're seeing different things based upon our perspective.
And then I'm also reminded of, you know, how this caste system came to be to, to separate us by creating this bipolar system in which there were the dominant group on top, which would have been the English colonists to begin with, and then bringing in the enslaved people from Africa to build the country after having decimated the numbers of indigenous people and driving them from their own land.
So this is the basis of where where we happen to be.
And in the ensuing decades, generations and centuries after that originating bipolar caste system was created that meant that anyone entering this bipolar system then had to navigate and figure out where do they fit in.
And that has created tensions within this bipolar structure where people were arriving from, say, Poland or from, from Ireland, or from what is now maybe Lithuania, wherever it might have been and arriving here and then having to shed their previous identities as Lithuanian or as Polish or as Irish.
And then being assigned to a new category, relatively new category, in human history that's only five or so hundred years old, which is the idea of race.
So they were, they had to shed what they had previously been or seen themselves as.
And then take on a new identity in order to, in order to navigate and to succeed in this new world, the new country, their adopted land.
And that meant people coming from other parts of the world also had to navigate and figure out where they where they fit in.
If they were coming in from Asia, coming in from South and Central America.
So everyone having to fit into this preexisting caste system.
And this is all part of the kaleidoscope.
Well, what is it that we're seeing?
Where people being assigned?
How do people interact based upon their assignment?
And then where is it that the history can come in to help explain how all of this happened?
Where does this all begin?
And what can we learn from it?
So I see all of this has interconnected always, as we try to unpack and better understand, you know, how we got here.
Yeah, Ken said in the beginning of the conversation, he made a comment that, you know, time is a social construct.
And you point out in the book, race is very much a social construct.
And one that, you know, we put the architecture around in the framing of America.
And it's one of the things I worry about, even in a conversation like this, is that this notion, especially when you start at slavery, that you are entering into a bipolar conversation that is about this American struggle of black and white.
That people can today say, "That is not about me.
I don't I don't fit into this struggle."
I you know, how do you how do you pull all Americans into this concept of us and how this how this system and the way people are pushed to identify with one end of the other of the spectrum.
One of the push backs from the the monuments discussion of the last several years has been people are kind of regressive idea that people complain that you're taking away my history.
When in fact, it's actually enlarging the history.
It's saying, look, we've got a much bigger and wider and really more interesting history.
And so I've been spending a lot of time and particularly redoubled since Mother Emanuel and myself, are trying to address and trying to speak directly to people who who see this in the purely black and white notions.
These symbols, as Isabelle knows better than anyone, all went up that not just the statues, but the Confederate flag, which is not the flag of the Confederacy.
It is not the flag that rep, was the flag of the Confederate States of America.
It was one battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which is it one of at least a few armies of the Confederacy.
And it happened to be the battle flag that was adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in their night raids, period.
So, you know, the statues went up in the 1880s and 90s for the most part.
We all know exactly what's happening there.
We're trying to back and fill from the mistake of how horrible reconstruction is, right?
That's the, that's the story that we're told.
Reconstruction is, of course, a good period.
It's a period when we're trying to enforce civil rights in the South.
And the collapse is the tragedy.
A backroom deal with Florida electors, can't make this stuff up, after an election in which the Democrat won the popular vote, but the Republican got to be president because of a backroom deal that said, you know, the quid pro quo is, we'll switch our votes if you remove the federal troops from the south.
And so we enter this period and these monuments are a way of celebrating the traders who were at the head of the largest insurrection against the United States of America.
As your Colonel Wilkinson says, Isabelle in your quote.
And the same with the Confederate flag.
That it was already worked in at that time into the Mississippi flag and finally now out, but it went into all the other flags in the Confederacy after 1954.
And you go, "Well, why 1954?"
And you just look at people say, "Well, what do you think happened in 1954?"
Brown versus Board of Education happened.
And so you have, let's put in the Ku Klux Klan flag to say where we really stand.
So none of this stuff is a really big argument.
If that statue was up in 1865, or 1860, leave it.
If it went up after the collapse of reconstruction and or after the various periods where white supremacy was trying to brutally impose itself, not just over the old Confederacy, but there are lots of Confederate monuments and I want to exempt those at the battlefields.
In the North as well, they got to come down.
They have to come down.
And just doesn't, it doesn't work.
You have to change the name of these bases.
No African American kid should go to a school named Robert E. Lee, or Nathan Bedford Forrest or Jim Stewart or anything like that.
This is pretty basic, elemental kind of forward progress we can make.
And this is in fact not taking away people's heritage.
It's actually putting their heritage into a place in which everyone's heritage gets some voice.
Some skin in the game.
No, no pun intended.
I'm struck by what that the man at that public hearing in New Orleans said.
He himself as a southerner, as a white southerner, recognized that in Germany there are no statues to the people who were part of the Third Reich.
There are many, many differences, of course, between the Third Reich and anything that anything that happened the United States.
Although it's been you know, one of the things that I've discovered in the course of working on this book was that there are connections, very, very disturbing connections having to do with the interaction between the American eugenicists and Germany eugenicists.
Germany eugenicists actually consulted with and were in dialogue with American eugenicists in the years and decades leading up to the Third Reich.
That German that American eugenicsts we're writing books that were huge sellers in Germany and very, very much beloved by the Nazis.
And that's chilling to know.
Of course, the Nazis, needed no one to teach them how to hate.
Absolutely did not need to be taught that in any way.
But they actually sent researchers to the United States to study the Jim Crow Laws and the anti miscegenation laws that had been used to subjugate African Americans the you know, subordinated cast in the United States.
They sent researches, the Nazis sent research or searches to our country here to study what America had done to subjugate African Americans.
And studied those laws and debated those laws as they were forming what would ultimately become the Nuremberg Clauses.
This is just chilling and shocking to know that this is what the connection, one of the connections that we that exists.
That they were turning to the United States in the early years of the Reich because they were building it.
And it's just shocking to realize that.
Now you scroll many decades later and, you know, Germany has been wrestling with this.
Germany has been trying to make sure that all of its citizens and its students and young people all know the history.
And they know the history so well, they've been working to atone for that history.
And they have been doing it to such a degree that now in the center of Berlin, one of the major cities of the world, in the center of it there is a monument that takes up, you know, several football fields large, that is a monument to those who perished in the in the Holocaust as it should be.
What's so interesting about it is that there is no, there's no marking, there's no there's nothing there.
There's no display to explain what it is or what it why this needed to be there.
There's no explanation as to what happened and what this is referring to.
You just go and you see these, you know, these these blocks of, you know, concrete blocks that are massive, and they take up the entire you know, center of the city and you it's not you can't miss it.
But there's there is no need for description because people all know what it's there for.
They're all on the same page about what's happened in the country.
They all get the same messaging the the what has been used, what's been done with those, anything related to that era.
The places of the Third Reich, the headquarters and various buildings have been all turned into museums.
Museums to educate and to enlighten and to record and to archive what had happened so that people from all over the world can come and see for themselves what happened so that this would never, ever, ever happen again as it should be, as the work should be.
That is how they have wrestled with their history.
That is how they have diverted the memories of what happened into the use of education to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
So you can see that there's a huge difference in how we have wrestled with our history and how well we actually know our history versus how they have wrestled with their own history and I think that there are lessons for us in there.
So many lessons and you know as we start to pivot toward wrapping up this conversation and giving people some things to think about and act upon as they leave this conversation.
Ken, I wanna move to a more current project of yours.
It is a film that you were executive producer of called "College Behind Bars" that you made with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein and one of the subjects in this film, people are used to thinking of your work as rooted in history and this is a very contemporary film.
And one of the subjects in this film is a man named Rodney Spivey-Jones and at the time the film was made, he'd been incarcerated for 17 years and the film explores people who are pursuing their degrees.
And he's an amazing thoughtful man.
His thesis is titled Messianic Black Bodies and really moves us into the current moment.
And I would love if we could just hear a little bit from Rodney and start to think about how we direct people to move forward from this conversation.
Binyamin says that we shouldn't look at history as linear.
One event following another and then the other events are in the past.
When he says messianic, he's saying that this past is constantly being resurrected.
It's constantly re-emerging.
Well, when we take the black body, it's a container of all of this history of suffering and resistance.
So we have a body of Mike Brown lying in the middle of the street for 4 1/2 hours.
But for many of the African American activists who are seeing this body in the middle of the street, they're not just seeing Mike Brown, they're seeing all of the previous acts of indignities, injustice and it's not just their personal experiences but the entire quote and quote race.
And I think Messianic Black Bodies, it allows me to explain why, again why African Americans can look at a black body and say listen, that is all of this history and it's to me.
So that's somebody wrestling with this tension, the myth of America, the promise of America.
You can look at that clip and maybe feel dispirited.
It certainly is a clip that speaks to a system of mass incarceration and changes that need to be made.
But that's also a hopeful clip if we choose to think of it that way and I'd just be interested when you two hear Rodney speak and you think about your own work, where does that lead you?
Well first of all, it's to me very, very helpful.
You're right, this is a film that Lynn and Sarah made that is fully founded in the tragedies of mass incarceration and the disproportionate number of people of color in that system.
But here is an opportunity to sort of escape the specific gravity of that situation with a extraordinarily rigorous college program started by Bard College.
And Rodney is just spectacular and again he goes back to the theme of no time that you can look at Michael Brown but you're seeing as he says in another section of this thing, all the names.
Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, fill in the blank here.
And yet at the same time you're looking at someone who has negotiated his way if not physically out of that place.
And Rodney is not yet out but has liberated himself already.
And for me, I can't actually complete the film that I've described that one of the projects we're working on about emancipation exodus without him.
So he has a job when he gets out because I want his brain and his thesis is unbelievable to help make sure that we tell this extraordinarily complicated oh, I had no idea story well.
And so I need Rodney on this side of the bars before we can really go forward on that.
Isabel I wanna give you a chance to comment on Rodney but I would love to just close with a final bit from 'Caste" as well so if you have thoughts on Rodney and what he's saying about identity and black bodies and our history and where that leads you and where that led you in your work.
I think that one of the most powerful things out of the many, many powerful things that he says is that, it is just the line fill in the blanks because that's a reminder of how many people we have seen in just the last year in fact I mean, just within the last months of people... We see unarmed African Americans dying before our very eyes.
I mean, just dying before our very eyes and it's happening with such frequency that it is sadly shockingly a matter of how to keep up with the names.
You know fill in the blank is just a terrifying kind of fact of dehumanization in itself.
The fact that there are so many and I also like to say that this is something that really dehumanizes all of us because we should not be...
Certainly these things should not be happening but the idea that we have seen this play out, we've seen this so many times, my fear is that we've become inure to this dehumanization before our very eyes because this is happening so frequently that we can grow numb to seeing the loss, the bodies against whom this violence is inflicted but has been inflicted for so many generations for centuries in fact.
And so this seems to be sort of a modern day manifestation of what we have seen for so long in our country's history.
And I will read from a passage that's connected to this if you wouldn't mind?
I would love it.
The vast majority of African Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath.
Subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.
Quote, this fact is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict.
Wrote the Sociologists Guy B. Johnson.
For it means that white people during the long period of slavery became accustomed to the idea of regulating Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of a law, unquote.
Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate cast seem normal and righteous.
Quote, and the gentlest houses drifted now and then, the sound of dragging chains and shackles.
The bay of the hounds, the report of pistols on the trail of a runaway, unquote.
Wrote the Southern writer, Wilbur J.
Cash.
Quote, and as the advertisements at the time incontestably prove mutilation and the mark of a branding iron, unquote.
The most respected and beneficence of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners whose crime was that they were born with dark skin.
Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities personally inflicted gruesome torches upon their fellow human beings.
Quote, for the horrors of the American Negro's life, unquote.
Wrote James Baldwin.
Quote, there has been almost no language, unquote.
And this was what the United States was for far longer than it was not.
It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.
No current day adult will be alive in the year in which African Americans as a group have been free for as long as they have been enslaved.
That will not come until the year 2111.
That's incredible.
And it's something for us to think about and I think... You know on the one hand it is a reminder that.. Well, certainly some of these things feel like a long time ago.
We are very much in the midst of navigating our story and figuring out where we are in our history.
And so maybe it is not surprising Ken, that this year feels so difficult and we are at such a crossroads.
No, it's true and I think that that is the sobering and terrifying aspect to all of this.
And yet perhaps that's where the seed that you spoke a little while ago about what to do.
I'd almost go back to the first voice we heard after yours which was that of Frederick Douglas when I asked at the end of his life by a young man what he should do and he said, "Agitate, agitate, agitate."
And all that is, is just stirring it up, writing an extraordinary book trying to communicate bottom up stories, trying to rearrange the molecules of this kind of constant narrative that perpetuates the old forms and disrupt in that way.
And hopefully stop one of the fill in the blanks, you know?
I'm here because we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1963 because my mother was dying of cancer and my father had two job offers.
One where there was a hospital Michigan and one where there it wasn't.
And so as a almost 10 year old boy I moved here.
And at the same time I have been watching in our previous home and in Ann Arbor, the dogs and the fire hoses in summer and I conflated and confused the cancer that was killing my country with the cancer that was killing my family.
And my mother died just a year and half after we moved anyway.
And a good deal of what I've done has been to try to take the architecture of the atom and the architecture of the solar system and try to show the similarities and try to say that in the particular, William Blake, the romantic poet, you could find the world in a grain of sand and that it is possible by telling these stories to get a sense of the larger cosmology and the way things are constructed and to do it in an intimate way.
And so, almost like judo I've used the pain of loss at age 11 of my mother to begin an investigation of telling stories in the history of the United States that somehow permits us to both conflate the intimate with the general but also to separate them in a way that we can struggle with this grief and come to terms with what's in the basement of our house.
Yeah, agitate, agitate, agitate, Agitate, agitate, agitate, that's it.
Isabel, I wanna thank you for this beautiful book "Caste: The Origins of our Discontents" and it is plural discontents ISABEL: Yes it is.
There are many and what it's calling us to grapple with I think that so much of our society now reinforces some sort of immediate response to things.
And I think what I appreciate about both of your work is you're asking us to think about things deeply and to try to make connections and can through Unum.
I hope that and we'll share on the screen here how people can go and look at this website Unum and try to make these connections so that we can find our place in our history and really about how we got here and how we all have agency in moving us forward.
I thank you both so much for your work and Isabel I hope we don't have to wait 10 more years for another book and Ken we will be looking forward to the new projects that you have in the works many of them and hopefully see the two of you together again.
I really thank you for being here together to talk about these issues with us.
Thank you for bringing us together.
Thank you.
(calm upbeat music) (birds chirping) (engine roaring) (birds chirping) (dog barks)