Those Who Escape the Cult

Daniella Mestyanek Young, Uncultured

Daniella Mestyanek grew up in a Brazilian compound with dozens of other children and adults, but not really in Brazil. Her home was an international colony of the Children of God, a strange Christian splinter group notorious for its isolationism and weird sexual mores. When she finally escaped the group at age 15, she found it had warped her thinking and left her permanently vulnerable to exploitation by powerful, amoral people.

Mestyanek, who writes under her married name Young, divides this memoir into three main thematic parts. Each involves her increasing awareness of private abuse and covert violence hiding behind smiling systems. Her time with the Children of God (proper name, The Family International) is perhaps the strangest and most pointed, as it differs most remarkably from her audience’s likely experience. Yet it sets the tone for power abuses which dot her entire life.

The Children of God arose as merely one among the Jesus Freak youth ministries of the 1960s. However, the group’s leader, David Berg, like his rough contemporaries Jim Jones and David Koresh, internalized his culture’s Woodstock-era grandiosity, and believed himself a prophet. He began issuing apostolic decrees which his adherents believed carried God’s signature. His pronouncements became increasingly weird, especially when he gave God’s blessing to sexual exploitation.

Unlike comparable cults, the Children survived years without a conflagration. Because of this, not only was Daniella Mestyanek born into the religion, so was her mother; Daniella was a third-generation True Believer. Except she lacked the fervor her faith community demanded. She asked questions, demanded respect, and felt free to express her doubts—challenges which a leadership appointed by God couldn’t accept. This resulted in increasing tensions.

The problem isn’t that Family leadership believe themselves right; it’s that they believe themselves chosen by God. Such absolute leadership cannot brook doubts, questions, or challenges. The longer little Daniella defies their dictates, the more brutal and repressive their tactics become. Tactics include isolation, physical violence, and sex. But rather than force her back into line, these tactics harden Daniella’s resolve to leave.

Daniella Mestyanek Young

Once out, and forced onto her own resources at only fifteen, Mestyanek must negotiate another power dynamic that also doesn’t permit doubts: the American education system. It takes time, but she eventually learns school’s intricate, unspoken rules, even when the occasional petty dictator uses those rules against her. She achieves the book learning she always wanted, but which her religion denied, since Armageddon was always happening soon.

Her formal education, however, culminates in graduation into two new power dynamics: marriage, and joining the Army. Her first husband makes her feel included and desirable, two traits she never felt previously, notwithstanding the Family’s mandatory sexual inclusion. But she quickly realizes that he considers her a consumable resource, not a partner. The Army authorizes her to stand on her own two feet, which empowers her to escape him.

If this sounds familiar, I appreciate my long-term readers. Lauren Hough’s memoir is pointedly similar, with the arc out of the Family, and into the only organization bold enough to provide the structure she needs—in her case, the Air Force. Both women find strength enough to free themselves from learned shackles, which in Hough’s case means her closeted sexuality. But they achieve that strength only after enduring systemic abuse.

Mestyanek initially flourishes in the Army. She rises through the ranks quickly, and becomes one of America’s first women officially authorized into front-line combat. But she also quickly notices the overlap between the Army’s conditioning, and the Family’s. Both rely on name-calling, shame, and in-group behavior to enforce desirable behaviors. Both are riddled with sexual violence. And both actively squelch independent women.

This isn’t a surprise revelation; Young declares this realization early. She doesn’t, however, deeply analyze the parallels; this isn’t a scholarly monograph on cults and their organization, it’s Young’s memoir of coming to grips with patterns of power and abuse in her life. Our author becomes aware of the power structures most of us take for granted, and rebels against them. But this isn’t a how-to, it’s her life story.

As such, Young’s memoir makes for gripping reading. She struggles to maintain her identity when confronted with powers that see her, a woman, as a lesser person to exploit. Though she escapes from the unspoken rules governing life in the Family and the Army, she’s still, in the final pages, finding her own beliefs. She gives us reason to believe that we, too, can escape the exploitation dominating our lives.

How To Write in the Middle of the Road

As the website formerly known as Twitter continues its slide into irrelevance, posts like this one have become more common. Don’t, says the would-be teacher, whose name was removed from their post before I encountered it, ever begin a sentence with the word “so.” Similar posts rehash Stephen King’s notorious demand to excise every possible adjective or adverb. Others include some variation on Quiller-Couch’s orphan injunction: “Kill your darlings.”

I acquired my distrust of gnomic advice early. In grade-school creative writing, teachers warned students to avoid the word “said” in dialog tags, lest our writing become monotonous through repetition. Somewhere between there and college, the zeitgeist shifted. Now writing teachers admonish us to avoid any word other than “said” in dialog tags, lest we become overblown, adjectival, and show-offy. Thus I realized that writing advice is faddish and insubstantial.

Stephen King warns writers to avoid adjectives and adverbs, and to remove all unnecessary content, advice he notably doesn’t follow. His books are often so overwritten, they’re physically difficult to hold. Matching advice to trim supporting characters, side plots, and world-building digressions, aim to reproduce the terse, telegraphic prose famous from Ernest Hemingway or Elmore Leonard. In other words, it’s about following the crowd to bestseller status.

This week, as I contemplated how to rebut these specious proverbs, seemingly designed to produce work that authors and audiences inevitably hate, news came down the pike. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Arizona State University has launched a pilot program with OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, to tutor freshman composition students. This becomes another opportunity to trim boring old teachers, with their salaries and demands, from the education process.

Despite the popular rhetoric, ChatGPT isn’t artificial intelligence; it’s a computer learning heuristic, a dynamic program designed to let computers learn from existing material. In particular, ChatGPT browses existing prose content, and teaches itself how to construct content passably similar. Technology philosophers argue whether it has any capacity to understand the content it reads or creates, but it doesn’t matter. ChatGPT is essentially a high-tech mynah bird.

Stephen King

Therefore, if we expect ChatGPT to teach college-level writing, we can at best anticipate that it will encourage students to write sentences and paragraphs which fit the program’s heuristic. It will regard individual voice, unique narrative, or personal interest as distractions. Just as ChatGPT itself only produces prose that satisfactorily resembles existing prose, it’ll demand likewise from students. This will produce bland, unoriginal writing that its own writers hate.

Much like the rules-based writing taught on Xitter.

Learning heuristic writing defies the purpose of college writing. It presents prose not as an attempt to explore the human condition, convey valuable information, or spin a constructive line of bullshit, but as a product to extract, like coal from a mine. If extracting text from human writers proves too costly, time-consuming, and laborious, fire them; outsource it to machines. Human writers are dangerous anyway, and use excessively big words.

Elaborate, oppressive writing rules share the same message. Excising adjectives and adverbs, the words that give nouns and verbs their flavor, or trimming side quests to create a sparse narrative that translates to film, all declare authors the enemies of prose. Anything that shows individual personality or a spark of character impedes slick commercial prose, which should roll out like cars from a Detroit assembly line.

Please understand, I’m not exaggerating. I’ve used this example repeatedly, but it remains relevant: according to Charles Duhigg, record label executives expected Outkast’s single “Hey Ya” to become a runaway hit. Not because they particularly liked it, but because in-house software declared it sufficiently like previous hits that passive listeners would devour it. When it initially struggled, industry insiders gamed the market to achieve the software’s projected outcomes.

Now we’re applying similar principles to writing. By making new prose sufficiently similar to existing prose, and excising any spark of character or enjoyment, we ensure readers can consume writing passively, like they consume petroleum. It matters not one whit whether writers craft novels, scripts, business reports, or journalism. We expect everyone to read as submissively as if they’re doomscrolling Xitter.

As a teacher, I cajoled students to use their own voices; several of them succeeded. Several youths who grew up resenting reading and writing found an unanticipated joy when they discovered writing wasn’t just crinkum-crankum grammar exercises. But now forces want to walk this progress back. Whether it’s human-made rules or computer learning heuristics, some forces would make writing as bland and joyless as possible.

The Disappearing American Dignity

John McWhorter, Ph.D

I personally don’t mind the trend toward letting people wear jeans to church. As an unusually tall person, jeans are often the only off-the-rack britches available in my size, so I wear jeans everywhere: work, church, school, job interviews. This growing willingness to let people remain informal during formal situations means I can wear comfortable clothes which fit. I’ll never demand increased formality for formality’s sake.

That said, increased informality creates new opportunities for friction. John McWhorter writes that, as more Black Americans feel comfortable using Black English in mixed-race situations, White Americans feel increasingly convicted by the language. McWhorter mostly means workplace situations, but we’ve seen this happen in other public spheres too. Last year, conservative spokespeople expressed outrage to learn that Black politicians changed their tone depending on which audience they addressed.

Growing informality isn’t uniquely Black. Historian Nancy Isenberg writes that Elvis Presley began mainstreaming White redneck culture when he refused to moderate his Memphis accent on camera. For Isenberg, that trend culminated with President Bill Clinton, who didn’t only retain his Arkansas accent, he exaggerated it on camera. He parlayed his “plain folks” appeal to victory over George H.W. Bush—a lesson Bush’s son took to heart eight years later.

Again, nothing against informality; our increased willingness to speak without mediating mannerly conventions provides opportunities to communicate more deeply and effectively. Unfortunately, while we’ve seen formality become less prized in American society, we’ve seen a plurality of Americans also sacrifice dignity. This isn’t a semantic difference. While formality generally means adherence to rituals and ceremony, dignity means treating oneself, and others, as possessing worth and character.

Dr. Nancy Isenberg

Earlier this week, Nebraska journalist George Ayoub compared Donald Trump’s third Presidential campaign to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist paranoia. When, Ayoub wonders, will someone direct the same question at Donald Trump that Joseph Welch lobbed at McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency?” Popular history contends that Welch’s question began the process of turning American voters against McCarthy’s scare tactics.

Much as I appreciate Ayoub’s position, I believe he’s mistaken, because we already know the answer: Donald Trump has never possessed decency. He began his first mainstream Presidential bid by hurling racist insults at immigrants, mocking the disabled, and snuggling with neo-Nazis. Trump’s partisans have spent the subsequent nine years repeatedly saying “He didn’t mean that” whenever Trump says something indecent which he clearly meant.

Quoting Ayoub again, he laments how today’s politics lacks “decorum, simple manners and any semblance of compassion.” Here, Ayoub and I agree. Politicians work for the American people, and therefore treat the people with respect and dignity (in principle anyway, if not in practice). There’s a categorical difference between George W. Bush’s informal chumminess, and Trump treating broad numbers of American citizens with public contempt.

Put another way, we’re witnessing the disappearance of Eddie Haskell. This supporting character from Leave It To Beaver knew how to modulate his tone, behaving manipulatively and even downright viciously with his peers. But when confronted by adults, he changed his tone, assumed dignity, and became downright deferential. We all attended grade school; probably all knew kids who acted accountable whenever adults were watching.

George Ayoub

But as Americans increasingly feel no need to behave with formality, some also feel increasingly empowered to shed dignity or accountability. In this week’s Iowa caucuses, Nikki Haley, a seasoned politician with rhetorical skills and actual policies, finished third behind Trump and Ron DeSantis, whose interpersonal skills haven’t visibly improved since fifth grade. Those voters motivated enough to caucus, see bullying and indignity as leadership qualities.

As the cleft between America’s political parties continues widening, the practical difference is no longer between left and right wings, more or fewer protections for women and minorities, or stronger or weaker economic controls. Often, partisans differ on dignity. The people most likely to vote Trump, wear branded red hats, and wave Trump flags, also frequently think it’s funny to treat customer service representatives and panhandlers poorly.

To repeat, I approve of increased informality in America’s public sphere. Much social and psychological repression in the Gilded Age or Eisenhower Administration arose because people felt so circumscribed by ceremony that they couldn’t face themselves, or each other, honestly. But for too many, rising informality means rejecting dignity, in themselves and others. Freed from inherited ceremony, too many people unmasked their ugliest, most vicious selves.

As long as schoolyard bullies with no personal dignity have national platforms and set our society’s morals, we’ll see the current public ugliness continue to get worse.

A Short Course In Speaking English(es)

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 116
John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, and Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

Sixteen centuries ago, the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, bringing their Germanic language with them. Sometime after that, Vikings invaded, then Normans, each changing English in different ways. Then the Empirehappened, and voilá! English as we know it happened!

If your grade-school English linguistics history resembled mine, you probably received a version of this just-so story. English underwent massive changes in the distant past, until it eventually resembled today’s vernacular, and the peasants rejoiced. Even then, I found this narrative unsatisfying. Apparently John McWhorter, Cornell linguist and sometime pundit, felt equally dissatisfied. He’s spent his career documenting how English has evolved, and continues to evolve.

English language evolution is substantially hidden because nobody left written records of change. McWhorter finds clues hidden in what historians and scholars wrote, but also in what they omitted. Languages which rubbed elbows with early English, including Welsh, Cornish, and the now-lost Danish Viking dialect, provide valuable clues. English, McWhorter believes, evolved in hybrid, among bilingual populations.

For instance, English lacks case endings, the word mutations that make Latin and German difficult to learn. But it has the present progressive tense, missing from most Indo-European languages. McWhorter finds other languages that possess, or lack, these functions, and wouldn’t you know? They’re all language that interacted heavily with English, often at swordpoint. From this, McWhorter surmises a history of lively linguistic give-and-take.

McWhorter works from the documentary record, but also from hypothesis. He considers it logical that Celtic languages seeded spoken English with new verb constructions, even as written English (Anglo-Saxon) resisted change. Indeed, in some cases, McWhorter considers the lack of written evidence as proof of deep-seated cultural prejudices and systems of power, which manifest themselves in what literate Anglo-Saxons consider to commonplace to record.

In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, McWhorter reconstructs linguistic change in distant history and written record. But English never achieved some perfect form, and stopped. In Talking Back, Talking Black, McWhorter applies the same narrative reasoning to the most vibrant form of linguistic evolution happening today: Black American English. Far from merely “broken” English, as critics accuse, McWhorter finds lively, vibrant growth taking place.

The arguments surrounding Black English have mostly fallen along two lines. Linguists and sociologists, often writing in specialist journals, insist that Black English has its own sophisticated rules, complex textual history, and social status. Meanwhile mass-media critics, Black and White alike, decry how Black English differs from Standard or “Correct” English, and bemoans the dialect’s backward social status. Both consider their positions apparent.

John McWhorter, Ph.D

Obviously, McWhorter rejects the mass-media narrative. However, he doesn’t do so offhandedly; he makes a persuasive case for Black English and its rich linguistic heritage. For McWhorter, language doesn’t merely convey information; it also builds social bonds and creates communities. In diverse ways, he emphasizes how Black English doesn’t merely let Black Americans communicate knowledge, it also reinforces their communities and binds them together. It also reflects power dynamics in a historically divided America.

Unlike his morphology of Anglo-Saxon, McWhorter has ample material evidence to demonstrate how Black English evolved within living memory. Black Americans left ample books, audio recordings, video performances, and other serious documentary evidence. Therefore he’s able to track, with remarkable precision, exactly when and where Black English underwent significant changes. He makes a persuasive case that Black English remains lively and evolving, adapting to meet society’s changing needs.

He also makes the case that Black Americans, speaking their historic dialect, are “diglossic,” equally fluent in two linguistic forms simultaneously. Unlike me speaking French, having to desperately translate every phrase and sentence internally, Black Americans simply know both dialects, and apply them correctly. Both forms come equally readily, and Black Americans can deploy Standard English when the context demands it.

McWhorter wrote these books separately, but they serve as a pair. One establishes and demonstrates his philological principles in an historical setting, while the other applies the same tools to contemporary settings. Both books run short, under 200 pages plus back matter, and both are comprised of mainly freestanding short thematic essays. This allows sampler-style reading without needing to commit to treatises founded on dense technical terminology.

Throughout, McWhorter maintains his casual tone, conversational digressions, and friendly vibe. Even when he goes beyond ironclad proof, you always believe he’s led you to think about things more deeply. Especially for general audiences, whose familiarity with applied linguistics is probably scanty, McWhorter’s approach will probably guide them through his difficult thought process. That makes these books good introduction to linguistics, an often overlooked field.

An Open Letter to the American Center-Left

President Joe Biden

Dear fellow center-left coalition:

Look, I get it, we’re all disappointed in Joe Biden for one reason or another. We have our unique reasons; after all, the American center-left is a massive slumgullion of diverse groups with separate wants and needs, and President Biden has found ways to ignore us all. I won’t enumerate a list, because doing so would probably enflame tensions, as some people would be angry if I excluded their pet concerns.

President Biden, and indeed the office of the Presidency itself, are by-products of an 18^th Century electoral structure that hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1789. The only substantive changes have been the 12^th Amendment, which streamlined Presidential elections, and the 17^th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of Senators. America’s electoral process remains mired in the era of powdered wigs and knee breeches.

(A critic has notified me that the preceding paragraph elides both the 15^th and the 19^th Amendments, which extend the vote to minorities and women, respectively. I made this mistake because I was focused on voting procedures, rather than the voting franchise. Notwithstanding my intent, this is a serious oversight, and one for which I wholeheartedly apologize.)

This is a major problem, and a gift to oppressive majorities. Please understand, I appreciate your grievances, because I likewise wish we had an alternative to the current winner-take-all voting system. Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest abolishing the Senate, and establishing proportional representation in the House of Representatives. David Orentlicher suggests a two-member Executive Branch. However, these solutions would require a Constitutional amendment, which hasn’t happened since 1992.

Some young voters endorse third-party candidates. Jill Stein and Cornel West have the largest followings. However, neither has significant elected office experience (Stein served one-and-a-half terms as a Lexington, Massachusetts, town board member). Neither has shepherded a bill through committee, and equally important, neither has any discernible down-ballot strategy. Without a congressional coalition, their dead-letter legislative agendas will make today’s Congress look busy and productive.

Third-party candidates also split coalitions like ours. Though conservatives have their third parties, including the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party, these have virtually no support. The center-left is historically more receptive to third parties. But voting for them presents the likelihood of a situation like happened in 2000 and 2016, when a clear majority supported a center-left ballot, but split the ticket, and conservatives won on a technicality.

Former President Donald Trump

Splitting the 2024 ticket will hand another term to Donald Trump—a man who recently pledged to criminalize LGBTQIA+ activity, and who previously pledged to forcibly relocate homeless people to camps in the desert. Disappointing as President Biden is, another Trump administration would be catastrophic for queer people, immigrants, the disabled, and other marginalized communities. It would also be catastrophic for remedying the problem later.

You’ll occasionally hear idealists, mostly White, mostly college-aged, wax rhapsodic about “revolution.” This comes mostly from comfortable, secure people who never expect to man the barricades. Further, contra Marx and Engels, revolution rarely ushers in substantive change. Historical revolutions have either been free gifts to landholders and capitalists, as happened in the U.S. and Mexico, or descend into sectarian civil war, as happened in France and the Soviet Union.

For many years, I misunderstood the word realpolitik. I thought that, like other forms of “realism,” it meant finding the most cynical, pessimistic interpretation of events, and using that to justify jerkish behavior. Not until I read Katja Hoyer did I understand Bismarck’s actual meaning: that you must accept the political system you have, flawed and toxic though it may be, and work within it, to make change that others can’t snatch back.

These constant cries of “fire Joe Biden,” “vote Cornel West,” and “viva la revolution!” come mostly from people who have never participated in ground-level politics. Most are committed voters, I’ll grant that. But they’ve never attended local Democratic Party meetings, participated in canvassing sessions, or helped cultivate regional strategy. For too many, politics is a seasonal spectacle, like the Super Bowl, which they cheer from the sidelines, distracted by Taylor Swift.

Please don’t misunderstand: I don’t advocate complacency. Our system is senescent and broken, as I already acknowledged. But the much-repeated charge that refusing to participate, or breaking it even worse, will hasten substantive change, is ignorant of actual history. Systemic change through breaking the system has only happened when circumstances got so bad that the survivors were literally mopping their friends’ blood off the streets.

Attending meetings and canvassing neighborhoods lacks romance, admittedly. Schoolbook history loves tales of sudden, paradigm-shifting change, usually stripped of the brass tacks that made such change sustainable. Nobody ever made Broadway musicals about get-out-the-vote campaigns. Yet any demand for change, without a matching commitment to the daily, dirty business, is guaranteed to fail. Politics is a process, not an outcome, and you must participate to make change.

Bronze Medal in the Oppression Olympics

Which comes first, “wilderness” or “civilization”? Sociology professors have used this question on first-semester students for generations. Most people assume that wilderness precedes civilization, because humans had to carve permanent settlements out of undeveloped wild land. But that’s deceptive: nobody needed a name for “wilderness” before they invented civilization, wild land was simply everything that existed. Only once humans built “civilization” did they name everything else “wilderness.”

I remembered this lesson recently, when some message board dummkopf repeated a popular conservative claim: “’Cis’ is the n-word for everyone outside the alphabet soup, and anyone who uses it is a heterophobic racist.” My initial response was to consider this statement obviously silly and beneath contempt. People simply reached into Latin and coined a term to describe something nobody previously gave a name to, that’s hardly racism or bigotry.

Yet on consideration, I realized the claimant had a legitimate point—just not the one they intended. This joker probably wanted to participate in the Oppression Olympics and pretend to be marginalized because one-half of one percent was mean to them. But this person raises an interesting point about how we create categories, and equally importantly, how we enforce them. The process begins, obviously, by giving the category a name.

We could extend the wilderness/civilization dichotomy out through similar pairs. Nobody had to be heterosexual, for instance, until the word “homosexual” was invented in 1836—and extended its definition to include people’s identity following the international scandal surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde. Ian Haney López has written that the White race didn’t exist in America until lawmakers needed to formally define the Black race. New categories create their opposites.

America’s growing willingness to admit that transgendered people exist, requires the creation of a category for people who aren’t transgendered. People like me, who simply accept (or, arguably, have learned to accept) our bodies, previously didn’t need a category name. We invented names, many derisive, for those who wanted or attempted to change their bodies: transvestites, catamites, queers. But we had the luxury of considering ourselves merely “normal.”

Of course, this normality was enforced; it didn’t merely exist. Laws about gender expression, traditions about “male” and “female” attire, and the occasional violent put-down of nonconformists, all served collectively to push everyone into a ready-made box. A rising left-libertarian coalition has decried this enforcement for what it is, violence, and called for a cessation. Many people, for the first time in generations, feel safe expressing their inner selves externally.

The rise of a peaceful demographic that calls itself “transgender” undercuts the previous terminology. The previous concepts of “normal” and “aberrant” no longer apply, because the violence used to crush aberration has fallen on political disfavor. People like me can no longer passively accept ourselves as “normal”; we must define ourselves in a positive, proactive manner. Thus we reached into the Greco-Roman lexicon and found a corresponding moniker: “cisgendered.”

Therefore this person complaining that “cisgendered” is an oppressive word, isn’t really complaining about the word; they’re complaining about the stacked presumptions that make this word necessary. Pushed outside the comfortable domain where they were simply “normal,” they must accept the “cis” handle and accept that they’re part of a demographic group. Maybe not a literal minority, but treated like one in America’s winner-take-all social order.

Which returns us to the Oppression Olympics I mentioned earlier. Historically, the “winners” have determined law, policy, and economic advantage, while forcing “losers” into subordinate positions. Subordinated losers must accept the scarlet letter category names enforced upon them by society’s winners: Black, refugee, homeless, gay. By forcing cisgendered people to accept a category name, they’re admitting the winners’ circle has been rewritten.

For instance, when we think of “gender studies,” we think of women, and women’s issues. Because men, fundamentally, aren’t a gender (or weren’t, until recently), we’re simply normal. Likewise, racial issues refer to Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous issues, while Asian issues have crept up latterly. Because White people aren’t a race, we’re simply normal. Newcomer groups, like the Irish and Italians, have competed to become seen as “White”.

My initial inclination, to simply make fun of this joker as ill-informed and outdated, is mistaken. This person has a legitimate, if poorly founded, grievance: for the first time, they have to think of themselves as belonging to a group. And if they belong to a group, then society could, potentially, push them outside that group. For the first time, this person’s grasp on America’s levers of power is slipping.

How Americans Make (and Remake) History

Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America

At the height of the controversy over American historical monuments, Harvard poet and Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith visited some of them. He wanted to see firsthand the places where America memorializes people, places, and events associated with slavery. For those who love terminology, Smith was primarily interested in historiography, not history; that is, he cared more about how we tell our stories than necessarily what stories we tell.

Smith presents a detailed travelogue of seven historical sites: six in America, and one African slave port. Smith records the visiting experience, talking with the guides and conservators responsible for transmitting the historical narrative onto listening audiences. He records how the stories told to audiences, including tourists, corresponds with the documentary record—and how it doesn’t. The differences can be astounding for dedicated history readers.

Some locations have unsurprising responses. Smith visits the Whitney Plantation, a tourist destination dedicated specifically to slavery. There he finds a painstakingly restored image of the sufferings enslaved Black Americans endured, even at putatively benevolent masters’ hands. He also visits Blandford Cemetery, the largest surviving Confederate graveyard. Visitors flock to revel in Lost Cause mythology, while pained curators try to correct the record for audiences who don’t want to hear.

Other locations prove more unexpected. Monticello, for instance. The historical trust that owns Thomas Jefferson’s plantation once notoriously whitewashed his reputation, and aggressively denied his relationship with Sally Hemings, but has reversed itself, becoming a haven for serious historians and truth-seekers. Gorèe Island, off the Senegal coast, has moved millions to tears with its brutal narrative of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—a narrative Smith admits is probably mythologized.

Between the locations, Smith finds an America caught in an awkward transition. Americans overall, including White Americans, have become more willing to face our slaveholding history, and the long-term consequences which slavery continues to wreak on the present. But faced with this rapidly changing shared history, some Americans simply refuse to face the evidence. Others, even worse, cling to myths that contradict the copious documents and works of serious historians.

Clint Smith, Ph.D.

History isn’t just a matter of scholarship and research. It also involves storytelling, in oral and written form. For instance, Smith visits Galveston Island, the site of the Juneteenth event, where Union soldiers proclaimed freedom to Texas’ enslaved population. Texas became the first state to proclaim Juneteenth as a state holiday, and historical reenactors perform the Juneteenth liberation every year, an event Smith describes as emotionally fraught and almost religious.

Yet Smith also notes that one in ten American public-school students attend school in Texas, where the state’s board of education continues to promulgate textbook standards which whitewash slavery’s impact. Lost Cause mythology permeates Texas’ official state history teaching standards. Sure, enacting Juneteenth is important for Texans to experience history. But that only reaches those who voluntarily make the pilgrimage, and I question how many White Texans do so.

One of Smith’s most telling narratives happens in Manhattan, a site not normally associated with slavery. But New York State didn’t abolish slavery until 1827, so binary narratives of “slave” and “free” states don’t hold water. With a professional tour guide’s assistance, Smith finds a plaque memorializing a slave market which existed for fifty years on Wall Street, within spitting distance of the Stock Exchange that now embodies American capitalism.

This plaque exists because of citizen activism. Manhattan’s Black population remembered the slave market in oral tradition, but no official body remembered anything. Then, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, one activist took it upon himself to comb the historical records. The activist, whom Smith doesn’t name, pulled maps, records, and images demonstrating the exact location of Wall Street’s market, forcing city fathers to create the first-ever official memorial.

Examples like this flood Smith’s narrative with exciting life. History, in Smith’s telling, isn’t only events which happened; it’s also the living, breathing humans who transmit those events to coming generations. Some historians make scrupulous efforts to preserve facts accurately, even when they reflect poorly on our ancestors; others market a feel-good panacea, sometimes because their hidebound audience will accept nothing else.

One wonders how Smith’s book will read for future generations. We exist in times of turmoil, as Americans increasingly favor honesty over mythology. Our official history, what Smith calls our “public memory,” is changing rapidly, and nobody knows what final form it will take. Smith provides a snapshot of that transition, taking place in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Smith shows us history as process, not product.

On a similar topic: Leaving the Church of St. Robert E. Lee