The Daily Stoic - Classics Scholar Dr. Anika Prather on Healing the Present by Studying the Past

Episode Date: July 3, 2021

On today’s episode, Ryan talks to Classics Scholar Dr. Anika Prather about the bridge that books can create between diverse cultures, why it’s so important to continue teaching the Classics in Universities, how to properly educate young people about racial inequality, and more. Dr. Anika T. Prather has earned several graduate degrees in education from New York University and Howard University. Her research focus is on building literacy with African American students through engagement in the books of the Canon and self-published her book Living in the Constellation of the Canon: The Lived Experiences of African American Students Reading Great Books Literature recently.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Policygenius will help you find the insurance coverage you need. You can save 50% or more by comparing quotes. And when your life insurance policy is sorted out, you’ll know that your family will be protected if anything happens. Just go to policygenius.com to get started.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Dr. Anika Prather: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage justice up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time.

Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. I was trying to think about this, like, what was the first classic book that I've read? I don't mean like classics like The Great Gatsby. I mean like classics when they think of the ancient Greek and Roman texts, you know the Odyssey, the Iliad, Marx Relius, Virgil, you know the the real, real classic texts like what you would study in the classics departments. And I mean, I guess we read parts of the Odyssey

in high school, so I guess that would probably be the first, but I think my real introduction to it ironically enough for today's episode would have been reading Plato's Republic and the allegory of the cave, the idea, which we'll talk about in the episode, so I won't spoil, but I remember being struck by the allegory of the cave. I think it was in a class I took my freshman year of college, freshman or sophomore year actually.

You know, I guess I would have read Socrates my first year, and then my second year I was taking this class called Aristotle, philosophy 101, Aristotle in the meaning of life. And we read Niccomancian ethics, which later I would use as a source in Ego's The Enemy. And then I read Mark's the Released, not that long after.

And that set me on this whole journey that I'm grateful to have you on with me today. It was eye-opening to say the least. I think of the classic side read up until that point, what struck me most about Mark's release was it was like, oh, I don't have to be like a genius to understand that. He's like saying what he means. But as I've gone and read more and more, particularly biographies, I've always loved similar moments that other people have had.

You know, Frederick Douglass falling in love with reading. My album, X Falling in Love with Reading. All these people that I've come to study and use in my books, they tended to have this moment where they fell in love with books. Harry Truman has this moment. You've heard me talk about it a million times, but the classics, they changed my life. They opened up the vastness

of the past, but also have helped me comprehend the present and participate in the future. So what we're going to talk about today is an interesting discussion that's coming from this racial reckoning that we're seeing. A lot of universities are questioning the idea of having a classics department because the classics have been misused in the past. The classics were used by the Nazis. For example, the founding fathers used the classics to justify slavery as did the South. And so people are questioning, why do we study old dead white guys? And especially given the horrible things

that those ideas have been made to use. Of course, anyone who actually love the classics realizes that they're far more complicated, far more complex and can teach as much about human goodness as they can be used to rationalize human evil. I was talking to you about that awakening earlier, and I wanted to read you this little section

from today's guest. She writes, I began to write ferociously. Every assignment was written to take me deeper into the history of classical education in the black community and to create a mental database of all the black literature that cites a volume from the great books.

Raisin in the Sun references Prometheus Bound, Harry P. Newton taught himself to read by reading Plato's Republic, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s letter from Birmingham. Jail is based on St. Thomas Aquinas. Henry David Thoreau, although white, was it abolitionist willing to stay in jail instead of supporting our race system? and in learning about him, I discovered Martin Luther King's

love for the text, civil disobedience. I discovered that schools before desegregation provided a primarily classical education to black students, and how desegregation killed that. I learned that Frederick Douglass loved Cicero and was first introduced to the classics when he bought the Columbian Order as a 12-year-old enslaved boy, the same book that Harriet Beecher Stowe had also read as a child. I discovered that President Barack Obama formed his worldview by reading the thoughts of many of the great philosophers and thinkers.

My most recent discovery has been that. Has been that Tony Morrison minored in classics at Howard University, which is the only historically black college with a classics department. And Tana Hasey-Coats also cites Prometheus bound in his book Between the World and Me, and makes the powerful statement that black diaspora was not just our own world, but in so many ways the Western world itself. And that is a beautiful passage from my guest today, Dr. Anika T. Prather, who is a adjunct professor at Howard University. She has several graduate

degrees in education from New York University and Howard. She has a masters in liberal arts from St. John's College and a PhD in English, theater and literacy education from the University of Maryland. She may be the most well-educated guest I've ever had on this podcast. I had such a great time talking to her about her love of the classics, which you'll hear in the interview,

it's just absolutely infectious. Talk a little bit about religion, talk about racism, we talk about learning from history, and we talk about this sort of cultural boogie man of CRT, which has got a lot of people riled up these days. I really enjoyed this interview. When I read her USA Today piece

about Howard University closing its classics department, I had to reach out. I listened to her on NPR as well. Her perspective was a great one that I benefited from having and you can follow her on Twitter as well. At Enika, that's ANIKAFRE Indeed, Enika Free Indeed, and you can check out her classical Christian school, the Living Water School as well, which seems really interesting. And you can go to her website at doctorprather.com. This is my

conversation with the classicist doctor and Nika Prather. Enjoy. And if you haven't read any of the classics, you've only read me please do yourself a favor. Go straight to the source. Go straight to the seat of intelligence, as Mark really says, you won't regret it. So I thought we would start with Plato's allegory of the cave. It hit me the first time I learned about it, actually, in college. But not everyone's familiar with it, but I do feel like it remains sort of the allegory for our time.

And then as you talk about it, it has some particular relevance in the Black community. Yes. Well, my first introduction to its connection to Black history was when I've read revolutionary suicide by Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther. And that was really exciting for me to read because, you know, there's almost like two battles

I'm fighting here on the one trying to show African-Americans or Black people that studying classics is relevant to us. It's not people who read it don't become assimilationists. They don't want to deny their heritage. And so finding UEP Newton was kind of just like my way to give an extreme example of how these texts don't make us hate our heritage or reject our heritage. And so, Huey P. Newton was a literate till he was about 18. And he got his hands on, he decided he wanted to learn to read and to just kind of stop wasting his life. And he began to read Plato's Republic as an literate person.

And he was using dictionaries and having people help him sound out he began to read Plato's Republic as an illiterate person. And he was using dictionaries and having people help him sound out words and he just muddled through the text several times before he was finally able to read it and understand it before it was just about decoding. And then he began to read and was comprehending. And as he began to read, he read it 10 times, he read Plato's it 10 times, he read Plittles Republic 10 times.

Somehow, somewhere before that 10th time, his mind was drawn to the allegory of the cave. And in reading it, he is when he decided, as he says, to free all black people. And the allegory of the cave is so interesting with regards to talking about freedom, because here you have these people locked up in the cave, right? And they are making assumptions of what is going on outside the cave based on, there's like a fire pit in the cave.

And the pit is located close enough to the door of the entryway of the cave so that the shadows, what's going on outside the cave is picked up by the flames inside the cave and which cast shadows on the wall. And so what those who are locked up in the cave and which cast shadows on the wall. And so what those who are locked up in the cave do is they make assumptions of what's going on outside the cave based on where the shadows are dancing on the wall

inside the cave. And so it's not until one of the men decides to leave the cave to see, you know, like, let me just see what's really going on out here. And so he goes out and he finds out that whatever is going on outside is not really what's happening on the wall or the shadows of the cave. And he frees himself. He decides to experience the outside world and to know what is true. And he's trying to encourage the others to come out

to see what we're seeing on the wall is not really what's true, but they won't leave the cave. And they just kind of stay stuck wanting to believe these false shadows, false representations on the cave. And of course, he's free outside knowing which true. And I feel like this allegory really connects to all of us because we have our world views, our perspectives, our experiences, and then we're afraid to step

outside of ourselves to branch out and to find out what is true. Yeah, so that's, and QAP Newton felt like black people have been kind of been kept in the cave of oppression, the cave of society making them feel less than, and he was trying to make the case for, now I read the cave and I come up with a totally different feeling. And- Oh, what's your feeling? The importance of, I don't know if you're religious,

but going into Samaria, like you can't really know what's true and to you cross, go outside of your worldview and talk to other people and find out what's in their hearts and find out who they are and to bring healing through actually knowing people. Yeah, that's my reading is that once you learn the truth, you're obligated to go back into the cave and teach the truth to the people who have been limited only to shadows and assumptions. Right. Right. And so I like that too. That's great. I'll receive that too. My thing is we're, I'm going to give you a good example what I mean because I think we could both say the same thing or put the two together. what I mean, because I think we could both say the same thing or put the two together.

So, um, and trying to, and in this whole journey of racial unrest, you know, there's groups of us who are trying to bring racial healing. And one of my tools I'm trying to advocate for is good literature, especially the works of the canon. And then reading other authors who've connected to the canon, but have written about it from diverse perspectives, specifically African-American literature. And a lot of times, I know for me in my journey, when I first came to the canon, I had one perspective. I was reading mainly African-American lid. I was in my cave. But when I began to read the works of the canon, I had one perspective. I was reading mainly African-American lid. I was in my cave.

But when I began to read the works of the canon, my perspective on everything began to change. Now, many years later, about 20 years later, I'm trying to advocate for everyone doing that, not just reading the works that you feel comfortable with or that represent your worldview or people group, but reading from the actual voices of the other, whether you make you nervous, whether you think their beliefs are the same as yours so that you can understand the very hearts of people.

And that's how you find what's true. And then once you do that, you are held responsible to go back and to tell, hey, hey, hey, I think we're almost understanding each other. This is what I discovered in building relationships and learning about other people and reading about other people from their perspective. Yes, I think there's that great poem about how books are door-shaped,

that a book is supposed to be a window, not a mirror. And I think that's right. It's that books are an entry point into a different way of thinking, a different way of life, and that whatever culture you're from or history you're from, you're sort of obligated to explore all of them and then come back to your people or your group or your industry or whatever it is

with the wider perspective that you've gained. Now, that's very hard. I can out, for me, doing that has been very hard because I always say, it seems like everyone has PTSD. You know, like, we're all so triggered by every little word, every little action that it makes it hard for people to want to leave their case. So one of the kind of the disheartening things from me is trying to encourage the black

community to join me in this journey of reading the canon. And I'm not saying read the canon and don't read black literature. I'm not saying read the canon and forget your hair or just I'm saying, hey, let's read the canon together to get a broader understanding of humanity, a larger perspective on the human story. But the constant pushback is, I often feel like I might be

called an uncle Tom or that I'm forgetting my heritage or as someone said to me recently, you want to cater too much to them, whatever that's supposed to be. And that's not what I'm doing that's really about being tired of the division and not wanting to wait for someone else to take the first step to bring healing. And I have found that books are a lovely way to do that because I can say to you, Ryan, hey, like right now, Ryan, I've read Plato's Republic, I've read the allegory of the cave and you can say, oh, I've read that too and this is how I see it. And I say, oh, that's good, I like that.

Well, what about this? And here we are, two strangers, different backgrounds. We may not agree on everything, but I feel a bridge is being created and I feel there's a healing that's happening as we've left our caves to share something with each other. No, I think that's right. Like, when I've gone, the journey that I've been on, I've read Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington

and Maya Angelou and Solomon Northrup. When you go and you read these sort read these first person memoirs of history, I think you're struck by a couple of things, and they're sort of classics in their own way, you realize one, that history has been filtered through other people's experiences, and you haven't been getting it directly from the source. And then two, you realize like, oh, Malcolm, and I heard this great description, I forgot who it's from, but that like Malcolm X, the autobiography of Malcolm X and a catcher in the rye are like equally powerful books

to read when you're like 16 or 17 years old, because it's all about sort of coming into who you are. It's like a wake up. And you realize that for all the differences that, I don't know, Frederick Douglass falling in love with reading is exactly the same as you or I falling in love with reading today and people are people. Yes, exactly.

And that's really what it is. We're all human beings. And we don't have to agree with each other on everything, because what you do in your life is you. And what I do in my life is me. But at the end of the day, we got to respect each other and I mean, James Ball would even say we have to love each other. And my dad used to say you can love someone even if you don't like them. And I thought that that means is I value your life. I value that your life is sacred. And I honor that. And I feel like one of the greatest ways to do that

is to read and hear the voice of the other. And I think in this, especially in America, we have been living in this tradition of using labels to slap on people, which subconsciously in our minds dehumanizes the other to us. So that what they say is not meaningful because you have this, you're a liberal, you're a left. You are Democrat, you are Republican, you are Black, you are white, even in black communities. We will dehumanize white people because of our experiences,

because I've heard it, I've heard names, I've heard the deribertory names, that we all call each other because of our world experiences. And I'm gonna give you a personal example of how I was delivered from that way of thinking. And in no way did this process cause me to not love myself or love my ancestry or love my heritage or my culture, it just made me love others more, which has been very liberating. So up until before I went, got into reading

the canon and before I went to St. John's and I came to this very late in life. I noticed that. Yeah. For an advocate of the classics, you came to it like in grad school or something, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, in my 30s. And it was almost an overnight change. And what happened was I accidentally ended up teaching great books at a classical school that my parents found it. My parents have always been a lot more open with regards to literature. I was a graduate from Howard University. I had to do it a lot of racism and Christian schools.

And so I came out of Howard pretty, clothe pretty much locked in my cave. And, but then I ended up teaching this great books class. And I was using theater and music to help students connect to Shakespeare or Aristotle or what have you. And it was more so just a job at the time. And then as I began to see the students really connect to the literature and we began to discuss the actual common human themes.

I realized there was more to this literature than, oh, that's just white people's stuff. Well, anyway, I decided to go to St. John's after that epiphany. And I would spend every summer for four summers studying at St. John's and every summer, I became more and more addicted to the canon. Well, one particular summer, I remember, and please don't ask me what line it was, I can barely remember the full text. It was the Federalist papers that we were discussing. That I do remember. But I remember sitting in my seat and realizing that the founding father labeling the founding fathers as racist slave owners may not be as only being that sure may not be

the whole story. And I remember I'm sitting here thinking how free I felt at that moment. Now someone may be listening to this and rolling their eyes and that's okay. But that was very freeing because at that point, began the journey of figuring out who is George Washington, who is Thomas Jefferson, who was Alexander Hamilton, who were these people, even though they did enslave my ancestors, even still, they were human beings. And I wanted to understand what that meant.

And that journey also gave way to me having a new perspective on America. That's why I've really fallen in love with James Baldwin, even though I acknowledge the flaws, the good, the bad, the ugly, I'm still able to value the country. Sure. And so, and that, that began through my, my studying, the candidate's been very freeing for me lonely, but very freeing, you know.

Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Hey there listeners. While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy

from the ground to heat in cool homes or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together they discussed their entire journey from day one and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery. No, I'm more of an Ellison fan than a Baldwin fan and I was just reading this biography

about him. And first off, he falls in love with the classics at Tuskegee. But he describes this scene where he's, this is after invisible man comes out and he's giving some talk at Harvard. He's been asked to address the class at Harvard. And as he's leaving, he walks through this civil war memorial to all the, the students who had died for the Union cause at Harvard. And he has this sort of epiphany that he hadn't been really seeing the full picture, and that these people who almost certainly all of them

at that time would have been what we are now referring to as sort of white supremacist. They would have believed that all the black people deserved to be free. They weren't sort of fully equal. But he realized that it was more complicated than he had been simplifying it. And I think that's the same awakening that Malcolm X has towards the end of his life.

It's like we realized that by simp, we realized that almost we willingly go back into cave and decide to see people only as shadows. When really they're just like us, which is that they're complicated and hypocritical and contradictory and limited by their beliefs and uprings. Yeah, I mean, because we're all imperfect. I think it's almost like we're all on a search to find the perfect person or the perfect group of people to affiliate with.

Yeah. And we're not. And actually all of this has even led me to kind of turn away from politics, not in a radical sense, like I still vote and things like that, but. You mean like culture war? Yeah. And yes, and because it's not so simple,

I hope it's okay if I give an example. So like, please, I grew up in, you know, going to conservative Christian schools and I'm a Christian and I'm also I'm pro life and not, but that's a whole another story. I just like like you're saying that it's complicated. It's complicated. It's so much more complicated than it is. You know, like, because I remember, I wish I could find this person, but years ago I was very young.

I was probably a teenager. And I knew that she, either she had had an abortion or was advocating for having an abortion. And I called her a murderer. And I thought her a murderer. And I thought I was so self-righteous and I was being this good Christian by saying that. And I see that word thrown around.

Let's fast forward then to my late 30s and my very dear friend, she passed away of Ovarian cancer some years ago. Very dear friend, also a Christian love Lord. And I was having that same ridiculous conversation with her again. And she loved me so unconditionally. And she said, you know I'm a Christian, I say yes.

She said, do you know I've had an abortion? I was shocked. Oh my God, really? She said, because I was raped by my mother's drug dealer. Wow. Do you still think I'm a murderer? Everything that I thought I knew, I thought I knew just failed to the ground at that point.

And I just, I was just like, she said, you know, can you really judge me? Maybe you would have kept the baby. She said, I was pregnant. Maybe you would have kept the baby. But I know that my mother's drug dealer, my mother owed him some money, and he raped me to get his

money back, and I got pregnant. So are you going to call me a murderer as well after all I've been through? And so I feel like we have got to stop complicating the human story. We've got to learn to, as we're saying, connecting it to the K, come out of our caves, come out of our churchiness, out of our politicalness, and to see people understand their stories, understand their experiences, and the beauty about classics and reading the works of the canon, is it kind of provides a tool to help us leave our caves? You know?

Yeah, no, it's funny that we call it the canon, right? Because this means sort of authoritative, definitive, it's everything. And really, I think the best relationship that one can have to these texts is not to see them so much as definitive, but as part of a, you know, centuries-long conversation or debate. And that what people

mean and how we see them, it changes over time. And I had Shadi Barch, the translator of Virgil, on recently. And she was talking about how, you know, Virgil was seen as one thing to one generation, then two generations, it was the opposite. And then it's evolved over time. So the idea that you would say like, oh, these texts represent X to this group, therefore they're worthless, or that they represent this.

And if you question them, you are doing something heretical, is to miss the point, which is that, no, this is just really great art that should be spurring exactly the kinds of complicated questions that we're talking about. Is this person good or bad? Is so-and-so a hero or a villain, should they have done X?

It's supposed to be a debate. It is, it is. And I love how Mortimer Adler, so he's very inspirational to me, because as a teacher, he helps me so that I can formulate how I'm teaching. Who is he? Mortimer Adler, I'm sorry. I was okay. So Mortimer Adler, he is one of the many people who brought together the canon. I mean, there's others who've done it, but he made it very accessible to K-12 educators.

Got it. Because his dream was to bring classical education or studying of the great books into K-12 public schools across the nation. He felt like doing this and having all the students read this and discuss this would kind of connect us all, give us a common ground, a common language. Sure. Sadly, he left people of color off of his list. And I think the assumption was that black people would not read it, aren't reading it, it's not relevant.

He did not realize there's a whole black tradition of reading the canon. And so I've just kind of inserted my, my list and integrated with his. And he says that he calls it the great conversation where you start off with classics, ancient Greece and Rome and going forward, every author is writing about their world perspective and then reaching back and referencing that. And they're all doing that and say, oh, Aristotle said, oh, well Shakespeare said,

oh, where the Bible said, or Plato said, and they're kind of, or you'll sometimes see a quote that reminds you of something from another text that you know they're citing that text. So you get the sense of a great conversation that spans worlds and times. And so when we read it, and we engage with each other around it, we become a with each other around it,

we become a part of that great conversation. It's very unifying. And so my desire is to train children to do that. So that the journey I went on in my thirties, it happens with them sooner. You know? Yeah, that moment you talked about where you sort of realized like, oh, the founders were complicated or whatever.

I think one moment you have as you read the great books is suddenly stuff that you understand now, you know, basic understanding of, I'll give you an example. Realizing that a lot of the famous lines in American history, you know, give me liberty or give me death. I regret I have one, but one life to lead. Or just other moments in philosophy where you hear some great quote and you realize actually this person is quoting someone else and that if you had grown up, you know, being forced to learn Greek or Latin,

memorizing these epigrams, you'd actually get the reference that they're making and that so much of history is actually sort of remixing these same ideas from like 2000 years ago. Yes, and in my dissertation, that's what my students said when I interviewed them when they began to read classics and learn Latin and read the other works of the canon they said they began to notice these words all around them in the movies and the news commercials like they it's like they one girl said I feel like I've been given a code. That's just really powerful.

I mean, because when we talk about canceling the classics, you're almost cutting off access to the origins of our human narrative to this generation. I had a Howard student ask me one time, or why is it necessary when I can just pick up and read what black people are writing now? Why do I have to go back?

But even those who are writing now understood the class, how can you fully understand what they're even saying if you don't know who they're referencing? If you don't understand the origins of the thinking that they have. Totally. I was just reading during the first part of the pandemic, I read Taylor Branches series on Martin Luther King.

And it was amazing to me reading all of Dr. King's writing and thinking and his comments, just how often he was, you know, when you're of Dr. King's writing and thinking and his comments, just how often he was like, you know, when you're reading like Cicero or something and there's like some Latin expression and then you Google it and like they don't even translate it because they just assume you'll all just be glad or that you'll notice that, oh, this is a reference from the Odyssey or whatever. Martin Luther King is doing that. Like so much of what he's talking about are obviously riffs from the Bible,

but he's also riffing on St. Augustine and Sophocles. And he had this profound, almost intuitive knowledge of the classics that it's like a second language. And you're just amazing. We're like these impoverished, backcountry people, they're also getting it because they were, they were, it was also the language they were speaking in church. And so, yeah, you just realized like, but by getting rid of that stuff, by not studying it, what you're really doing is like cutting the legs off this other powerful more recent word.

You know, the image I have with what you're, I love this, the image I have with what you're saying is seeing the canon or let me say classics, classics being that the writings of ancient recent Rome. I see that as the seed. And I've said this before, but just want to visualize it. I see that as the seed, and then the stem and the branches, and the leaves and the flower and the fruit of the plant, is everything else. And if you kill the seed, like when my husband, I want to kill weeds, we get round up, if you get the kind of point

and the poison goes down to the seed and kills it from the bottom up and eventually you see it die. You know, at first, you know, you spray it down and it doesn't kill the plant up top. It goes down into to the seed of the plant and kills it from the bottom. And then before long, you see the brown creep up in the plant and the plant dies. I feel like that's what we're doing when we fight against classics and even the works of the Canon. It's spraying roundup.

That's beautiful. It's haunting, but beautiful. It is. And eventually, you're going to see if we don't somehow wake up and realize that this is not a good path, we're going to see if we don't somehow wake up and realize that this is not a good path, we're going to see a withering away of something meaningful. And I feel kind of like an urgency about it. And I think that's why I talk so much about it. Even today, I was really grieving about the misunderstanding around the canon

and classical study, because I'm working on a book about Anna Julia Cooper. And I'm just, who is that? I'm meeting, okay. I always, I'm sorry, I keep saying names. No, not, I just wanna make sure I have that. Thank you for doing that,

because I'm just going and going, Anna Julia Cooper, she was a slave up until emancipation. And at 10 years old, she was emancipated and went into St. Augustine's college, which was an early, St. Augustine's normal school. It was a school set up for emancipated people. And it was a classical school. Oh, and so most of the early black schools set up for the emancipated people were founded by missionary organizations partnering with the black community, and they were classical and Christian. So they study the canon, they study classics, they study Latin Greek theology. And Anna went went to St. Augustine's normal school and she would

get a little bit of classics, but mainly they wanted to learn just a little bit of that and then learn how to clean a house and cook for her man. And the men got to study the full, the gentleman's program, they called it, got the fullness of classical study. So she protest and says, listen, I want to learn this too. They let her do it. And that began her journey at 10 years old to studying classically. And she went on to be a classical educator up until she was, I mean, she died when she was 106.

Whoa. But her journey is interesting because you hear about how her university's connection to her, like, was she earned her PhD. She's like the fifth black woman in America to earn a PhD. The first woman in DC to earn a PhD, something like that. Please double check it. But almost one of the first, right? And how her university was celebrating her, and Alan Locke was also rooted in the

canon. He is the father of the Harlem Renaissance. And he wrote a book, I say called the New Negro. And he leads this whole celebration honoring her for getting her PhD. And that's all held at Howard. And so I'm reading that and researching her life and researching her work of Classical education in the black community and how it was really used as a as a source of liberation and For black people and how Howard was at the center of it and I was just grieving at this Spring of Roundup on the seed in the black community. Yeah And I hate it being lost.

I hate the story of that being lost because it's actually the story of the beginnings of black education. Classical education was the first philosophy used to educate black people coming out of slavery. And I started to cry about that because this misunderstanding around the canon is actually,

what's the word I want to use? It is burying a part of black history that is so important. And then when you think about the larger misunderstanding around classics, you know, universities are closing their classics departments and we're lessening the requirements in their classics departments. And again, I see that again as a spring of roundup on the seed of our heritage of as human beings, you know. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here

and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. It seems strange, right? Like, certainly the classics and their use throughout history have not been perfect. But of list of priorities, things to remove or to tackle as sort of mechanisms or vehicles for spreading racist or unproductive beliefs. The classics would be like the absolute, not only would it be lower, but it also seems like the easier way to solve it instead of, say, eradicating a department at Howard's, which has professors and is as a long history, as you said, it's like, why don't we just elevate and include other voices into the canon? Like, you were just talking about Cooper who I hadn't heard

of, but only earlier this year, I guess it was last year, that I heard of Phyllis Wheatley for the first time. And it's like, why don't we just include her in the story? Because she, in fact, by including her, you, you, by extension in diet, a George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the Ben Franklin, for not, for, for, that, that it's, they can't be excused for, you know what I mean? You realize that, oh, they weren't living in a vacuum. There was also incredibly talented, brilliant black people that they were aggressively holding down. So it seems like by introducing diversity or rather just ceasing to artificially exclude diversity,

yeah, one of it. You improve the entire ecosystem. Right. Jessica Houton-Wilson says something along the lines of, instead of disrupting or canceling, why don't we expand? Yes. And because it's there, when I read, when I look at the, I have one of Mortimer Adler's books,

like I'm a Mortimer Adler, like I got to use book sales and thrift stores and I like find his stuff, because people consider a lot of it obsolete. But I'll get anything he's put together. And I'm looking at this list and I can just see where we can integrate it. But the formula is there,

so you don't have to start from scratch. It's organized according to time period. and somebody has already put the thousands of hours of work to bring it all together. Even classics themselves reference ancient African civilizations so you can learn about ancient African civilizations and Middle Eastern civilizations, Asian civilizations all just by reading classics. You can do that. And we kind of find out all about ourselves and how we intersect and how we connect

and how we've been on this lifelong journey to preserve humanity. And I just don't understand why we can't expand another easier task, but be to get with these curriculum in K-12 schools and make sure they actually tell the stories correctly. Sure. It's like, you're so, it's like a knee jerk reaction.

It's like, we've got to do something. What's the easiest thing to do? Get rid of classics. And it's like, there's no, I'm really not seeing the logic. And another thing I've said to people is like, guys, it's not the books. It's people, like, wouldn't it be easier to do training? Wouldn't it be easier to get people? Wouldn't it be easier to to to get people to to root racism out of their hearts? Wouldn't that be more meaningful? Because like, what if you get rid of classics and you do all of this

stuff that you think is doing something, but people's hearts haven't even changed? Like people are still holding to their caves. So yeah, I would always strikes me as yeah, people go, let's get rid of this, but then there's never a good argument for what you're replacing it with. And so, so, you know, I'll find that too. And it's, you know, nobody's perfect, but you know, I'll put up a book list for him.

So I'll be like, you're my 20 favorite books about this or something. And so I'm gonna go, you know, why are there no women on this list? And it's like, well, first off, you don't know how to count because there's several. But, you know, I get your impulse, which is, you know, it's like, it's like, oh, you just, you just actually didn't look very closely or you, you assumed that this name was a man's name, you know, you thought George Eliot was a man, or whatever. But I get your point, which is that things should be,

we should try for some level of equity and representation, but it's always striking to me that your impulse, if you see a list that's missing something, your impulse shouldn't be like this list sucks, your impulse should be like, add these people to the list, you know, because like, I would love the recommendations. Sorry. Sorry.

That's so true. I'm laughing because it's you're like, what you're speaking so much truth right now. It's almost it's hilarious. But yeah. So who would you add? Like when you when you talked about Mortimer, Adler, sort of leaving some books off the list, what would you add? When I was talking to Dr. Bars, she was talking about, you know, like we read The Ancient Greeks and we sort of let them

get away with referring to the Persians as barbarians. She's like, I'm from there. I don't like that. We should study Cyrus the Great and these other figures. But as you look at what more representative classics might be, who do you feel like maybe slides under the radar, maybe a Philist Wheatley, Solomon Northrup? Who else? I mean, I'd even put this morning, I just thought of somebody else, and I even black, it's Paulo Freire,

I would put him on there. He refers to the canon so much, a lot of play, a lot of Aristotle. And then there's a, he's a theater person, but his name is Augusto, Augusto Boul. So, so, he created something called theater of the oppressed. And these two men are connected to each other. And it reminds me of is again Frederick Douglass. Oh, I know what I want to say. Okay, let me on this. Okay. I've been working through this all day.

It's just really intense. Okay, so follow Freire and Augusto Bowl. They're both somewhere from, I think they both, I know one is from Brazil. I can't remember what other, but South American country or Central America country. Freire is from, I can't remember. But so when they read the works of the Canon, they both were

incited to do something to stand for liberty or freedom from oppression. Right? You see that same thing happen with Frederick Douglass. You see that same thing happen with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, even Angela Davis, like all of these people, but most people of color who are rooted in the works of the canon from classics and beyond were incited to fight for equality, even the founders of America. And so I'm really kind of baffled by the resistance

to putting these other voices on the list, such as Pala Freire Augusto-Bole, or Phyllis Wheatley, or Dubois, or Frederick Douglass, or Marley Luther King. I'm just weird to me, but they will put the founding fathers on the list. They will put the Constitution on the list. They will put the Constitution on the list. They'll put the Declaration of Independence on the list, right? But those people were

rooted in the canon and incited to fight for liberty. So I'm like, so how do you come up with not including other people inspired by the canon to fight for liberty. Right, yeah, when you look at, when you look at Tussant Leve on tour, or even Marcus Garvey. Yeah, I was just reading, I was just reading a book about him as well. Yeah, another person that sort of, and actually, when you really look at the great civil rights

leaders, what Martin Luther King does so brilliantly, what Frederick Douglass does, perhaps best, is take those texts and then shove them in people's faces. Yes. Actually, Lincoln does the same thing. Of course, he's like, no, no, they really meant this. Yes. You can't, and I think, great activists did this in the gay rights movement as well. It's like, where is this love by neighbor stuff that you purport to believe?

You know, where is, Thomas Jefferson wasn't joking when he said all men are treated equal. He may have been a hypocrite. He may have been done monstrous things in his personal life, but he wrote it and let's take him literally and force him to put his money where his mouth is, you know? And I think that what, so it's almost, you want to do the opposite of Get rid of the classics, you want to familiarize yourself with them. And to a certain degree, almost weaponize them against the power structures that you're

trying to motivate to change. And that's what our, in that what our founding fathers did, like, somehow, like the Declaration of Independence is a radical document, you know? The Boston Tea Party was a radical protest. And so, and all of these people had a classical education. All of these people were rooted in studying the, there's something about these documents that, I mean, Douglas really, his narrative really explains what not just, not just what happened in black people, what happened in those who settled this country. I mean, those who crossed the ocean

just to come here to settle the land. Whether, yes, Native Americans were already here, and I'm not that, you know, that's a, that's troubled, that's very troubling. Sure. But they were moved to feel like I am free. I should have this liberty. So they crossed the ocean, they come here, right?

And, you know, for a while, they're willing to be up under Britain's rule, but then they are excited to fight for liberty. Give me liberty or give me death. Their story is exactly like Odysseus. Their story is exactly like Frederickseus. You know, their story is exactly like Frederick Douglass. Their story is exactly like Phyllis Wheatley and Martin Luther King. At all these people, what do they all have in common?

A fight for liberty. I mean, can you imagine if we framed it that way? Can you imagine the healing that could come? If we all looked at, we're studying the canon to learn how these works inspired so many different people to want to fight for liberty. When, and maybe part of it too is, as you said, it's part of a great conversation.

So it's problematic to see the classics as sort of from a certain period to a certain period, right? Because then it then it ceases to be, it starts to be dead as opposed to living. And like I think if you see, for instance, Frederick Douglass as a founding father, even though he comes about almost a hundred years later, then what he's doing makes a lot of sense.

And then he can be included on the same reading list as Thomas Jefferson. But in this book that I was reading about Marcus Garvey, I was introduced to Claude McKay, who had not heard of again another failing of the education system. No, that's a read. That poem, if we must die, let it not be like Hogs, Hunton, and Pendin, and Gloria's spot, while Roundus bark, the Mad and Hungry dogs. That sounds like something that one of the founding fathers

gets said as he was trying to whip people up into fighting in the revolution. Yes, yes, yes. And see, and see, this, and see, see, we're proving something right here, Ryan. We are proving how these texts can bring us together. We're proving right now with this discussion because we are seeing how

all of our narratives and all of our ancestry reflects the other. Because it's the human story, the human story is all about our fight to find our place in this world, our journey to finding our identity, to finding our place, to being liberated from all the things in this life that seeks to to to restrain us. And so, and and so some people may may struggle with the way I'm putting it because the pain of slavery was so awful, you know, and we still are experiencing the aftershocks of that even now. But it's not that I'm belittling that, you know, I think some people almost want to say like, I can't have that conversation. We don't have anything in common because my situation of my ancestors being enslaved

and my roots being torn from me, I can't even trace my family history, is so much worse than what this person has gone through over there. But is it worse than Native Americans who are relegated to living on a reservation when this was actually their land? You see, so we all have this story,

and they have a fight, you know? They fought, they actually contributed to the Constitution. A lot of people may not realize that I think it was Benjamin Franklin went to them to look at the era, the Constitution of the Irrigoy nation. Yeah, their Confederacy sort of informs the articles of Confederation. Yes, yes, and they were even invited to the convention, right? And so my point is, you see how all that is all mixed in the Constitution is on the canon, but that experience connects Native Americans.

It connects white people, you know, and it even connects Black people as we grapple with, hey, y'all not living up to what this thing says, you know. So, it shows a connection, it doesn't mean that it lessens the importance of your story. But at what point do we say, at what point do we stop holding onto our came, like this is my pain, it's so much more painful than yours. I can't talk to you because of my pain.

To, I have this pain. I have this burden. Let me see how we can relate each other with the hopes of being healed from that. So it sounds like the Christian community that in, maybe you can relate to this, but I have been observing slash hearing from a fair amount of people. I'd otherwise see as pretty reasonable, certainly decent, certainly not prone to hysterics, very worked up that kids are being taught critical race theory.

You know, like, like a very concerned about this. Yeah. Walk me through what it is, why it matters, and whether, you know, maybe we can walk some people off the ledge here. Okay. So, let me preface this by saying, I actually, I have so many mixed feelings about CRT, and I'm going to be very honest about that.

I mixed feelings because I had to learn about CRT in grad school back in like 2005, 2006. And when I read it, I didn't think it was dangerous or something to be concerned about, and most of, if not all of it, I could see and it made sense to me. I had to study in a college of education and they wanted us to study it at the University of Maryland. Just so we're in our teaching, we can be aware of making sure we're not teaching in that way, in a way that oppresses.

Sure. Okay. So there was that. So then I graduated, I met my quota for graduate school, and I moved on. And then now, almost 20 years later, it's rising up as this horrible demon sent to take over the world. And I'm like, this is not what I read in grad school.

And I feel like I'm a pretty good reader. I'm pretty, my, I have pretty good antennas. Why is this, what I'm hearing now is not what I study in grad school. And so one of the things I've heard is, how can I explain it? I've heard is, how can I explain it? It's almost like their misunderstanding that CRT is telling people to label people by race to mistreat people by race or XYZ. But CRT is actually seeking to explain to the world what it's like to be black in America, like, or a person of color, or, and if you read the fine print of the original documents,

they wanted it to go out to not just black people or people of color, but the LGBTQ women, like anyone who felt like the system was not really working for them. They wanted it to help to explain that. Okay, so there's that. And how the systems of our country lend itself to favor a certain demographic, it doesn't consider all the diverse types of people in our country. Okay, and that comes played out by how education is done, how real estate laws are done. I don't know about all those other things, but I can speak about education. So even now, I can, even now, I go into public schools and I review curriculum and I can look at curriculum and I can see wow um you're not telling the true story about the Native American people here or you're not

telling the true story of what slavery was like or you are talking about George Washington and Washington DC but why won't you talk about Benjamin Bannocker who designed Washington DC? And so, or you'll talk about Thomas Edison, but you won't talk about Vladimir, the man who created the filament inside the light bulb. And so you can look at how education has intentionally left out the narratives of all the diverse people

who've worked to make America what it is. Okay, so that's just fact that's not me having a concern. I just and that's the little just a few examples. That's not me having a conspiracy. That's not me thinking, oh everyone's racist and out to get me. That's just I've taught in the schools. I've used the curriculum. That's just that. Now, the issue with critical race theory though, I have is how do you take that and roll it out to every single school in the nation, leaving it in the hands of all types of different teachers

and know that it's being taught in an ethical, gentle, child-friendly way so that a healthy outcome happens. And so I just feel that it is easier to just fix the history curriculum. Right. Like just go get the books, get a few, make a committee and say let's analyze these texts and see where we miss the mark, any defileance of holes, rewrite the curriculum, put it back in the schools and teachers just teach the curriculum. Because to place the perspective of racism around you on a child is a huge burden for a child to carry.

It's also a hard thing to sell. I think you're raising a good point. This is something I think activists do poorly, which is like, if you want to make people really nervous, tell them you're going to reimagine what their kids are learning from start to finish in school. This is why people are so mad about common core and stuff you're like, this isn't how I learned how to do multiplication. Something must be wrong.

So it's like understanding that people are inherently conservative, not politically, but they just don't like radical change. Ideally, you wanna find a way to explain the changes you're making within the confines of also sort of sneakily keeping them the same. Right. You know what I mean? And so, yeah, you're right. It's like in Texas, like, they're still teaching.

We still celebrate like Confederate memorial day here in Texas, right? It's like, why don't we just fix that first? Get rid of that, get rid of that. How about we just get rid of that? Yeah, and I'm not saying you're telling people, oh, you gotta wait, but I think your point, which I would agree with, which is like,

let's update and fix the curriculum rather than trying to sell a wholesale reimagining of the curriculum, because're probably going to get a bunch of resistance on the second one from people who would wholeheartedly agree with you if you said you were just doing the first one. It's like, yeah, if you told people we're going to demilitarize the police, probably 99% of people would agree with you. Then when you say we're going to defund the police, they're like, what are you trying to do?

How you explain things better. How you package it. Yeah. And then again, I'm looking at it also from a psychological point of view of children. The whole concept of race is a very complicated, and racism is a very complicated thing for children to wrap their minds around. I mean, I have three young children, seven, nine, and 11.

And I have to be, and I'm their mother, and I love them, and I want them to feel safe in their world and to enjoy where they are. But yet, be aware of things they may endure. And I have to be very careful with that. If I just walk around all day saying, it's racism everywhere, these people don't treat you right, then I'm going to raise a whole bunch of pessimistic children.

Sure. Um, so it's very important that I'm very intentional about, um, how I lovingly and gently explain to them and not too much because kids just want to play. They don't care about the color of your skin. They don't care about anything, but that you're nice to them, and we can play together. And I don't want to, it's almost like, I feel like you can preserve a child's innocence at the same time of making them aware of things

that are going on around them, how to love someone equally, how to recognize when someone is being mistreated because of the color of their skin, without throwing them into a feeling of the whole system is against me. And as a black woman, I'm not saying I've never felt that way.

I'm just gonna be really honest. I mean, oh my gosh, through my grad school experience. I mean, I felt the system was against me. It was a really difficult journey. If it hadn't been for the dean of my college and the head of my department, um, I don't think I would have, I don't know if I would have gotten out of there because you, um, and Anna Julia Cooper, who I referred to earlier, she went through something similar, like trying to get a woman, a black woman,

a woman at that, trying to get her PhD was just very hard for her. And it's still hard today, especially for black women. And so I'm not saying that I've never felt or experienced a system that is not seeming to be for me. I just don't think it's wise to trust every school, every teacher in the nation, we're trying to educate kids about that because someone's going to do it wrong, someone's going to come out pretty jacked up. But if you focus on curriculum, because teachers can follow curriculum, if you go into the curriculum and fill in the holes it should be there, inherent in doing that

would be teaching them the truth. I have a friend, my cousin, she says, I don't know if she's listening, my cousin, and she says, if we would just teach the truth, we wouldn't be talking about CRT. Sure. You know, but we're so busy, we're so busy trying to make the narrative so much about like America is so much more than slavery and not being enslaved and racism and not being racist and left and right and this divided segregated world that we end, you know, it really was a fight to become a union. And if we teach our kids that, maybe they'll grow up to fight for it too. Yeah, and then it's also funny though, that people are like, oh, they're teaching propaganda in schools.

This is the reaction against CRT. It's like, you mean when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the day, or do you mean when they learn, you know, like the lost cause mythology, like that's not propaganda, you know, like the idea that you who your ancestors came in and fucked up our history by inserting a bunch of propaganda and lies in it, don't get to then prevent someone else from coming in. And it's like, the status quo is not acceptable either.

And anyone who's looked at a history book, especially in the South, immediately sees that, like, all is not well. Right. And I saw, somebody was saying the other day, like, we're fussing so much about CRT. Why aren't we fussing about removing, not allowing the Confederate flag to be flown?

Like my neighbor, I have a neighbor. I live in Maryland, so my neighbor decided to put his Confederate flag. Not a Confederate state, by the way. Hello? And so I wrote him a letter. I said, because I was scared to go over there, not going to his door, so I wrote him a letter.

And I said, why are you flying this flag? And let me tell you how this makes me feel. And a wonderful dialogue. And he has a farm happening. He's like, why don't you come bring the kids over and feed the sheep? And I never saw him fly that flag again. Sure.

And so that's relational. I mean, those kinds of that, but why aren't we, as a country, taking the leadership to educate our society about why the Confederate flag shouldn't be flown or why Confederate monuments need to be put somewhere in the back of a museum someplace? Why aren't we promoting the story of the union more? Why is this a battle? But instead of even focusing on that, you know, we come up with something as complicated as CRT in schools. I struggle with CRT not because I don't

see the points of it. It's because I feel like it's too complicated to teach children. Well, and this is where classical history is so important, right? When you read, when you read Machiavelli, Machiavelli talks about how the hardest thing in the world to do, he says, is do something new. He says, which is why a prince always makes it seem like what they're doing is a continuation of the ancients. And so I think that's something that activists often mess up, which is that they are convinced that because they're right, you know, because they have the, let's go back to Socrates. You know, Socrates asks a bunch of brilliant provocative questions.

You know, it is the word was, they killed it. They killed it. So you learn that, you know, truth and justice as important as they are are not always welcome with open arms and you have to figure out, it's not gradualism, but you have to figure out a way to subvert power structures and use them against themselves. This is what Martin Luther King does, this is what Gandhi does, this is what great activists do.

Booker T. Washington realizes, you know, basically that, you know, if he preaches, if he talks, you know, the sort of all fingers on the same hand, he can at least get a bunch of resources from White philanthropists to start a movement that generations later can probably be closer to how he actually wanted to see the world. And that's, you know, there has to be a pragmatism to this as well. Yes, balance. Yes. That's, you know, there has to be a pragmatism to this as well. Yes, balance, yes. The RTS, like if Fox News can turn it into a scary talking point, you probably haven't

done the work as far as how you presented to the world. I think this is what Biden does well. You know, Biden that Republicans tried to throw all the things that they threw at all the other candidates at Biden, and he just said, I'm Joe Biden. That's not true. And it works. You know, like, it finally, you can't, you couldn't make him look like a scary radical because he comports himself like a kindly old grandfather. And, and that's what made him electable. And, and there is a, there's a long classical tradition of understanding as Odysseus is cunning, you know, and that's what we're talking about.

Yeah, and another thing about CRT that I want people to understand. So when people look at those who are the funny thing is people are not even reading their original writings about it, they're reading what political figures or people on, they're from their perspective are saying about it. But I want to say this, why are we shocked about the things that CRT says about systemic racism and how the government and real estate and education and all of these systems in our world are set up against people of color or underserved populations.

And the reason why I want to say it should be foreign to any of us because if you are studying human civilizations, every people group has had an opportunity to run the world. Every people group. There was a time where ancient African civilizations were running everything. They were the most powerful scary group. That's the Moors, right? Right. The Moors. You have Kush. You have it, which is also Ethiopia. You have the Egyptians. You have more of the Moors. Yeah. So, yes, you know, you got Hannibal that over that overcame Rome for a little while, you know, and then you have Cyrus the great from the Middle East,

the Battle Onions, if you're a Bible, if you're listening to this and you read the Bible, you can see the different human civilizations. In fact, there's a vision, I think, in the book of Daniel, where God gives Daniel a vision of a statue, which shows all the different human human civilizations that would be an authority. And then if you break that up a little bit, and you look at the different Bible stories, even if you think of some myth, you can connect a lot of what I'm saying

to actual documented history. So if you look at different human civilizations, and you see the story of Daniel, who was there under Nebuchadnezzar, which was the Babylonians, you know, you can see that the whole way that government was set and the children of Israel and them being enslaved, like they even had to live in segregated parts of Egypt. Like, so the whole, this thing that's going on in America is like there's nothing new under the sun. This is what happens.

And we cannot deny history, the history says, yes, the Native Americans were here first, but the settlers came and eventually, all of Europe seemed to come, took over the land, took the land from the Native Americans. That's just the story. This is not me to raise up bitterness in the point fingers. I'm just saying, this is the story. Like, we can't deny that that's the story.

I'm not sitting here being mad at you because that's the story. That just is the story. That's just how human history has rolled out. Well, with that happening, just like with Babylonia, just like with the Egyptians and all other, and the ancient Africans, which were the first, the ancient Africans were actually the first world powers.

And then you go from ancient Africans up to, I think, the Babylonians and then, and then I think Greece and then Rome. But I'm not a historian, so if I'm mixing up my fashions, sorry, but my point is every people group has had this point where they have been in control. And then part of that being in control, governments and school systems and all, even real estate, everything has been set up to benefit the desires of those who overcame. Well, watch this. I'm going to say this real quick, Ryan. to fit the desires of those who overcame.

Well, watch this, I'm gonna say this real quick, Ryan, I'm sure all of my brothers and sisters are gonna probably throw things at me when I say this, but I just wanna say it anyway. But with that understanding, it just is what it is. Like we, that's just the story. The big task for us to do now as America is, are we going to go the way of these other ancient civilizations that to stop what they were doing,

they had to literally be overthrown and they no longer exist? Or are we going to continue in the way of America that has constantly fought to try to live up to its promise and preserve what we have and to make it better. And that can only be done if we're willing to root out those things that aren't adhering to what the promise has said. And so CRT, whether they do it perfectly or not, is seeking to say, hey, this is what's going on in our society. And so that you can recognize it, what can we do to change it? This is not so that black people can now be in power,

or Muslims can now be in power, or gay people can now be in power, or women can now be in power. This is so how can we make it so that America really is Muslims can now be in power or gay people can now be in power or women can now be in power. This is so how can we make us so that America really is living up to the promise that all men are created equal? I think that's beautiful. And any of your point that every group has ruled one society has had a chance at the

top at one point or another. I think what you find is universally, there's always been oppression, evil, persecution. And the idea is, that all cancels out to some degree. How do we now, in the future, with this knowledge, try to be a little bit better, and try to as as Martin Luther King says, fulfill out the true meaning of its cre of our cre. You know, that's the idea.

Yeah. That's the idea. And I can't say that everyone's going about it, um, right or in every way that I agree with. Of course. Um, the whole thing's political CRT, it stresses me out so much. I'd rather just read a book with somebody and talk and get to know people. We're an old book that doesn't have any of that. And just read something old that isn't part of the culture war. That's always. Yes, yes. It is very freeing. So I have no interest in politics or activism in that sense. I just want to love people and connect people, but also be truthful and realistic about what is going on around me. And how can my little bit of action somehow put a dent in the mess, you know?

I think that's beautifully said. Doctor, I'm so glad we got to chat. Please keep fighting for the classics. And I hope we can talk again soon. I can't wait to read your book. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening. We just crossed more than 50 million downloads with the Daily Stoke podcast. Thanks to you.

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