>> What you may not realize is
that history is incredibly important.
I think -- I hope that most people
in this audience know that.
But I had the occasion in the past couple of months
to have a couple of people tell me that history did not matter.
I had one person who said to me,
somewhat insensitively I would think, that what I did was sort
of like train spotting -- people who watch the trains go
by every day, and then note the number of them and so forth,
suggesting that talking about the past did not matter.
And another person who said to me -- a younger person who said,
what difference does it make what happened a hundred
years ago?
What does it matter for the here and now?
William Faulkner in Requiem For a Nun said,
the past is never dead, it's not even past.
And actually President Obama posted that line --
paraphrased it in a very important speech he gave
about the history of race in the United States of America.
And I wanted to take that as a theme, and I mention that as --
in the title of my talk, because I agree with it.
I've always thought that history mattered.
When I grew up in the south, which is a place that's very,
very suffused with history, and lives daily with the effects
of history, I couldn't help but be moved by --
influenced by that kind of history.
Growing up in a place which was not legally segregated,
but when I went to the theater, my family and I sat
in the balcony where Blacks had sat.
When I went to the doctor's office,
we went to separate waiting rooms.
I always looked into the White waiting room
and they always had great magazines,
and ours, we had no magazines.
And that was the effect of history.
It was an outgrowth, a legacy
of African channel [phonetic] slavery
in the United States of America.
It's definitely a part of that.
And I could never think that history did not matter,
because of those kinds of things.
I could also not think that history didn't matter
because in my town my parents decided, for whatever reason,
to send me to a White school.
I was the first child in our school district to go
to a White school -- the so-called the White school.
And that told me that history was important.
I had a sense of myself from the age of six years old
as being a part of history, growing up in those days
when things were changing, and people were talking
about history, talking about change, changing laws.
And as you know, law is very, very much to --
dependent upon history and precedent, and that the force
of law from the Constitution,
a document that is very much a part of American history,
and is a part of every American's consciousness,
that this sort of thing -- this document and the history
of slavery was very much a part --
the legacy of slavery was very much a part of my life.
So I've always taken for granted that history was important.
I know that we're in a particular phase now
where we look at the problems that were talked
about earlier today, about America's place in the world,
being concerned about America's place in the world, and thinking
that what really matters is that people become proficient
in science, hard subjects, accounting,
the kinds of things -- practical things that people can do,
and that's exactly right.
But I think the humanities --
and history is a part of the humanities --
those things are critical for us, to do the kind of thinking,
policy, all of those kinds of things that are gonna take
to make America competitive, and to help us continue
to be a great country, it starts with the humanities,
and history is a part of that, is critical.
So this is something that I've always believed.
And I've lived it, because most of my work has been
in the area of history.
I've started out writing about a place
that is iconic in American history.
That is to say Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson,
where hundreds of thousands people --
hundreds of thousands of people go to Monticello every year
to find out about a great American who crafted --
wrote the Declaration of Independence,
but was also a slave holder.
And right there, learning the lesson of the link
between Blacks and Whites,
the sort of troubled American past in this one place.
So by going to a place like that,
then most people sometimes can -- you could think of Monticello
as -- it's like a -- a place for great gadgets and so forth.
But it's much more than that.
It's a home that talks about America's origins,
both as a place of liberty, and as a place of slavery.
And I had this focus, thinking about history, and thinking
about race all of my life, and that's what led me to writing
about Jefferson, and writing about slavery at Monticello.
Because it occurs to me that a lot of what happens
between Blacks and Whites today is very definitely a product
of that time and that particular moment.
You may not realize -- one of the things you may not realize
about history is how much America has always been
that dreaded word, a multi-cultural country.
This was never a nation in its origins
that was particularly White --
that was totally White, obviously.
Native Americans were here when the Europeans arrived.
Most people think of the Europeans or I'm not --
the history lesson that I had growing up,
we focused on Plymouth Rock as the place,
and people thought of the Pilgrims.
But it begins before then -- 1609 in Jamestown.
>> It begins before then if you talk about people who are --
who are not English speaking, Spanish settlements in Florida.
But not long after that, or in sometimes contemporaneous
with the Spanish, Africans came as well.
You think about a place like Williamsburg --
colonial Williamsburg, if --
I'm sure many of you have been there.
It's a place that is
in its incarnation now predominately White.
If you walk around Williamsburg, most of the people there
in costume and so forth are White,
and it gives a particular representation
of the past that is not accurate.
In the time period that I write about, the family that I write
about -- the matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Hemmings,
was born in the 1730s in Williamsburg --
in the Williamsburg area.
And at that time, half the population was African,
and half White.
So you don't really get a sense of that when you walk
around Williamsburg today,
and it can give this false impression
about America's origins.
The wonderful film -- or the somewhat dated film I should say
that -- oh, I'm saying this on tape.
The dated film that they show in Williamsburg
about these origins, they're all -- it's --
it's a place that's basically White.
You don't see Blacks participating,
Blacks even walking around as being a part
of the scene in Williamsburg.
But as I said, it changes your nation -- your --
your notions of what this country was
like in the beginning, if you realize
that Williamsburg was a place half and half --
nearly half and half Black and White.
Africans -- people who were not Creole -- who -- who were --
who were not yet Creole, people --
and that is to say people who hadn't learned English,
and sort of had an -- a melded [phonetic] culture,
many of these people were African.
You could walk around and see people with tribal markings
who were still speaking their native languages,
who were interacting with English people
who were not Americans yet.
These were all English people,
African people of differing groups.
The other thing to think about, Africans not as a --
a country, Africa is not a country, it is a continent.
And within that continent there are --
[ Applause ]
>> -- there are -- there are --
there are many, many different languages, different peoples
who have different cultures.
And they all came together,
and they're in this particular place,
and they are becoming America --
becoming Americans during this time period.
It took a while for Black and Whites to become Americans,
but it's a process that --
that Blacks and Whites went through together.
And I think it's very, very important
for people to understand that.
There is a -- a sense that there is some --
something to be gained by portraying America
as foundationally White.
I mean, you know, saying that well this is --
that Blacks sort of showed up at some point later on,
and because they were not a part of the power structure
of the society, they did not write the Constitution,
they were not part of the --
they did not write the Declaration of Independence,
they were not part of Congress, any of those kinds
of things, it didn't matter.
But culture is very, very important.
And this is what history -- social history tells you,
that Black and White together made a society,
helped to make this country in ways
that make us who we are today.
Now not all of this is good, not all of this is good,
because of the encounter between Africans and --
and the English started out as one of a power struggle --
a tremendous power imbalance.
It was also during that time period that what it meant
to be Black was defined, and what it meant
to be White was defined.
And you know -- you can probably guess what those definitions
were -- whiteness as power,
blackness as relative powerlessness.
And I think those attitudes --
those legacies of slavery are still with us.
We've tried very, very hard to work them out --
work the kinks out in a way, but they're definitely with us.
And that is what my work has been about.
I started out with this problem of thinking about history,
and the way historians wrote about slavery.
How do you take the words of enslaved people
who are telling you what happened during slavery.
And the particular story that I focused on was Jefferson
and Sally Hemings, and the story of Jefferson's relationship
with Sally Hemings, and the way historians had treated
that subject over the years,
not because I thought it was earth shattering,
I mean the idea that enslaved woman had children
by a slave master is pretty -- is pretty banal in the south
where I grew up -- I grew up in Texas.
Now some people don't think that's the south, but --
[ Laughter ]
>> -- but Texas is the south, particularly east Texas.
Anyplace where they have plantations
and cotton is the south.
And growing up in that area, going to family reunions,
seeing people around, the reality of mixed race --
mixed race nature
of the African-American community was always present
to me -- present for me and other Blacks, probably in a way
that it wasn't for Whites.
So it never struck me as a terribly important thing.
But what was important was how the words
of African-Americans were treated in history.
And what I wanted to do was to try
to expose the double standard, I thought, where the words
of Blacks -- the people who were the objects of slavery --
were not taken seriously, and the words of Whites were taken
as -- as the final word on things.
So it was really about using history as a way to talk
about -- to -- to expose this,
to ask the question does this still happen today?
Is this a part of our understanding
of the way we interact with one another as Blacks and Whites?
And I do think that that legacy of slavery was something
that I saw in historical writing, and it was something
that I wanted to bring to the fore,
and to have people discuss -- not did Tom and Sally, you know,
what was the nature of their relationship,
but how do we talk about it.
>> And I think that that was very, very important.
While I was working on that it also occurred to me that one
of the reasons that people could dismiss the words
of enslaved people was that we didn't know anything
about the Hemings as individuals, that people think
of slavery, and most people think of cotton fields, right?
Antebellum period, Gone With the Wind, a sort of dialect,
a way of speaking, a way of carrying themselves
that was monolithic, and not seeing enslaved people
as individuals.
And there I also thought that that was something
that continues today as well.
Black people, from my perspective,
if you look at popular cultures -- movies, television --
there are two or three types of Black people.
And you know what the Black person --
my son said to me one time,
he said you always know what the Black character is gonna do.
You know what the Black character's gonna say.
There's the sassy Black friend -- sassy Black female friend --
girl, you know you don't need to be doin' that.
She's the friend of Julia Roberts or someone.
And you have the Black guy who is, you know, maybe selfless
in some ways, who's too brave, I mean 'cause he --
he's always a computer specialist a lot.
You -- there -- there's --
there are these things that the person's gonna do --
these sort of [inaudible] that -- that are there that --
that sort of -- that Black people are symbolic,
not individuals.
And what I've tried to do with history,
and what I think history --
is exciting about history done the right way is
to bring individuals alive, to talk about the Hemings
as individuals, not a slave girl, not a slave man
or enslaved woman, but as people, Sally Hemings,
Betty Hemings, her brother James, all the kinds of things
that talk to them and -- talk about them and were with ways
and all the types of things that you expect and sort of assume
that are part of individuality.
And so I thought from --
that history was a vehicle for doing that.
Knowing how important it is, knowing how just
as we are the sum total of all of our experiences,
that society is the sum total of all the things that we've done
and that have happened in the past, all of the things
that have influenced us.
I sort of moved away a bit from my comfort zone in writing
about slavery, and trying to work all of this stuff
out in the time of slavery, and sort of presenting this family
so that people could think about them as individuals and people,
and hoping that that would make them think about Blacks today,
the descendants of enslaved people as people,
to bring that to the fore.
And talking about another period in American history
that was sort of the end result of what did not happen
with the founding generation,
that is to say solving the problem of slavery,
and writing about the period of reconstruction.
I've been writing about that recently, and forced to think
about this, because this too is
in some ways I think even much closer to where we are today
in -- in sort of -- as a society, and the kinds of things
that we're grappling with.
A time that Thurgood Marshall said was the time
of lost opportunities.
When there was an opportunity, a chance to sort
of change the lives of Blacks after the end of slavery,
to bring them into full citizenship, here was a moment
when that could have been done.
And Marshall in a descent [phonetic] [inaudible] opinion
in his descent.
He said if we had taken care of things in the 1860s,
the way they should have been taken care of,
things would be different today.
We wouldn't be dealing with the problems that we have today.
So history, as the shaper of the --
of the present and of the future,
history as a contingent thing -- now go -- go back to the --
to the Faulkner quote a moment before --
that I mentioned before, the past is never dead.
It's not even dead, it's not even past.
There's a way of conceptualizing the past
that is called memory versus history.
History is what academic historians do.
Memory is the sort of collective feelings
and the collective thoughts we've had that we get
from our grandparents and our great grandparents,
and our understanding about the world.
That's separate from history.
That is supposed to be much more detached in a way.
We can never have complete detachment,
but you strive for it in history.
And it's a way of presenting a story of a country,
of a nation that everybody can share.
Memory is something different.
It's much more personal, it tends to be much more --
it can be casual or not in the sense that it is unimportant,
but casual in the sense
that it's not always well thought out.
And I was thinking about this because we are in a moment now
that is very much read on [phonetic] I think,
where memory is very much a part
of the way people respond to the past.
And we are now at the [inaudible] of the centennial
of the -- of the start of the Civil War,
which is for some reason recognized much more
in the south than it is in the north.
You would think -- think --
you'd think the people who won would want
to talk about it more.
But this has been one of those things where the people
who lost have spent much more time,
and have been much more active in putting together committees
and so forth to commemorate this, even though many,
many northern soldiers died in that war as well,
and should be remembered.
But memory -- the memory of what that war meant,
and what reconstruction meant, all those kinds
of things are very, very important,
and we have competing memories.
So what you may not realize, and what -- what I want you to --
to -- to realize now, to think about is when you read
over the next year about these commemorations, all these kinds
of things, think about history versus memory.
Think about the importance of history as a vehicle for telling
who we were, not so that we will be hostage to the past,
but as a way of making sure that we know who we are,
so that we could go forward in the future.
If you think about a person that you meet --
think about in your own life, if you wanted to know someone,
if you wanted to be helpful to someone, if you wanted to --
to become a -- an important -- important part of their lives,
how would you do that?
You'd want to know something about them,
you'd want to have their story.
And I think it's important to do that for the nation, as I said,
not so that we'll be hostage to the past,
but so that we will know how to be useful for the future.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]