Reckoning with America’s history of slavery

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This week on the Empire Politics Podcast. This is Fresh Air, I'm David Bean Coolie. After the statue of Robert E. Lee near downtown New Orleans, was taken down from its 60-foot pedestal in 2017. Clint Smith became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with, and with

teaching himself all the things he wishes someone had taught him long ago. Smith is from New Orleans, where at least a hundred streets, statues, parks and schools, are named after Confederate figures, slaveholders, and defenders of slavery. His non-fiction book, "How the Word is Past," a reckoning with the history of slavery across America, won the National Book Critic Circle Award for non-fiction, reached number

one on the New York Times best-seller list, and was on the New York Times book reviews ten best books of 2021. For the book, he visited eight places to better understand the distortions in the way the history of slavery was taught to him and to most children, as well as the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history.

“Smith earned a PhD in education from Harvard.”

He also is a poet and a staff writer at the Atlantic. His book Counting Descent won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. And in 2023, he published another collection of poems called "Above Ground." He's a previous National Poetry Slam Champion.

We're going to listen to Smith's 2021 interview with Terry Gross.

But first, he reads a poem he wrote about growing up in New Orleans.

Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy wasn't ever present fixture of my daily life. Every day, on the way to school, I passed a statue of PGT Beauregard riding on horseback. His confederate uniforms lunged over his shoulder, and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who PGT Beauregard was.

I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate National Flag.

“I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery”

what I knew, is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city. These copper garlands of a pass that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silence by the soil. After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason

into something they could name as honorable. They called it the lost cause, and it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding. They told us that Robert E. Lee was an honest man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved, that the Southern flag was about heritage, and remembering

those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. Let's see the thing about the lost cause, is that it's only lost if you're not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it's a word that also means I'm ignoring what we did to you.

I was taught the Civil War wasn't about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations

of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught that the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the four million enslaved black people were worth more than every bank factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states rights, but I was never taught how the

fugitive slave at Cuckair less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way. It's easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don't see the black bodies buried behind it. It's easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in

its wake. I come from a city abounding statues of white men on pedestals and black children playing beneath them or we played trumpets and trombone to drown out the dixie song that still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there were a hundred schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates

and slaveholders.

Every day, black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them

to be there. Every time I return home, I drive on street's name for those who would have wanted me in chains. Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on clayborne translation, go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered

hundreds of black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of black bodies, the cornerstone of his new nation. Make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of Rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.

What do you call it when the road you walk on is name for those who imagined you under

a news?

“What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have”

wanted the bricks to crush you? Clean Smith. Now, let's hear his 2021 interview with Terry Gross, when his book How The Word Is Past was released. It's now out in paperback.

You may hear a difference in the quality of the audio. It was recorded during the pandemic when guests couldn't come to the studio. So much of what animated this book and served as a catalyst for wanting to write this book was watching the statues.

He's Confederate statues in my hometown in New Orleans, come down in May of 2017.

And so statues of Robert E. Lee, PGT Global Guard, Jefferson Davis, among other symbols of white supremacy, coming down after having been erected and located in different parts of the city for over a century, many of them. And I started thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more omages to enslavers than there were enslaved people.

I got it in that to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Highway, plantations on field trips as an elementary and middle school student. I was going to places where the sites of torture and intergenerational chattel bondage. But no one said the word slavery.

And so I started thinking about how that came to be because symbols aren't just symbols.

They are reflective of stories that we tell and those stories embed themselves into the narratives

that a society carries and those narrative, shape, public policy and public policy obviously shapes the material conditions of people's lives. And so the implications of this were vast. And so I started thinking about that in New Orleans. And then I started thinking about what did this look like across the country and across

the ocean, like what are the different places that are attempting to or failing to tell a story about the history of slavery and how does that shape our country's collective memory of this institution that we are told happened long ago, but in fact, it wasn't that long ago at all. What were you taught in school about the Confederate generals and the owners of enslaved

“people whose names and statues were all over New Orleans where you grew up?”

I was taught very little to be honest and to the extent that I was taught anything. I was taught that, you know, Robert E. Lee was an honorable man who fought for the state and the people that he loved. I was taught that the Civil War was about states' rights and that it was reflective of a failure to compromise when in fact all that had been happening in the decades prior to

the Civil War were attempts to compromise and what was compromised was the freedom of enslaved people. And so part of what maybe I want to write this book was that I remember growing up in New Orleans and being inundated with these messages, some implicit, some explicit about why New Orleans was the way that it was, right?

I was, you know, we're inundated with messages that New Orleans was the murder capital of a nation that we incarcerated in more people, per capita than China and Iran and Russia that there was a sort of culture of violence, a culture of pathology that was so deeply embedded in the city and implicit within that is the black people within the city because this was especially at that time for a long time a majority black city.

And so I was inundated with these messages as a child and as a young person and I felt like I didn't have the language or the toolkit or the framework with which to push back against it. What happens is you almost experience sort of psychological and emotional paralysis where you like know that the things that this country is telling you about your community and

about people who look like you was wrong but you don't necessarily have the language or the history with which to explain it. So it's very hard to change the narrative of history even when the narrative you're trying to change is proven to be wrong or distorted but some places really are trying to change the narrative and you've visited one of those places Jefferson's home and plantation

Monticello and it seems that the narrative there is changing that the tours given to people now are saying very different things about the history there than the tours that used to be given. Give us an example of that.

“So Monticello I think is a really fascinating example of a place that evolves and changes”

over time and responds to new information and shapes their the curation of their museum experience in that way. So one example of a new project that they've begun is something that started a few years ago which is a tour that focuses on the Hemings of Monticello, the Hemings family. And the Hemings family was an enslaved family and enslaved black family on Monticello's

John Wales so her father was a white man and her mother was a mixed race black woman and

“so she was actually a quarter black but was still enslaved on that plantation because of”

the sort of notions of the one drop rule and that one drop of African blood would make you black which gets into a larger thing of race as a social construction but regardless the Hemings is were enslaved on this plantation and were really central to what the plantation was and how and operated and part of what Monticello has recognized is that they have to center the lives of the enslaved people who lived there and not just center the story

of Monticello on Jefferson because it's much larger than Jefferson and in order to understand it as a plantation we have to understand the people who who lived on that plantation and made it what it was outside of the context of this single man I thought it was really

“interesting that some of the tourists are basically prepared or you might even say warned”

by the tour guides that some of what you're going to hear today might be difficult because a lot of the people who come to visit Monticello are just expecting a heroic story about Jefferson and not realizing that some of the story they're going to get is about Jefferson as a slave owner somebody who bought and sold people and who had a sexual relationship with one of the people who he owned so did that surprise you that they were almost like

you know like warnings before the tour it did so the tour your referencing is the slavery at Monticello tour and one of the things that was most interesting about it is that to your point a lot of people come to this place having no conception of Jefferson as someone who owned enslaved people and so I spoke to these two women after my tour done in grace and I've been watching them during the tour given by this man David Therson who's a

tour guide at Monticello and and he talked about slavery in Jefferson and Jefferson's relationships slavery in ways that were more direct than any teacher I had ever had and it was clearly deeply impacting these women and their mouths were a gap and they were clearly sort of unnerved and unsettled and I went up to them afterwards and spoke to them and they were just like I had no idea Jefferson owns place I had no idea that Monticello was a plantation

and mind you these are people who bought plain tickets who bought hotel rooms who rented cars to come to this place

almost as a pilgrimage to to see the home of the third president of the United States one of our

founding fathers but had no conception of him as someone who enslaved human beings yeah and getting back to Sally Hemings for a second she was 16 and Jefferson was in his mid 40s and he started his sexual relationship with her so he's having sex with somebody who he owns and she's 16 part of what Monticello is doing too is trying to sort of complicate notions of the history that we've been taught and saying that you know we cannot understand what Sally Hemings relationship

to Jefferson was as something that was fully consensual because he owned her and that is should serve as an entry point to us thinking about the way that black women throughout the history of slavery were treated the way that their bodies in so many ways were not their own and the ways that they were subjected to rape and to assault and to just an onslaught of of subjugation to their bodies in ways that that I don't think this country has fully accounted for so when you think about

the declaration of independence and Thomas Jefferson was one of the drafters of the declaration

“what do you have to reconcile in your mind I mean Jefferson I think generally is such a fascinating”

historical figure for me because I think he's sort of a microcosm of America he's a microcosm of the dissonance and the disconnect and the contradictions of this country in the sense that America is this place is provided unimaginable unparalleled opportunities for millions of people across generations to build wealth and create opportunities for upward mobility and has done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been subjugated and oppressed

across generations and and the story of America is both of those things and we have to hold both of those things that want to recognize the totality and complexity of this country and I think

Jefferson similarly you know is the man who wrote one of the most important documents in the history

lifetime including for his own children he is someone who wrote in one document that all men are

created equal and wrote in another document that black people are inferior to whites in both

“endowments of body and mind and so I think that Manicello and Jefferson in one of the reasons I”

wanted to go there for this book is is that I wanted to explore how how this place tells a fuller more honest robust story of this person so that we can have a fuller more honest more robust understanding of this country that he was one of the creators of. In the epilogue of your book you write about your grandparents and you you actually interview them and so I'd like to start this section of our interview with asking you to read a paragraph about your grandfather's

grandfather and to me this is almost like a prose poem. I'd be happy to. My grandfather's grandfather wasn't slave. They shared a name, a lineage and a hard soil of Mississippi. My grandfather's grandfather wasn't slave. I thought about how I felt pulled closer to the center of the concentric circle of history.

“My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. I set it out loud and let it idle on the edges of my”

lips. My family told me that my grandfather's grandfather was born into slavery and I never knew

until I asked. When did you ask? It was in the process of writing this book. One of the reasons I wanted to end the book with interviews and conversations with my grandparents is based on a trip that I took with my grandparents to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and we were walking through the museum. I was pushing my grandfather in his wheelchair and my grandfather was walking a little bit in front of us and I had this moment where I was walking through

this museum and I realized that so much of the violence and history that was documented in this museum was something that they had experienced firsthand. My grandfather born in 1930, Jim Crow Parttide in Mississippi. My grandmother born in 1939, Jim Crow Parttide, Florida. This history, the history that we are made to feel happened in the Jurassic Age almost, is something that they lived through. When I spoke to my grandmother, she had this refrain, you know, when I asked her about the

our trip to the museum, she was just like, I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. She was looking around and realizing that like so much of what she was seeing, she lived through it and experienced it directly and I just really, you know, I'd spent these years working on this book, interviewing strangers and going into the archives and thinking about primary source documents and asking people, I just met their life story and what their relationship to the history of slavery was and I

realized that I had never been as intentional in doing so with my own family and so I sat down

and had this series of conversations with my grandparents and just learned so much about them and their history and their own lineage, which is my own in ways that I never would have known otherwise. You know, the reading that you did for us, it's almost like you just mowing over and saying to yourself over and over, my grandfather's grandfather wasn't slaveed and I'm sure like you knew in some abstract level that your ancestors had been enslaved. What was the difference between knowing

abstractly and finding out that your grandfather's grandfather wasn't slaveed? Because it sounds like it was almost in its own way a shock to have the specificity of that. Yeah, I think he gave me a different sense of my proximity to that history again because you know, as I sort of mentioned like we are taught that the history of slavery is something that happened, you know, almost like when there were dinosaurs, it was like the dinosaurs, the Flintstones, and slavery, you know,

“like in so many ways that's how young people are taught to think about it, they are taught to think”

that this is something that was terrible but was a long, long, long, long time ago. And when I'm encountering information that's like my grandfather's grandfather wasn't slave, you know, this person who I love, this person who I was raised around, this person who was so central to my life and my own identity is someone who was only a generation or to remove from a family member who had been born into slavery. And so I think about my own four-year-old son sitting on my grandfather's

lap. And I imagine what it would have been like from my grandfather's sit on his grandfather's lap.

go at all, the woman who opened the National Museum of African American history and culture

alongside the Obama family in 2016 who rang the bell to sort of signal the opening of this museum was the daughter of an enslaved person, not the granddaughter, not the great-great-granddaughter, but like was the daughter of someone who had been born into slavery and this is in 2016. And so it's a reminder that there are people still alive today who loved, who are raised by

“who knew who were in community with, people who had been born into child slavery. And I think when”

when you realize our proximity to that, you gain a different understanding of how the idea that what our society and what our country looks like today would not be impacted by that is both

morally and intellectually disingenuous. Clean Smith speaking to Terry Gross in 2021. After a break,

we'll hear another of their conversations, and critic at large John Powers reviews lanterns, the new TV show featuring the classic DC Comics character Green Lantern. I'm David B. in Koolie, and this is Fresh Air. This week on Consider This, stories about the Trump administration, here how a former Olympian was targeted by the Justice Department over damage to the reflecting pool, plus inside Trump's secret decoy flight out of Turkey that left press and cabinet officials

on Air Force one without him. Listen for those stories and more of the week's biggest news.

“This week on Consider This from NPR. How did we get here?”

That's a question we have been trying to answer a lot here at NPR. We are exploring global histories on throughline, where hearing from national security experts on sources and methods we're watching the markets with planet money. You can support this work across all our podcasts with NPR Plus. Find out more at plus.npr.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. in Koolie. We just heard Clint Smith's interview about the distorted way the history of slavery was taught

to him and most children and the way as many Americans deceive themselves about that history. Now let's hear another of our interviews with Clint Smith. This one from 2023 about his book of poems titled Above Ground. It deals with the legacy of slavery in a more personal way through poems addressed to his young children about what their grandparents endured and escaped. The poems also are about fatherhood and the joy and anxiety surrounding it,

especially as a black father. Clint Smith, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's really a treat to have you back on the show. Your book opens with a prose poem about something I've been thinking about a lot and I know a lot of other people think about this too and that is how do you hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time gratitude for the things that are right in your life and anger or fear about everything that's wrong in your life or in politics or in

“the larger world or with the earth itself. What were you trying to reconcile when you wrote this?”

What was happening in your life? Yeah, well it's so good to be back with you Terry. It's always a

pleasure to be on this program and with regard to this first poem, so much of what I've been thinking about over the last several years is what you've kind of alluded to the the simultaneous of the human experience which is to say how do we move through our lives holding wonder, joy, all alongside fear, despair, a sense of catastrophe and a lot of what I'm thinking about in this collection is that idea in the context of the larger human experience but also through the

prism of parenthood. It how parenthood is both the thing that shows you parts of yourself that you have never experienced before in ways that you are incredibly proud of and also in ways that you're ashamed of, how being with your kids is full of joy and levity and laughter and also that parenthood is one of the most exhausting, difficult and fear-inducing experiences in the world and so I'm thinking about this Hamiltonity of our lives, both in a macro context and a geopolitical context

in an ecological context but also in the specific granular details of our own lives. And you have the ability to put it all in words that really perfect the thought, clarify the thought. So would you read for us all at once? I'd be happy to. All at once. The red woods are on fire in California, a flood submerges a neighborhood that's that quiet on the coast for three centuries.

Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil, a glacier melt into the ocean and the sea climbs

closer to the land. A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time.

A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. A country below the equator ends a 20-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another. The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. Your mother's cancer has returned and doctors say there is nothing else they can do.

There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.

Before we get to more of your poems, I want to ask you about your nonfiction book,

how the word is passed. That's about the legacy of slavery and the monuments commemorating the Confederacy and Slav Holders. The distortions of history has your book been banned. There's so many books now fiction and nonfiction related to black history that have been banned or that

“are under consideration for removal from the classroom. It's interesting because I think there are”

couple different ways that book banning manifest itself as a sort of political and social phenomenon. I'm not specifically familiar with whether or not the book has been banned by particular school districts or that there are, whether or not there are librarians who are prevented from learning it out. I've heard a few stories anecdotally, but I've not seen a lot of that, but what I'm more familiar with, an example I have is there was a school in which the students

and teachers selected how the word is passed as their common read. It was a private school and they were going to buy 2,000 copies of the book and I was going to come speak there and I've done this several different universities over the past year so and so I was excited to do this at a school with younger students and being conversation with those educators and those students about so many of the themes that come up in the book but then my speaking agency got a note that said that

a decision had been made from above, from a board level that decided that they were not going to do have how the word is passed be the common read anymore because they didn't want any sort of

controversial, critical race theory books being inserted into the lives of students and having them

indoctrinated with a particular set of views and so the visit was canceled, the purchase of

“the book was canceled and I think that that's something that's in some ways much more common for”

so many authors than what's happening in terms of the specific public list. Let's talk about your poems and I want you to read one that's impart about what your grandparents live through, growing up and what you describe as the apartheid south. Your grandfather was from Mississippi and your grandmother from Florida and it also refers to the miracle of your son being born, your first child because he was hard to conceive and then the pregnancy ended up being very risky. Would you read it

for us? By chance, if the doctors said you were impossible and you arrived anyway, doesn't mean they were wrong or doesn't mean you defied science, what is the difference between science and a miracle, other than discovering new language for something we don't understand. The day we brought you home, I stayed up all night and watched you sleep in your bassinet because I was afraid if I closed my eyes, you'd vanish. Once, a long time ago, your grandmother

escaped a war and your great-grandfather fought in one. You come from a good fortune. You come from a history that is arbitrary and cloaked in luck. You come from a landmine that was two feet to the left. You come from children who shared their bread when they didn't have to. You come from the parachute that didn't open. Then did? Do you tell your children about what it took for them to get here for you to get here, what your grandparents endured and how they survived?

“I do absolutely. I think it's really important for them to know and this poem is actually”

speaking to the experience not only of my own grandparents but also thinking specifically of

from Nigeria to Cameroon when she was a child and who ended up being able to move to the United States and make a life for herself when such a thing was so uncertain and so, you know, I'm thinking about the sort of what it means for my children to be the descendants of people who were enslaved and also the descendants of people who were colonized and what it means to carry both of those

“lineages in their bodies and it's important for us to communicate those reality to them and”

obviously you do it in a way that's developmentally appropriate. You do it in a way that allows them to understand that's not going to traumatize them but it is important for our kids to have an understanding both in a sort of micro familiar context where they come from but also to understand the sort of larger social realities of colonialism of slavery that's shaped why their family looks the way that it does today.

Cleansmith speaking to Terry Gross in 2023. More after a break, this is fresh air. This week on sources and methods for a year now, members of the National Guard have controlled the streets of Washington, D.C. might they be tasked with patrolling polling places this November, you know, the military may be going to some states and seizing ballot boxes.

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that's this week on sources and methods the National Security podcast from NPR. The fatal shooting of a teenager at a protest in Seattle has gone unsolved for six years. This is open in your faith to how are there no answers. Our investigation has uncovered new

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Not once. Listen to we keep us safe. A new true crime series on the embedded podcast from NPR. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's 2023 interview with author, historian and poet Clint Smith. They're discussing his latest book of poetry called "Above Ground." Did you always know you wanted to be a father and when you were younger and what when you were older when you were a young man and you looked around and you saw the people who were parents

your age and older. What did you see? Oh man. Well I thought that once you reach your 30s you were like an elderly person.

“So I was like you know I couldn't I was like once you have kids you're like oh you must be on”

I didn't know what Social Security was but I was like whatever version of the thing that

old people get is it's probably what you get when you turn 30. I always thought that I was

going to be a dad. I don't think there was ever a point in which that didn't feel like something I was moving toward. With the exception and I write about this at the beginning of the book is when my wife and I got news that we were the fertility was going to be difficult for us and it was very uncertain and the pregnancies themselves when they even happened were uncertain and incredibly emotionally and physically difficult especially for my wife. I always imagined

by self as being a father but there were certainly moments where a fatherhood felt more distant and so I feel the enormous gratitude to look at these two little humans that we brought into the world because there was a point in which that that was um it was uncertain whether or not that would happen. I want you to read a poem about that that's a poem about meeting your wife and deciding to try it to conceive pretty soon because of the problems of fertility.

Counting descent to my son was born on the 71st day of spring on the fifth floor of a hospital in a city with a history of burning. He had two grandmothers in the room and four generations in the world. My daughter was born on the 59th day of winter and two doors down from the room her brother was born in 21 months before. Both of my children were in do several weeks before they would do because waiting any longer would have been a risk to both of their lives. I met my wife two years

one month and seven days before our first child arrived and three relationships after I assumed

no one like her existed. We sat at a table in a city 893 miles away from where we live now four times more likely than we planned and talked about things we had spent half our lives attempting to forget. When the bar closed we walked two miles to her apartment where two dates later we'd kiss for the first time. After 17 months and three doctors appointments we started trying to have a child because the doctor said we had less than a 1% chance. I'm not sure how they came up

So that was a follow-up poem to the title poem of your first book of poetry which is also about

thinking about your past in terms of numbers. I'll just quote a few lines. You write my grandfather is a quarter-century older than is right to vote and two decades younger than the president who signed the paper that made it. Why don't numbers have so much power where you're counting the days the months the distance between? I should say that this poem and the one that preceded it were inspired by a mentor of mine Alan Michael Parker who's a professor at Davidson College where

I went and he was my advisor. He was one of the people who introduced me to poetry and he has a poem in this book that in his book they use as a similar conceit that I was also drawn to.

“I think numbers are such an interesting way to document one's past. I like the idea of”

the specificity of these moments and for me poems especially these sorts of poems in this collection

are time capsules. They are attempts to capture a moment in time. They are attempts to archive a moment of feeling and idea and event so that I might be able to look back on it in the way that one looks back at a picture in a photo album or now a picture in your phone from years ago and be drawn back into a moment and I think that using numbers in this sort of conceit of this poem and the previous counting descent is just another way of creating sort of time

capsules within the larger time capsule of the poem. There's a poem I'd like you to read about being out at the pharmacy with your two young kids and if you have any greatest hits and any

“poems you think of as greatest hits I would imagine this would be one of them. So this poem is called”

Gold Stars. Gold stars. On the days when I am out alone with my children I made to feel as if I am a saint or a god or the undisputed best father of all time. What I mean is that when we walk into CVS and my daughter is wrapped on my chest and my son totals and my side people stop and look and gasp and point and walk up to me asking to shake my hand. Men pat me on the back women touch my shoulder and touch their hearts. The manager at the front of the store comes on to

loudspeaker to say excuse me my have everyone's attention on aisle seven you can get three boxes

of detergent for the price of two and on aisle five there is an incredible father running errands

alone with his children. Everyone in the store burst into applause and someone walks over to hand me a crown and a ribbon and a coupon for an all you can eat buffet. Just the other day a woman at the park told me how wonderful it is that I took the time to babysit my own children. Just the other day I changed a dirty diaper and someone said praise Jesus. Just the other day a man on the road stopped his car in the middle of the street rolled down his window and told me I was father of the year.

It's not that I don't appreciate the sentiment. It's just that this man has no idea what kind of father I actually am. All he saw was me and two children and a diaper bag teaming with crackers. It's not that I don't want people to tell me I'm doing a good job. It's just that I am praised for the sorts of things no one ever thinks my wife for. I am a dorned in a garland of gold stars for simply being in this body. Your wife might love that poem and the acknowledgement of the

disparity between how men are just like acknowledged and applauded for just being a father out in public with their kids and the way women are just expected to be that way. Yeah it's one of those things where you know and we talk about this all the time and

“and experience it in such profoundly different ways all the time and I think there's an additional”

layer because you know she's a black woman and I'm a black man and so that is in conversation with the sort of already conspicuous difference that I think men and women often of any race experience with regard to people's perception of their role as parents and it's one of those things where it's nice to tell parents they're doing a good job. Like it is I do feel oftentimes that like you know parents should get a parade. Parents should get a you know should get

have random people come up to them and give them crowns and give them coupons and give them and tell them they're doing a great job. So it's not to say that that shouldn't happen but it is to ask us to examine why we do that for fathers in a way we don't do for mothers and I think

the sort of pathologies around black fatherhood that have existed in our public consciousness for

a long time and and so I think when people see a black father they they want to celebrate it like when they see a black father with his young kids it feels worthy of of praise and so I

“understand where it's coming from even if I think it's important to push back against the impulse”

to do it only for the fathers and not for the mothers. Cleansmith it's been great having you on the show again and hearing you read your poems and talk about your life thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Cleansmith speaking to Terry Gross in 2023. His book "How the Word is Past" and his collection of poetry above ground are both out in paperback. Coming up John Powers reviews lanterns a new TV show reviving a very vintage comic book hero

Green Lantern. This is fresh air. The midterms are coming and that means the new cycle which is already intense is about to get more intense this fall. So this summer is a perfect time to make sure

your news diet is calibrated. I'm Leila Faldzill on up first we unpack the three biggest stories

every morning so you can stay informed and get on with your day in less than 15 minutes. Follow or subscribe to up first today wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Farn. After a really good show for like you want something. On Bullseye rapper Isaiah Rashad on how we wind down after a night on stage as it is in his thirties. So it's like it's hard not to

“celebrate with. I think I'm going to get a salad. Self-care is important. That's Bullseye.”

Find us in the NPR app at maximum fund.org or wherever you get podcasts. This is fresh air. The new HBO series lanterns puts a contemporary spin on the DC Comics series green lantern which has been around since 1940. Kyle Chandler stars as Hal Gordon who statuses the green lantern is threatened by the appearance of his successor played by the British actor Erin Pierre. Our critic at large John Powers has seen the seven episodes available for preview and says

that lanterns is a super hero show aimed at people who may not like comic book heroes. When I was a kid, I loved comic books. Spider-Man was my favorite and my mom was cool with that. What she wasn't cool with was my college age cousins or their dads reading about superhero's too. When will these dummies grow up, she'd say. But a funny thing happened. It was the comics, not the dummies that began to grow up. Ever since the watershed year of 1986, with the

advent of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchman, the most ambitious superhero stories have aimed to tackle adult themes. Which is how we get a series like HBO's lanterns, the latest in the scores of superhero series to air in the last 20 years. Writhing on the DC Comics green lantern, this mashup of superpower action, odd couple comedy, an old school cop story, both the pleasures and betrays the perils of pushing the comic book

envelope. Kyle Chandler stars as Hal Jordan, a one-time test pilot whose fearlessness led the guardians of the universe to anoint him a green lantern, an intergalactic cop whose lantern powered ring allows him to fly and create objects out of solid green light. But over the years, Hal's become a scruffy, hard-to-handle-wise eager. The guardians want to replace him with his understudy, John Stewart. That's Aaron Pierre, a tall, no-nonsense, ex-niper, whose parents

trained him from boyhood to become the first black green lantern. Predictably, the guerrillas

hell knows this, and connives against his would be protouching. When there's a mysterious murder in Rushville, Nebraska, the two get called in to see if there's anything outer space he going on. Naturally, there is. Sue and they're dealing with a macho rancher, his enigmatic wife, and a team of E.T.'s out to kill a so-called manhunter, an alien who's taken human form. Oh, yes, Hal and John Stewart also wrangle with the local sheriff, played by Kelly MacDonald,

who invariably exudes such niceness that she'd be a blast as a James Bond villain. Of course, this being a newfangled superhero story. Our two lanterns don't rap things up neatly. Here, early on, how grills a Rushville local, whom he suspects is actually a space alien.

“I love football too. When did Nebraska win its first national championship?”

Sorry. Uh, you love football. You're from Nebraska.

Now, at the first 200 yard rush, Frank. So, look, so shy. It's been winter, Johnny Rogers.

Where did Harry Potter go to school? Excuse me?

“Harry Potter, boy, wizard. What was the name of the school?”

Oh, it was a book. I don't read a lot. Oh, you go to the movies, not yet. They only made like 22 of them. Oh, what's a lot of football? That's the rub, isn't it? What? Pretending to be someone that you're not, you learn all the specifics, but you don't learn whatever one else in that house. I had a pleasant time watching lanterns. It's got sharp dialogue and a strong cast.

Laura Lynney turns up as a shape-shifting, not all together trustworthy,

guardian of the universe. I especially enjoyed the bi-play between Chandler's CD Free-weeling Howle and Pierre's John Stewart, an honorable Sydney Plotty-a-type character whose a maculate poise must withstand a man whose antics drive him crazy. Of course, you don't need superheroes for this kind of stuff as countless buddy cop movies have made clear. This points to a key issue facing shows like lanterns. Does the theme you're exploring actually require superheroes? Are they only there

to milk IP, provide brand recognition, and justify action sequences in which entire neighborhoods get flattened? Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is the best Batman movie. Yet what it says about vigilante justice was done better and more powerfully in the film, Dirty Harry, whose hero's only superpower was being played by Clint Eastwood. Lanterns is relatively sparing in its use of comic book elements. In this it joins the likes of Spider-Nuar, Watchman, the great TV series

not the dire movie, and the delightful Wonderman, one of this year's best shows, which Disney foolishly just canceled. These series care less about showing their heroes during super things, then exploring the meaning and cost of being a superhero, both for oneself and for the world. Here, John Stuart faces a big question. Does he really want to become a green lantern,

“or are there good reasons to turn down all that power?”

Now I have to note that I watched lanterns with a 23-year-old DC Comics fan who did not find that question, especially compelling. Although he enjoyed watching, he kept loudly asking when the show

would finally go into outer space like the comic, and when the ring would start creating cool green

stuff. For him, why do green lanterns? If it's going to be more like lethal weapon or true detective? A reasonable question. In fact, Lanterns shows the trickiness of re-tooling comic book characters for a grown-up audience. If the show is too comic-booky, viewers like me will get bored by the CGI mayhem and mind-numbing superhero mythology. If they're not comic-booky enough, the genre's loyal fans will feel cheated of the geeky fun stuff that made them fans. It's not only in the

“Odyssey that you must find your way between Silla and Corribous. John Powers reviewed the new”

HBO series Lanterns, which premieres Sunday. On Monday's fresh air, when you're dieting to lose weight, human evolution is often working against you. We'll talk about why, with Daniel Lieberman, author of FedUp, and founder of Harvard's Department of Evolutionary Biology. He'll also talk about diets he's tested, and they often contradict the information about what's healthy to eat and what's not. Hope you can join us. Fresh air is executive producer and Sam Brieger.

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