Quote · The Bulwark Podcast
Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be
Where this was said
Talking to Kids About America's History
At 53:41 · chapter starts 52:40
The conversation shifts to the practical challenge of talking to children about hard history on a holiday weekend when Trump is giving a primetime speech. Smith describes his experience with the young readers edition of 'How the Word Is Passed' and the middle school tours he did around it: children, he found, have no trouble holding the both-and-ness of America in their heads at once [1] — Clint Smith "For kids, the idea of like the both-and-ness of America, the duality of America is one that feels very easy to digest. It's the grown-ups t…" 53:41 . They understand intuitively that a country can do great things and terrible things, and they find that more comforting than confusing. It's adults who bring their defensive complications to the conversation. Smith talks about his own kids — a 9-year-old and a 7-year-old who are descendants of both enslaved Americans and Nigerian immigrants, of both pilgrims and colonial subjects — and how he calibrates the conversation to each child's development level. Tim Miller shares his own parallel: growing up white in suburban Denver, the civil rights movement felt like ancient history in black and white; raising his Black daughter in New Orleans, where that history is alive and spatially present, has meant learning it all over again alongside her. Smith closes by arguing that parents need both opportunities (their own proximity to the history) and constraints (their distance from other histories) to guide these conversations, and that the most powerful thing a parent can do is admit they are also still learning.
Children on middle school tours have no trouble accepting that America has done both great things and terrible things. The complexity only becomes a problem when adults impose their defensiveness onto the conversation. Clint Smith's approach — with students and with his own kids — is age-appropriate honesty, not erasure or sanitizing.
