How Americans Deceive Ourselves About Slavery

Clint Smith has spent years asking a deceptively simple question: what do Americans actually know about slavery, and how did we come to know—or fail to know—it? His investigation takes two forms, each one a different kind of reckoning. The first is a work of narrative nonfiction that traces the geography of American slavery through the places where it happened and the stories those places tell or refuse to tell. The second is a collection of poems written directly to his children, attempting to name what their ancestors survived and the long shadow that survival casts.

When Smith examined how slavery enters the American classroom and the American consciousness, he found something troubling: a persistent gap between what happened and what we say happened. The education system, he discovered, has a way of softening the edges, of presenting slavery as a historical fact rather than a historical crime—something that occurred, yes, but in a register so distant and abstracted that it barely touches the present. This sanitization matters. It shapes how an entire generation understands the country they live in and their place within it. It determines what questions they think to ask and which ones never occur to them.

Smith's book-length investigation takes readers to the sites where slavery was practiced and perpetuated: plantation grounds, museums, memorials, classrooms. At each location, he encounters different versions of the same story—or different silences where the story should be. Some places have begun to reckon honestly with their history. Others have not. The variation itself is instructive. It reveals that how we remember slavery is not inevitable; it is chosen. Every omission, every euphemism, every decision to center the enslaver's perspective rather than the enslaved person's is a choice made by someone with the power to make it.

The poetry collection operates in a more intimate register. Here, Smith writes as a father trying to transmit something true to his children about who they are and where they come from. He writes about what their ancestors endured—the violence, the theft, the systematic denial of their humanity—and what they escaped. This is not abstract history. It is family history. It is the weight of generations compressed into language precise enough to hold it. The poems ask: how do you tell a child that their ancestors were enslaved? How do you do that without breaking something in them? How do you do it without lying?

Smith's work across both projects points toward a central insight: America has developed a sophisticated capacity for self-deception about slavery. We have built institutions and narratives that allow us to acknowledge slavery's existence while denying its ongoing consequences. We teach it as something that happened to other people, in another time, rather than something that shaped the country we inhabit and the inequalities we live within. This deception is not accidental. It is maintained through countless small decisions about what to teach, what to memorize, what to visit, what to pass down.

The stakes of this deception extend beyond the classroom. When a society fails to reckon honestly with its foundational crimes, it cannot understand its present. It cannot see the connections between past and present. It cannot imagine different futures. Smith's work insists on those connections. It refuses the comfort of distance. It asks Americans to sit with the full weight of what slavery was and what it made possible—the wealth, the power, the nation itself—and to recognize that weight as something we are still carrying, whether we acknowledge it or not.