The Most Important Question History vs Nostalgia
I've recorded hundreds of conversations with incredible people working on the front lines of the future. People who've asked the most important question: what can I do? Who found their answer and followed it.
But for today's conversation, we're going back to the front lines of the past because the past can tell us a whole hell of a lot about today and how tomorrow might go.
But only if we tell the full story of how we got here, about who got us here, about how my great-great-grandparents got here. And how my grandma got here fleeing the Nazis, and how millions of Africans were forcibly brought here, over 35,000 trips across the middle passage over almost 300 years.
The full story of the choices we made then, which was not so long ago, and continue to make now about wars and heritage and bondage and family and land and more.
And how, if we can break from the stories we've been told and continue to tell ourselves to choose history over nostalgia, to choose facts over memory and infinite disinformation on demand, we can make different choices.
My guest today is Clint Smith. Clint is the number one New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, he's the winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award for nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for book journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021.
And now in 2025, the Young Reader's Edition has just come out and it is wonderful. Clint is also the author two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground, as well as Counting Dissent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards.
Clint is a staff writer at The Atlantic and he has received fellowships for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canum, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. Clint is a former National Poetry Slam Champion, and the recipient of the Jerome Jay Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.
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INI Book Club:
- How The Word Is Passed by Clint Smith
- How The Word Is Passed Young Readers Edition by Clint Smith, Adapted by Sonja Cherry-Paul
- Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
- How Germany Remembers the Holocaust (The Atlantic)
- Monuments to the Unthinkable (The Atlantic)
- What Is Colonial Williamsburg For? (The Atlantic)
- Watch Clint's Crash Course on Black American History on YouTube
- Read Clint's poetry in Above Ground and Counting Descent
- Clint is listening to: Say Something by Karen Harding, and Craig David
- Keep up with Clint's work https://www.clintsmithiii.com/
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- Produced by Willow Beck
- Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com
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