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Time English Language 2 Action
00:00
Hi there, I’m Clint Smith and I am the host of Crash Course Black American History. I am a
00:05
writer, a teacher, and a doctor. No, not the kind who can help you if you have a serious medical
00:11
issue, more like the kind who spent too many years holed up in the basement of the library reading
00:16
books on race, inequality, education, and history before getting the letters PhD behind my name.
00:22
So, while I can’t perform open heart surgery, I can tell you a lot about how slavery shaped
00:27
the course of American History and the ways it’s been taught in our schools..
00:30
This series, will move from the moment enslaved Black people first arrived on the shores of the
00:35
American British colonies in 1619, all the way through the Black Lives Matter movement that
00:40
has pushed this country to more fully reckon with all that it has done to Black people
00:44
and to more fully acknowledge all that Black Americans have contributed to its history.
00:48
We should probably begin by addressing the name of this course itself, Black American
00:52
History. Over the course of American history the language used to describe Black people has
00:57
changed and evolved over time and will no doubt continue to change and evolve moving forward.
01:03
Across the United States today, the terms “Black” and “African-American” are often used
01:08
interchangeably and there’s a good chance that we’ll use them interchangeably here as well.
01:12
Typically, African-American is meant to refer to people of African descent who were born in, or are
01:18
living in, the United States. In the U.S., there are Black people whose ancestors were enslaved
01:23
many generations ago and who are unable to trace their history to a specific place of origin,
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and there are Black people who immigrated to the United States just a few years ago
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from countries all over the world. While people’s histories and experiences
01:38
may be different, each of these groups of people, and everyone in between,
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is Black. And that plurality of experiences is both a remarkable and just a beautiful thing.
01:49
As we’ll discover, there is a great deal of fluidity with regard to how these terms are used
01:54
and who they apply to, and delving into this will really help us understand how race is a social
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construct, but also one with very real cultural, sociological, and political implications.
02:06
Part of why this show is so important to me personally, is that when I was younger,
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I felt like I didn’t have the language or the toolkit, with which to fully understand and
02:16
make sense of what this country had done to Black people over the course of centuries.
02:20
I didn’t know that 12 of our first 18 presidents owned enslaved people.
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I didn’t have the language to understand how redlining and government-sponsored
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housing segregation shaped the landscape of contemporary America. I didn’t know that
02:33
New Deal legislation and the GI Bill after World War II purposefully left out millions of Black
02:38
people from accessing its benefits, basically trapping them in intergenerational poverty,
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while millions of white Americans received those benefits, giving them a leg up into
02:48
purchasing homes, attending and graduating college, and moving comfortably into the
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middle class. The sorts of things that have long-term, intergenerational implications.
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I didn’t know these things, because no one told me. No one taught us this in school.
03:02
And when I did learn it many years later, it was so important--it was so freeing--because
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it helped me better understand why our country looks the way that it does today.
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It helped me understand that the disparities Black people experience in this country, are not because
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there is anything wrong with Black people, but because of everything that has been done
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to Black people over the course of generations. Now it should be said that, sometimes, when people
03:27
think of Black history, they think only of slavery and oppression. And while slavery is deeply
03:32
deeply important (trust me I wrote a whole book about it) to understanding how Black Americans
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first arrived here en masse, how the United States developed its early economy, and why so
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much inequality persists between Black and white Americans across the board , it would be a mistake
03:49
to conflate the story of Black life in this country singularly with the issue of slavery.
03:55
Which is to say, naming the centrality of slavery to the American project can be done
04:01
without falling into the trap of suggesting that Black History begins
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and ends with slavery. Black History is more than slavery, it is more than Jim Crow apartheid,
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it is more than oppression. And while we will obviously be addressing these issues
04:17
because they are central to understanding how this country came to be what it is,
04:21
we will also be talking about Black art, Black literature, Black cultural traditions,
04:26
and all that Black people have created and accomplished /in spite of/ centuries
04:30
of both interpersonal and structural violence. Black American history is as much about the joys
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and celebrations and traditions of Black life, as much as it is about being able to name and
04:41
identify the ways this country has long subjugated Black people. They are not mutually exclusive,
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in fact they go hand in hand. That being said, we want to note
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that this series will address topics that can be challenging to discuss, but we believe it is
04:59
important to cover them thoroughly so that we can fully grapple with the reality of US History.
05:04
When watching this course, you will encounter some information that may be sensitive
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and disturbing. But we will also try to let you know when there are extreme cases.
05:12
Over the course of this show, we will do our very best to capture the various dimensions of
05:16
the Black experience, but because we only have 50 episodes to tell these stories, there will
05:22
inevitably be some things that are left out. This show is not meant to be a definitive
05:27
history of Black American life, it is meant to be one contribution to a much wider conversation
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that has been happening among scholars, writers, activists, and citizens for generations.
05:38
There’s going to be a lot to learn over the course of this show, and a lot to unlearn.
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But what we hope you come to understand is that Black history is not /peripheral/ to
05:48
American history, it is central to it. Black history is American history. So let’s go.
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Crash Course is made with the help of all these nice people
05:59
and our animation team is Thought Cafe. Crash Course is a Complexly production.
06:04
If you’d like to keep Crash Course free for everybody, forever, you can support
06:08
the series at Patreon; a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.
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Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.