﻿Hi there, I’m Clint Smith and I am the host of Crash Course Black American History. I am a
writer, a teacher, and a doctor. No, not the kind who can help you if you have a serious medical
issue, more like the kind who spent too many years holed up in the basement of the library reading
books on race, inequality, education, and history before getting the letters PhD behind my name.
So, while I can’t perform open heart surgery, I can tell you a lot about how slavery shaped
the course of American History and the ways it’s been taught in our schools..
This series, will move from the moment enslaved Black people first arrived on the shores of the
American British colonies in 1619, all the way through the Black Lives Matter movement that
has pushed this country to more fully reckon with all that it has done to Black people
and to more fully acknowledge all that Black Americans have contributed to its history.
We should probably begin by addressing the name of this course itself, Black American
History. Over the course of American history the language used to describe Black people has
changed and evolved over time and will no doubt continue to change and evolve moving forward.
Across the United States today, the terms “Black” and “African-American” are often used
interchangeably and there’s a good chance that we’ll use them interchangeably here as well.
Typically, African-American is meant to refer to people of African descent who were born in, or are
living in, the United States. In the U.S., there are Black people whose ancestors were enslaved
many generations ago and who are unable to trace their history to a specific place of origin,
and there are Black people who immigrated to the United States just a few years ago
from countries all over the world. While people’s histories and experiences
may be different, each of these groups of people, and everyone in between,
is Black. And that plurality of experiences is both a remarkable and just a beautiful thing.
As we’ll discover, there is a great deal of fluidity with regard to how these terms are used
and who they apply to, and delving into this will really help us understand how race is a social
construct, but also one with very real cultural, sociological, and political implications.
Part of why this show is so important to me personally, is that when I was younger,
I felt like I didn’t have the language or the toolkit, with which to fully understand and
make sense of what this country had done to Black people over the course of centuries.
I didn’t know that 12 of our first 18 presidents owned enslaved people.
I didn’t have the language to understand how redlining and government-sponsored
housing segregation shaped the landscape of contemporary America. I didn’t know that
New Deal legislation and the GI Bill after World War II purposefully left out millions of Black
people from accessing its benefits, basically trapping them in intergenerational poverty,
while millions of white Americans received those benefits, giving them a leg up into
purchasing homes, attending and graduating college, and moving comfortably into the
middle class. The sorts of things that have long-term, intergenerational implications.
I didn’t know these things, because no one told me. No one taught us this in school.
And when I did learn it many years later, it was so important--it was so freeing--because
it helped me better understand why our country looks the way that it does today.
It helped me understand that the disparities Black people experience in this country, are not because
there is anything wrong with Black people, but because of everything that has been done
to Black people over the course of generations. Now it should be said that, sometimes, when people
think of Black history, they think only of slavery and oppression. And while slavery is deeply
deeply important (trust me I wrote a whole book about it) to understanding how Black Americans
first arrived here en masse, how the United States developed its early economy, and why so
much inequality persists between Black and white Americans across the board , it would be a mistake
to conflate the story of Black life in this country singularly with the issue of slavery.
Which is to say, naming the centrality of slavery to the American project can be done
without falling into the trap of suggesting that Black History begins
and ends with slavery. Black History is more than slavery, it is more than Jim Crow apartheid,
it is more than oppression. And while we will obviously be addressing these issues
because they are central to understanding how this country came to be what it is,
we will also be talking about Black art, Black literature, Black cultural traditions,
and all that Black people have created and accomplished /in spite of/ centuries
of both interpersonal and structural violence. Black American history is as much about the joys
and celebrations and traditions of Black life, as much as it is about being able to name and
identify the ways this country has long subjugated Black people. They are not mutually exclusive,
in fact they go hand in hand. That being said, we want to note
that this series will address topics that can be challenging to discuss, but we believe it is
important to cover them thoroughly so that we can fully grapple with the reality of US History.
When watching this course, you will encounter some information that may be sensitive
and disturbing. But we will also try to let you know when there are extreme cases.
Over the course of this show, we will do our very best to capture the various dimensions of
the Black experience, but because we only have 50 episodes to tell these stories, there will
inevitably be some things that are left out. This show is not meant to be a definitive
history of Black American life, it is meant to be one contribution to a much wider conversation
that has been happening among scholars, writers, activists, and citizens for generations.
There’s going to be a lot to learn over the course of this show, and a lot to unlearn.
But what we hope you come to understand is that Black history is not /peripheral/ to
American history, it is central to it. Black history is American history. So let’s go.
Crash Course is made with the help of all these nice people
and our animation team is Thought Cafe. Crash Course is a Complexly production.
If you’d like to keep Crash Course free for everybody, forever, you can support
the series at Patreon; a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.
Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.