Quote · The Bulwark Podcast
Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be
Where this was said
America 250: The Aspiration Is Still Noble, Even as We Backslide
At 52:35 · chapter starts 45:00
Tim Miller admits to melancholy about the holiday, and Smith meets him there before offering something more sustaining. He tests out the analogy he uses with middle schoolers: just as we hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes without pretending we never made them, we should hold America to the same standard — acknowledge the wrong, learn from it, and try to become better. He notes that the celebration of the 250th is in some ways a celebration of only one iteration of America's birthday; some would argue America's true birthday is 1965, when Black Americans could more fully participate in democratic life. Miller briefly plays devil's advocate, noting that Canada seems to be managing a multiracial democracy reasonably well, and Smith pushes back: Canada's multiracialism is recent and has a fundamentally different historical foundation [1] — Clint Smith "America has never fully lived up to its founding promise — and right now it's backsliding. But the aspiration of a multiracial, multiethnic…" 45:00 . Then Smith arrives at the passage that gives the episode its name and its emotional core: from 1619 to 1865, enslaved people fought for a freedom that the vast majority would never see for themselves. They fought anyway, because they knew that someday someone would [2] — Clint Smith "From 1619 to 1865, enslaved people fought for an emancipation the vast majority never lived to see. Clint Smith argues that the responsibil…" 49:45 . Smith says he thinks about those people constantly — about what responsibility their example bestows on him, on his children, and on anyone who benefits from their sacrifice. 'We're all chipping away at this wall,' he says, 'and you don't know if the wall is 6 inches thick or 6,000 miles thick. But what you know is that the more you chip away at it, the less the people who come after you will have to chip away at.'
America has never fully lived up to its founding promise — and right now it's backsliding. But the aspiration of a multiracial, multiethnic, multi-faith democracy at this scale has never been attempted anywhere else. Clint Smith refuses to abandon that project, even as he acknowledges how far we are from it.
From 1619 to 1865, enslaved people fought for an emancipation the vast majority never lived to see. Clint Smith argues that the responsibility passed down to him — and to all of us — is to keep chipping away at the wall of injustice, knowing we may not see the breakthrough ourselves. That's not despair. That's the longest tradition in American history.
The first enslaved people arrived in the British colonies that would become the United States in 1619, and from that moment they were fighting for freedom — mostly without living to see it.
