The only book learning we ever got was when we stole it. Master bought some slaves from Cincinnati, that had worked in white folks’ houses. They had stole a little learning and when they came to our place, they passed on to us what they knew. We wasn’t allowed no paper and pencil. I learned all my ABCs without it. I knows how to read and ain’t never been in a school room in my life. There was one woman by the name of Aunt Sylvia. She was so smart she foreknowed things before they took place. —Mark Oliver
The summer of 2020 now feels like distant history, and it is easy to be cynical about that moment given the backlash that has followed that season of protests over the parade of Americans murdered by the forces we pay to protect us. But I remember an even more distant era, when the names of those killed died with the people who carried them. Those 2020 protests succeeded in implanting some skepticism in people who were raised on the idea of Officer Friendly. I think that is what the white supremacists feared most—the spreading realization that the cops were not knights and the creeping sense among Americans that there was something rotten not just in law enforcement but maybe also in the law itself. That fear explains the violence of the response to the protests, but even that violence redounded to the benefit of the protesters because it confirmed their critique. What was the justifiably noble interest that required tear-gassing protesters blocks from the Capitol, or the deployment of secret police in Portland, or the literal cracking of heads in Buffalo? While violence was never forsworn, by the end of summer white supremacists had learned a lesson: The war might be raging in the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they were ultimately fighting was the word.
Around the same time George Floyd was killed, Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay in the 1619 Project, which argued for America’s origins not in the Declaration of Independence but in enslavement. Nikole is my homegirl, and like me, she believes that journalism, history, and literature have a place of honor in our fight to make a better world. I had the great fortune of watching her build the 1619 Project, of being on the receiving end of texts with highlighted pages from history books, of hearing her speak on the thrilling experience of telling our story, some 400 years after we arrived here, in all the grandeur it deserved. Seeing the seriousness of effort, her passion for it, the platform she commanded, and the response it garnered, I knew a backlash was certain to come. But I can’t say I understood how profound this backlash would be—that a “1776 Project” would be initiated by the president, that the 2020 protests would be dubbed by some on the right as the “1619 riots,” thus explicitly, if in bad faith, connecting the writing and the street, and that the White House would issue Executive Order 13950, targeting any education or training that included the notion that America was “fundamentally racist,” the idea that any race bore “responsibility for actions committed in the past,” or any other “divisive concept” that should provoke “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” It’s true that the order was revoked after its author lost the next election, but by that time it had spawned a suite of state-level variants—laws, policies, directives, and resolutions—all erected to excise “divisive concepts” from any training or education. The flag of parental rights was raised. In Tennessee and Georgia, teachers were fired. School boards in Virginia were besieged. And in North Carolina, Nikole’s tenure at the state’s flagship university—where she herself was an alum—was denied.
I guess it’s worth pointing out the obvious—that the very governors and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts.” And I guess it should be noted that what these politicians—and even some writers—dubbed “critical race theory” bore little resemblance to that theory’s actual study and practice. So I will note it. But the simple fact is that these people were liars, and to take them seriously, to press a case of hypocrisy or misreading, is to be distracted again. “The goal,” as their most prominent activist helpfully explained, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and think ‘critical race theory.’ ” It worked. Today, some four years after the signing of 13950, nearly half the country’s schoolchildren have been protected, by the state, from “critical race theory” and other “divisive concepts.”
Homes and businesses smoke after the Tulsa race massacre, June 1921. Protesters hold pictures of George Floyd at a Juneteenth rally in Brooklyn, 2020. Indigenous warrior Medicine Owl, circa 1920.Illustration by Yannick Lowery.
It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now moved to the library, that a counterrevolution in defense of brutal policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and art. But in the months after George Floyd’s murder, books by Black authors on race and racism shot to the top of best-seller and most-borrowed lists. Black bookstores saw their sales skyrocket. The cause for this spike was, in the main, people who had been exposed to the image of George Floyd being murdered who suddenly began to suspect that they had not been taught the entire truth about justice, history, policing, racism, and any number of other related subjects. The spike only lasted that summer—but it was enough to leave the executors of 13950 shook. And they were right to be.
History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates the present. And framed a certain way, a story can be told that justifies the present political order. A political order is not just premised on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what unrealized possibilities can be imagined. Our possibilities are defined by our history, our culture, and our myths. That the country’s major magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, and social media were suddenly lending space to stories that questioned the agreed-upon narrative meant that it was possible that Americans, as a whole, might begin to question them too. And a new narrative—and a new set of possibilities—might then be born.
The truth is that even as I know and teach the power of writing, I still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the real world. Maybe it is the nature of books. Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it. I see politicians in Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina moving against my own work, tossing books I’ve authored out of libraries, banning them from classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and brought into another age, one of pitchforks and book-burning bonfires. My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women as lethal as they were ridiculous. And when I force myself to take a serious look, I see something familiar: an attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form.
What these adults are ultimately seeking is not simply the reinstatement of their preferred dates and interpretations but the preservation of a whole manner of learning, austere and authoritarian, that privileges the indoctrination of national dogmas over the questioning of them. The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.
I know this directly. I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world. My eldest, The Beautiful Struggle, is the honorable, hardworking son. He has that union job my father once aspired to, four kids, and a wife he met in high school. My second son, Between the World and Me, is the “gifted” one, or rather the one whose gifts are most easily translated to the rest of the world. He plays in the NBA, enjoys the finer things, and talks more than he should. I see We Were Eight Years in Power as the insecure one, born in the shadow of my “gifted” son and who has never quite gotten over it. He has problems. We don’t talk about him much. All these children suspect that my daughter, my baby girl, The Water Dancer, is my favorite. Perhaps. She certainly is the one that is most like me—if a little better, more confident, and more self-assured. I see my books this way because it helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned it’s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.
My loyalty to that lesson is dispositional—I am often struck by secondhand embarrassment watching writers defend themselves against every bad review. But it’s also strategic: My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it, and then leave. Some people will like it, others won’t, and nothing can change that. I am at my worst out there defending my children and at my best out of the public eye, enjoying the pleasure of making more of them.
But in the months after George Floyd, it became clear that this was a privilege. Out in the real world, teachers, parents, students, and librarians saw in this man’s murder an America they had not previously known. And with this new knowledge of the world, there came an urge to understand. When these people spoke out, they found their livelihoods imperiled. They did not have the luxury of declining to defend themselves. I think a lot about this one note I received from Woodland Park, Colorado. The school board was trying to ban Between the World and Me. A resident wrote urging me to reach out to one of the teachers who was fighting it. “He believes in you and your message (as do I),” the resident wrote. “And he has been suffering for it.” Suffering. It felt inhuman to let that pass. So I sent along a note of support. I even went on TV to call out the school board. But after that I retreated into my own private space of bookmaking.
And then I read about Mary Wood. The outlines of the case were not much different from others I’d heard about: She was a teacher in South Carolina who had been forced to drop Between the World and Me from her lesson plan because it made some of her students, in their words, “feel uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian.” Moreover, they were sure that the very subject of the book—“systemic racism”—was “illegal.” These complaints bore an incredible resemblance to the language of 13950, which prohibited “divisive concepts” that provoked in students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” And it was not just the students’ complaints that resembled the executive order—the South Carolina 2022 budget contained a prohibition lifted, nearly word for word, from 13950.
The connection between the legislation and 13950 was obvious. Still, for the first time I began to think about the vocabulary being employed—discomfort, shame, anguish—and how it read like a caricature of the vocabulary of safety that had become popular on campuses around the country. I suspect this was intentional. Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves. The strategy banks on the limited amount of time possessed by most readers and listeners and aims to communicate via shorthand that is just as often sleight of hand. It’s not surprising that everyday people grappling with laundry, PTA meetings, and bills do not always see the device and the deception. But the difference is clear—Mary’s protesting students were not looking to attach a warning to Between the World and Me about its disturbing imagery or themes but to have the book, by force of law, removed from the state’s school altogether.
Literature is anguish. Even small children know this. I was no older than five, crying in the back seat of my parents’ orange Volkswagen while they argued up front. When they turned to comfort me, they were shocked to learn that I was crying not about their argument but about the grasshopper who starved in winter while the ant feasted. The wolf devours Grandma. The gingham dog and the calico cat devour each other. I was not born into a religious home, but I knew that my peers had been raised on stories of God casting Adam and Eve from paradise for biting an apple, that he had destroyed all life save that contained in the ark on a whim, that he had condemned me and every other nonbeliever to eternal suffering. I suspect these believers would say that the anguish, this discomfort radiating out of their own gospel, is not incidental but is at the heart of its transformative power. For my part, the anguish of the story of the grasshopper and the ant was in the moral of the story: that laziness and foolishness made one worthy of starvation. This kind of retribution left me empty, and even then I felt I wanted no part of a world that called starvation just. That was my personal revelation—and one that apparently ran contrary to the story’s intended message. But in my anguish, in my disagreement with the core of the text, I found my truth. And that, I suspect, is the real problem. Whatever the attempt to ape the language of college students, it is neither anguish nor discomfort that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.
