So, welcome to this Munk School event. This is the kind of event, the kind of discussion that we hope is signature of what we do. It is Professor Crenshaw is here on behalf of the Center for the Study of the United States and the Munk School. She will be speaking this evening at a packed event. I hope you have tickets. So, I will repeat my introduction from last night at dinner. Professor Crenshaw needs no introduction, but this is not about her needs. And so, how do you explain Professor Crenshaw's influence on the world today? It's not easy. One measure, which Professor Crenshaw gets very upset if I mention, is she's more than three times as cited as all members of the Munk School faculty combined. So, and one of the most cited living people, her impact across all disciplines is exhibited by the fact that 16 departments are co-sponsoring her talk this evening.
The concepts her influence is also exhibited by the fact that one of the concepts the practice she started along with Derrick Bell, critical race theory, is now basically illegal in the United States. So, that's how you know if you like your life's work is made illegal then under your name, under the very expression that you introduced it, you have influence. And you know it's illegal because it explains what's going on. Now, Professor Crenshaw will have this moderated discussion with Professor Timothy Snyder, who is a scholar of Eastern Europe, of course, a professor of history at the Munk School, home team here. And I think all of us have been working together, both Professor Snyder and I have worked for the African American Policy Forum, AAPF, which is Professor Crenshaw's institute. I should mention she is, I think, the only person with full tenure at two top 10 law schools, Columbia and UCLA. So we've both done work, activist work, for Professor Crenshaw. And so Professor Snyder is the author of, I don't even know how to count that high, many books, but way more than I have, translated into over 40 languages, a scholar of mass killing and authoritarianism. So please welcome Professor Crenshaw to the Munk School.
So I'll start out with this question to both of them because both of you are in your various ways historians. Critical race theory is the practice of looking at practices, legal practices, and other practices that reinforce racial hierarchies that are kept from the past. And Professor Snyder is a historian of authoritarianism and mass killing. So we focus a lot on the present. But what I want to ask you both is how do we think about the past, the past of the United States in bearing on the present, the way that and particularly the way that exceptions pose a problem. The United States represented itself as the home of freedom, but black Americans have never been allowed into that. How does that structure of exceptions play a role in shaping the present?
So, first of all, Jason, thank you so much for inviting me here. I'm very really, really excited to be here in Toronto. It feels like a respite and I don't have to tell you guys why. And it's also a pleasure to be in conversation with you again, Tim. You guys have come to my sandbox to play with me, so it was my turn to come to play with you, also. This is great for me. So, I want to take your question and turn it into both how to think about the past and how not to think about the past because what we're involved in right now is a lesson about how not to think about the past. So, as you mentioned, critical race theory has been banned now in several states. In more than 26 states, there are limits in how teachers can teach about the past and in particular, how they can teach about the racial past. Those limits, those bans are framed in terms of you can't teach something that makes students and in particular, white students feel a certain way about the past. This is a very interesting, but also not unfamiliar way in which fascists work. The history is about a feeling. It's not about the facts. It's not about usable knowledge about history in order to help us understand the contemporary challenges. Instead, it is a way of framing history as a home team kind of cheer session. This is effectively what has now become the law in too much of the United States. The impact is immeasurable. We now are in a country where nearly 24, 25 million students go to schools in which they are by law not permitted to learn the full history. So, when authoritarians take over the process of education by dictating the content of what can be told, not only the fact that they are subjecting history to topics, but perspectives on topics. In our field around, you know, free speech and freedom of ideas, those are two distinct but deeply problematic areas of concern. What you can substantially talk about and how you can talk about it, what perspective you're trying to pursue. So, that's telling us something very clear, very imminent, very dangerous about what's unfolding in the United States today.
Now, where I sometimes part with others who are now deeply concerned about how to think about history is that for us, we've been watching this happen for a while, have been trying to raise alarms for a while, have been saying, "What happened to all the academic and free speech concerns when the topic was about anti-racism?" Now, the topic is to suppress anti-racism, and a lot of those folks have simply disappeared. And I want to say that it's not just in the academic arena that there's been a no-show. We've seen it in traditional civil rights groups who responded to the first wave of suppression, which was against critical race theory, it was against intersectionality, it was against the 1619 Project. The first response was, this is a distraction. This is a trap. We can't simply respond to each of these moments because there's a bigger war to be had. Without understanding that this was the Trojan horse of the bigger war, right? So, once they tested and figured out what people would permit, they were able to use that template to then apply it more broadly to entire fields of study, to entire campaigns for social, racial, and other forms of justice. So, we were that test case, and the test case turned into a positive green light. What's behind that green light? And here's again where I'll get a little more controversial. We have had a fight over the course of I guess the last 50 years, not just with the right about how to think about race in American society. We've had a fight with liberals about how to think about race in American society, and we've had a fight with the left about how to do it. And all of this has converged in a particular ambivalence about critical thinking about race. What we found out as one of the points of departure for critical race theory when we were trying to raise the ways of applying critical thinking to race was that some of our allies and colleagues on the left were no more than liberal about race. In other words, they saw race as natural and saw racial hierarchy, I should say, as socially constructed. So, their view that race itself was not natural meant that you couldn't create an intellectual project to interrogate it. Liberals, on the other hand, just saw race as something that you could erase by not paying attention to it. And conservatives saw colorblindness as a way of erasing racial justice as an imperative, but falling back on ideas of natural racial hierarchies. So, we were having fights with all of them at the same time. That's all metastasized into this moment in what I considered a kind of "Okay, we can't talk about that anymore." And over, I think, your concept of anticipatory compliance, they were ready for race to be taken off the table because it was difficult, it was controversial, and there is a sense that we can't win with race being part of our agendas. And now we see this playing out at the foundation level, we see universities taking out ethnic studies, racial race studies, and departments as one of the first things to go. So, this compliance is, I would say, not necessarily against the will. It's more of a we might have to finally put this down. That's the consequence of us not making the progress we needed to make on race in the last 50 years that we had the opportunity to do so.
All right, I'm going to stop. Is my mic on? I'm going to stop. Can you hear me? Yeah, it's on. Okay, that's great. I'm going to stop taking notes and start talking then. So, I'm going to reconceptualize a little bit of this, but this is in very broad agreement with what Kim has been saying. But from the perspective of someone who's a historian, I'm an American, I'm a historian, I'm not an American historian. Right? I had a dear friend called Tony Judt who was a wonderful historian who, you know, was an American and a Jew, but he was not an American Jew. And like he sort of made this point often, right? So, I'm an American, I'm a historian, but I'm not an American historian. So when I think about this problem, I start first in other countries and then I notice things about the United States which remind me of things I've noticed in other countries. And so for example, how where you pick your moment of origin that you define as being neutral and natural. So, in the Soviet Union or in Russia now, you pick July of 1941 as a kind of neutral natural starting point or June of 1941 rather, June 22nd as a neutral natural starting point because that's when the Germans invaded. And so that's a good place to start history because that means we never we didn't do anything wrong, wrongs were only done to us. But of course, if you start that way, then you're blanking out, you're erasing in Jason's term, you're erasing the fact that for the previous 2 years you had been an ally of Nazi Germany. Which is a very convenient thing to erase and I imagine you're all nodding which is very charitable and sweet. But I'm going to say that probably for most people the notion that Nazi Germany and Soviet Union were allies for 2 years at the beginning of the Second World War, it's not that familiar. It's not that intuitive. It's something that's hard to say without a hiccup in a public space, even though I've been saying it for decades now. And so likewise with the US Constitution, right? So there's this notion that if you go back to the beginning and you say you're an originalist or whatever, that somehow that's a neutral position. There's nothing wrong with that. We just fresh start. We got rid of the British Empire. We started everything new. What could we possibly been doing wrong? But an originalist position means that you're uncritically identifying with views of the 1780s, which in general means identifying with the view that people from Africa were inferior in all kinds of ways and that it was virtually unthinkable that they would be full participants in this project. And so this notion which is meant to seem neutral in fact brings with it all kinds of meaningful connotations which then turn up, right? That's the first thing I wanted to say is that the problems that we're talking about, we're mostly talking about the US and how the present crisis in the US has historical roots which one can name and analyze, but this is a world problem. I mean it's hard to name a country where this doesn't figure in some version. The second thing that I wanted to say is how I think about critical race theory, which is that I see it as essentially like I'm glad Kim's not paying attention because I'm about to say something.
Writing everything you say. I'm taking my notes here.
So like I see critical race theory as essentially very sound historical method because critical race theory is about again, you know, correct me but it's about not taking literally the things that are said. It's about taking law seriously but not literally and by extension taking other things seriously but not literally. So just because you have laws about civil rights doesn't mean that the whole society has taken a turn, right? It may even mean that other things are happening at the same time in the exact opposite direction. And that is of course what historians try to do. We don't go back and read primary sources and say, "Oh, this is literally true and somehow this other primary source which says something else is also literally true and this third primary source which contradicts those two is also literally true." That's not what we do. We try to figure out, and this is very old-fashioned, I'm basically paraphrasing von Ranke, but we try to figure out what was actually going on. And what is actually going on is something which is hidden in the interstices of all the sources which always requires a certain amount of interpretation and intervention, right? And the more sources you have the better. But what's really going on is never what the law actually says. And it's never what anyone actually says in a bit of correspondence. And so, critical race theory for me is actually like it's sound historical method. It's like you're turning over the earth, you're turning over the earth, you're turning over the earth until you start to see what's actually happening.
And then my third point is about the purpose of history. And I think here I'm going to be saying things which are quite similar to what Professor Crenshaw said. I think history is necessary for empathy. Because if history if you just say that history is what makes you feel okay in your own skin, then you feel okay in your own skin. But you don't have any idea what it's like to be inside somebody else's skin. And history is not about what it's like to be inside their skin either. History is something where it kind of touches on everybody, but it doesn't make anybody feel completely good, right? And if you know things about history, like a good history book will always make you feel uncomfortable, no matter who you are. Like if you turn the last page of a history book and you're like, "Ah, I feel wonderful now." That wasn't a good history book and it probably wasn't a history book at all, honestly. Whereas when you learn history, like you're a little bit startled, you're a little bit unsettled, and you look around and you recognize the experiences of other people a little bit more than you did before, right? So, you need history for empathy. And relatedly, for maturation. Like it honestly makes me sick as an American to imagine kids going through our school systems not being able to break away from the things that their parents tell them, right? And not or not being able to break away from the things that make sense to them at their age, right? Maturing involves recognizing that there are perspectives that go beyond your own experience, your family's experience, your church's experience, right? That's what maturation means. It means not getting stuck. It means breaking out. And history helps you to break out because it helps you to see that there are other kinds of truths, right? Like it's not that your own experience lies or your parents lie or your church lies. It's that there are more kinds of I mean maybe they do, of course, right? But it's that there are other kinds of truths out there and that if you keep going you get touched by those other kinds of truth.
And then relevant to that is the possibility and I'm moving a tiny bit towards politics is the possibility of coalitions. So, you can't really do democratic politics without You can't do pluralism without coalitions. And you can't do coalitions without some level of mutual understanding, which doesn't necessarily mean identifying, right? It doesn't mean that I am in the same identity group as somebody else, but I can understand them enough to make a coalition. And history really helps with that. History clears away like it breaks some of the ice at the beginning of the conversation if you already have the history because it means that in order to form a coalition you don't have to start at point A and then like explained every single thing. Some of the stuff is already held in common, right? And then related to that and I'm going to hit on a point that I think Kim was making as well and we'll see if it's the same point, but as I like I'm not a messenger, right? Like and I didn't Sorry, that sounded religious. I meant in the political sense. Like I'm not a polling person. Like I'm a messaging What messenger What do they call it? Messagering? Messengering? Like I'm not big into messaging. Like it's a term that I really don't like. And it's a term like messaging and polling. Like these are the terms that basically overwhelm the daily political conversation. And I don't message. Like I just kind of say what I think. I have that luxury, you know, to be able to say what I think as a tenured professor. You know, so and as a you know, basically like autistic human being who doesn't mind that much what other people think. Hey, it's not good when only my spouse laughs at that joke. That's like doubly bad. First of all, that was funny y'all. And secondly, wait a minute. Okay, but the point here is that as I try as I with part of my as out of the corner of my eye, I follow the Democratic conversation about messaging. It seems to be moving in the direction of a wait a minute. Actually, maybe messaging itself wasn't such a great idea. Because messaging become like a form of as you say, anticipatory obedience. And when you're messaging, you're always making compromises with things. And you're never actually like hitting that nail on the head, right? Or you're never hitting that nail on the head with your forehead, which sometimes you have to do. Like sometimes you got to lean out and take the pain. And with the race is one of those things. And when I think about like the inherent radicalism and wildness of American politics right now, I tend to think that people prefer for you to tell them what you really think. Even if they disagree with you. Than to hear you middle and muddle and muddle the whole time. That's like that's my take. And you know, if that's right, then it's better to just go whole hog on racial issues and say what you think and talk about the history than it is to try to make all kinds of compromises all the time. I mean, it's right morally, but what I'm trying to suggest is that it might also be right politically. Okay, I've got some other stuff to say, but I'm going to pause there because I want to hear Jason's next question.
So, I'm glad you talked about the US Constitution and its role in our memory politics. And because that does lead to my next question. So, one of the 19th century debates between William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass was about the Constitution and the role of the Constitution. I'm going to use this to ask about ideals and hopes in the light of America's brutal history. So, what Douglass urged against William Lloyd Garrison's claim that the Constitution was a slavery document was that we should reclaim the Constitution. We should reclaim the Constitution for American ideals. And you see this throughout the history of black organizing and black activism. This reclamation of American ideals. This reminding people about that they're being hypocritical to these American ideals. Now, how do we negotiate this? How do we negotiate the ideals, the reminding people of the ideals when America has become a kind of has lived up to the Soviet Union's correct description of the United States as a white supremacist nation. Now, we are a white supremacist We were always a white supremacist nation. But, now we're kind of officially a white supremacist nation. So, how do we recover the ideals? How do we use the ideals while not forgetting that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, that, you know, we incarcerate our formerly enslaved population to levels that are, you know, world historically evil, that, you know, Tim and I teach a class mass incarceration in the United States and the Soviet Union, where, you know, looking at mass incarceration societies. So, how do we deal with the reality of history while keeping, while following, or should we follow, that honored path of looking to a better future?
You want to start that way, Tim?
If you like. I mean, I probably don't have as much to say as nearly as much to say about this as you do. But, I look, I take that question as a question about the possibility of the future of the American Republic because I think the existence of the American Republic is very much in question now. I think that's the real ground issue of politics. It's not about, for me, whether Trump succeeds in installing some kind of thoroughgoing fascist dictatorship from California to Connecticut. I think that outcome is unlikely because I think everything breaks first or that pieces start to fall off before you get to that outcome. I'm not saying that's not what he's trying to do. I mean, I've been saying that's what he's been trying to do for some time, and I'm not changing that story. But, I think it's more likely that the system cracks under the pressure of this attempt. And so, I just want to frame the discussion, at least my part of it, that way because I don't honestly see how the Republic goes forward without the Constitution, right? So, as a practical matter, I can imagine parts of the US slipping out from under the Constitution now. The president is seeking to exempt himself personally to slip out from the bounds of the Constitution. Kim will have more to say about this, but the Supreme Court seems to be very confused about its role in you know in I mean not just in interpretations or mistaken or not, but they seem to be confused about their actual role in all of this in a fairly profound way. So it's this second point would be something like yeah, taking it's given all the critiques of the Constitution historical and otherwise, I don't see I think the question is about the republic and practically if their constitution breaks, that's because the republic is breaking. So I mean what I so I'm but to give you my take about this, I'm essentially on the Frederick Douglass side. Like I think that there are animating principles within the Constitution which properly interpreted, so rule of law, rule of law, balance of powers, the notion of liberty, that there are things in the Constitution which if differently interpreted, if differently interpreted, could you know could lead to a just society. So that's I have so I'm kind of of two minds here. Like on the one hand I think it's as a you can't make the Okay, I'll try to reconcile the apparent contradiction. You can't interpret the Constitution in a way which allows for the flourishing of Americans without recognizing its historical situation, right? And it's precisely by way of seeing where the Constitution arose and whom it was meant to empower and disempower, it's by way of that that you could think your way forward to an improvement which would involve an amendment as well as reinterpretation. So if the republic's going to exist, I think it has to be something like that that you need the history in order to criticize the Constitution, but the criticism of the Constitution has to lead to amendment and reinterpretation, something like that. I want to hear what Kim has to say, though.
So that's obviously been the tension for any of us who have been engaged in the practice of constitutional scholarship with an eye towards transformative possibilities. We have always had to deal with the fact that the Constitution was in fact a slave document. The Republic was in fact a republic grounded on theft of labor and land and reproductive capacity of black women. That's one thing that never gets talked about that must be inserted in our reflection. And even if it is the case that there are ultimate limitations on how far we can go towards creating the conditions of a real democracy within the constraints of the Constitution, we haven't come anywhere close to it. So it is as an initial matter an easy answer to simply say let's actually try to use the Constitution to do its maximal amount. In fact we've tried that a few times and it is true that the Constitution can be interpreted in a way that does far far far far more than it's doing right now. So that raises a question of whether we're dealing with an inherent structural limitation that's embodied in that document or we dealing with a set of practices that consistently undermine the possibilities that are inherent within. The way I think about it sometimes, it's a question of whether we're going to look at how far the rubber band can stretch or how quickly it snaps back. Because the stretch is what happened in the Reconstruction Constitution, the remaking of the very relationship between the state and the national government, the remaking of the relationship between government and its citizens when African-Americans were given citizenship. They were also given a new protector of that citizenship, the national government. Congress became the guarantor of citizenship. That was a fundamental rewriting and rethinking of how citizenship should be thought about in the United States, which was essentially initially through the states, which allowed southern governments to limit the concept of citizenship in order to reinforce slavery as a status that was inherited by people of African descent. So, that was a flip and it was an important flip that happened. It was the product of the Civil War. It was the spoils of the defeat of the South. And it could have been the basis for Douglass's affirmation. Like no document always remains what it was intended to be at the first place. It undermines our sense of human agency. So, we can actually remake things. The problem is what do we make of the fact that those things that were remade were so quickly overturned, so quickly, you know, snapped back. So, you know, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls his book 8 years in power. He wasn't referring to Obama. He was referring to Reconstruction. We were 8 years in power. What happened in those eight years? What happened in those eight years was a vision of a multi-racial society that we have not really been able to resuscitate since. What happened in those eight years was a proliferation of certain ideas about how education should be made widely
available as a condition of democracy. What happened in those eight years were different ideas about work, different ideas about community. Unfortunately, not different ideas about gender. So, there's always going to be a limitation that we have to grapple with. But there was a possibility that was quickly, violently suppressed. And that violent suppression was articulated in the language of neutrality. It was articulated at the constitutional level in amendments to the Constitution and other laws that intentionally and directly had the effect of disenfranchising the new citizens and returning them to a position of powerlessness and in some ways available for exploitation that was more life-threatening than some of the conditions that preexisted the end of slavery. I'm talking about convict labor and things that I know you all know about.
So, what do we make? What is the story that we tell ourselves about the overthrow of that possibility? Is the limit in the document or is it the limit in us? Is it the way that whiteness was able to galvanize mass consent over and against what the Constitution made possible as the condition and scope of democracy? I would say as long as that possibility, the snapback, is made possible because of white consciousness, because of the idea that I would rather live in a broken democracy than share it with you, which was additionally what we saw again on January 6th. That was the long arc of that sensibility that keeps generating the same kind of destructive sentiments in society. As long as that's still there, we will never really know what the Constitution itself is capable of.
Can I have another crack at that one? Yeah. This is inspiring a few thoughts. One thing I want to say is that this issue of it's not unique to the Constitution, right? So, like insofar as all of you Canadians are zoning out as we go into like this American dispute about the late 18th century, there's a broader issue here, which is that democracy's always been like this. Republics have always been like this. The history of democracy and the history of republics is not a history of everyone having equal participation. The history of democracy and the history of republics is a history of there being a group which is larger than oligarchs who have special rights, including to vote, right? And then the big shift is, and again, this is America not being exceptional, the big shift is how you get from it being a select group of people who have the right to vote and also the right to colonize. Those two things seem to go together. How do you get that group to become everybody?
And so, in the United States, there's a specific story about race, there's a specific story about the native population, there's a specific story about women, but there's a general arc here, which is that things that are called democracies and republics historically start out with it being a small group, and then how do you get from the small group to everyone? And that notion that it should be everyone is not a new one, right? Jefferson speaks as though it was everyone, although he was a slave owner, right? Kant speaks as though it should be everyone, although he had very specific ideas about who a human being in fact was, right? And so even the universalisms are themselves — you find your favorite universalist thinker and then it turns out that he or she, you know, made exceptions. But this is a general problem and I would, you know, much as I'm concerned about the US example, I would phrase it that way. It's there agreeing with exactly what Kim said about whiteness.
There is an issue here about how you get beyond imperial politics in general because democracies and republics historically have also been empires. The French have a very good way of like tricking us. The French say, well, we were a republic, then we were an empire, then we were a republic, then we were an empire. But even when they were republics, they were also empires, right? France never stopped being an empire just because it was like the première, the deuxième, or the troisième République, you know, that doesn't stop them being an empire. They were always an empire, right? And the fact that America's a republic doesn't stop it from being an empire. And so for me the very broad question is how do you get to a form of post-imperial politics which involves the beneficiaries of various imperial practices, be they white Americans or be they some other group, coming to terms with history and making some kind of conscious decision about it.
Because this is the second thing I was thinking about. Progress doesn't happen on its own, right? And one of the things that leads to the snapbacks is the notion that progress is happening on its own. The notion that like all in all we're moving in a certain direction. As soon as you start thinking that like we are moving in a certain direction or the country is moving in a certain direction or history has a certain direction, you're just inviting that snapback, right? Because that's never how it works. It always works that there's some kind of struggle and that struggle creates different epistemic conditions for those who are inside the struggle, but also for the people who are adjacent to the struggle and are somewhat affected by the struggle.
And so this just leads me to the last thought that I want to share, which is that it has to do with how you interpret the Constitution. And you know, Frederick Douglass spoke about this famously, but do you think about that moment as a moment where people were struggling to get beyond themselves, even if they didn't get where you wanted them to go, right? But they were struggling to get beyond themselves where they were. And if that's true, then that means you have to struggle to get beyond yourself where you are now, right? And so then the interpretation of the 18th century in the United States would be, okay, all of the flaws, everything, but this group nevertheless in some way was struggling to get beyond where they were, and that means the correct interpretation of that moment is you struggle to get beyond where you are now, right? Because they would never have said, okay, what we're fighting for in our revolutionary war and what we're trying to draw up in our Constitution is trying to go back 250 years, right? None of them ever said anything like that. And so when we say, hey, it's time to go back 250 years, we may be violating the spirit of that moment, right? And so this is one way of thinking about the Constitution, that people were trying to jump over their own shadows. They may have jumped over one or two shadows and there were many shadows left, but the correct interpretation would then be, okay, let's ourselves try to jump over one or two shadows.
So let me add something. And it's somewhat a comment and also a way of a question because I am not an international scholar on these questions, so I'm curious about a few dimensions of the American obsession with its heroes, hero worshipping, whether that is also a condition in other republics or not. So, two points of departure. So, we're about to — and I hope that it's not going to travel here — we're about to go into a 250th birthday celebration in the United States, perfectly timed to finish the project of erasing all of the dimensions of recovery about the conditions of the birth of the nation. The framing has been America was born perfect and just kept getting better. So we're going to have a lot more of that over the course of the next couple of months.
What that brings to mind is both how participating in the project of constitutional lawmaking seems to require signing on to this idea like it's a religion, an article of faith. The Supreme Court Justices are framed as the high priests and they are supposed to, you know, maintain fidelity to the word of the on high. And so that is a sort of practical reality, but it also gets absorbed into the culture more broadly. And I just don't know if that's exceptional or not.
So, at the 200th anniversary Thurgood Marshall, who was the first black Supreme Court Justice, wrote an article that almost got him impeached. And in this article, he basically said, all this flag-waving and celebration about this great miracle of Philadelphia acting as though the Constitution is the best thing since sliced bread, it wasn't that great from the beginning and it was so flawed that it led to a cataclysmic civil war and had to be rebuilt from the bottom up. So, I don't think it was all that great. I'm not going to jump up and down. I'm not going to be waving any flag. What I'm going to be doing is remembering, commemorating, and celebrating all of the blood, all of the sweat, all of the lives that were lost to create the notion of America that people take as their birthright. It was not a birthright. It was hard fought and won.
So, because he wrote that, the ancestors of MAGA basically said he's not qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. We need to begin impeachment proceedings. Now, fortunately, that was in 1976. Had it been this year, the impeachment proceedings probably would have actually happened. That's how far, you know, we've come in this idea of you've got to not only celebrate the Constitution, but you've got to celebrate the original vision of the Constitution, which would be such a contradiction for a black person to get into, but that's another issue. It would be one thing if this was just a preoccupation of those of us who drank the Kool-Aid. But our entire society is enmeshed in this.
So, I'll end with this. I teach a course called Race, Representation in the Law. It is a way to teach a film course in the law school. And what we do is we look at how race, the state, law are imagined in film, in cinema, because more people have access to that than any case they're ever read in their entire lives, or any law, or the Constitution itself. So, one of the first movies we look at is a movie called Amistad, and it's like a complicated thing. It's a Steven Spielberg movie, and it's basically — the upshot of it was the question of whether Africans who were captured off the coast of the Atlantic are enslaved people or whether they are contraband that are owned by someone else or whether they can be freed and go back. And so the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court.
And in this fantastic scene, Anthony Hopkins is pleading with the Supreme Court to let the Africans go. And in it, he has this whole stretch where it's all about honoring the vision of the ancestors and taking the courage to ask them what should be done. So in this speech, and it's Steven Spielberg at his best, the wind is flowing. All of the Africans are now dressed in, you know, Victorian wear. They'd been in rags the whole time. They're sitting there earnestly wanting their freedom and he's going to the busts of American presidents starting with George Washington and then moving to Thomas Jefferson. These are two of the wealthiest presidents who held the most slaves, asking them for their wisdom to let these potentially enslaved people go.
And even though we in that class fully know that this is a contradiction on top of a contradiction. No way in the world can you appeal to Washington and Jefferson to let the people free. It still works because something is there in the American psyche before the facts. And so people love that scene and when it's over it's like, yes, let the people go. We're like, do you realize what you have just done. You have shown the power of the idea of hero worship, the idea that who our founders are are much more important than what they actually did. The facts don't matter. The worship is what matters. It drives me crazy, and I don't know if it's just an American sickness or it's broader.
