"The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from," wrote author, poet and academic Caroline Randall Williams in a widely-read opinion column for The New York Times. As a Black southern woman with white ancestors, her view of the debate over how America remembers its past is deeply personal.

This episode is the latest in our podcast series on racism and its painful legacy. Recent protests across the country have sparked renewed controversy over confederate statues, and the naming of military bases and public buildings that celebrate men who fought in the Civil War against the government of the United States. 

Should the monuments be repurposed or removed? We discuss ways to find common ground and better our understanding of the American history.

Caroline Randall Williams is a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University. She is a resident and native of Tennessee. Some of her ancestors were enslaved. Others included a prominent poet and novelist, and a civil rights leader. She is the great-great grand-daughter of Edmund Pettus, who was a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and U.S. Senator from Alabama.