WEBVTT

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Not that long ago,

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I received an invitation

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to spend a few days at the historic
home of James Madison.

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James Madison, of course,

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was the fourth president
of the United States,

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the father of the Constitution,

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the architect of the Bill of Rights.

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And as a historian,

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I was really excited
to go to this historic site,

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because I understand and appreciate
the power of place.

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Now, Madison called his estate Montpelier.

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And Montpelier is absolutely beautiful.

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It's several thousand acres
of rolling hills,

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farmland and forest,

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with absolutely breathtaking views
of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

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But it's a haunting beauty,

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because Montpelier
was also a slave labor camp.

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You see, James Madison enslaved
more than 100 people

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over the course of his lifetime.

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And he never freed a single soul,

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not even upon his death.

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The centerpiece of Montpelier
is Madison's mansion.

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Now this is where James Madison grew up,

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this is where he returned to
after his presidency,

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this is where he eventually died.

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And the centerpiece
of Madison's mansion is his library.

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This room on the second floor,

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where Madison conceived
and conceptualized the Bill of Rights.

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When I visited for the first time,

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the director of education,
Christian Cotz --

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cool white dude --

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(Laughter)

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took me almost immediately to the library.

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And it was amazing,
being able to stand in this place

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where such an important moment
in American history happened.

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But then after a little while there,

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Christian actually took me downstairs
to the cellars of the mansion.

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Now, in the cellars of the mansion,

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that's where the enslaved
African Americans who managed the house

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spent most of their time.

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It's also where they were installing
a new exhibition on slavery in America.

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And while we were there,

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Christian instructed me to do something
I thought was a little bit strange.

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He told me to take my hand

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and place it on the brick walls
of the cellar and to slide it along,

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until I felt these impressions or ridges
in the face of the brick.

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Now look,

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I was going to be staying on-site
on this former slave plantation

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for a couple of days,

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so I wasn't trying
to upset any white people.

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(Laughter)

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Because when this was over,

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I wanted to make sure
that I could get out.

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(Laughter)

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But as I'm actually sliding my hand
along the cellar wall,

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I couldn't help but think
about my daughters,

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and my youngest one in particular,

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who was only about two
or three years old at the time,

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because every time
she hopped out of our car,

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she would take her hand
and slide it along the outside,

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which is absolutely disgusting.

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And then --

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and then, if I couldn't get
to her in time,

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she would take her fingers
and pop them in her mouth,

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which would drive me absolutely crazy.

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So this is what I'm thinking about
while I'm supposed to be a historian.

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(Laughter)

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But then, I actually do feel
these impressions in the brick.

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I feel these ridges in the brick.

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And it takes a second
to realize what they are.

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What they are

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are tiny hand prints.

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Because all of the bricks
at James Madison's estate

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were made by the children
that he enslaved.

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And that's when it hit me

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that the library

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in which James Madison conceives
and conceptualizes the Bill of Rights

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rests on a foundation of bricks

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made by the children that he enslaved.

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And this is hard history.

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It's hard history,
because it's difficult to imagine

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the kind of inhumanity

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that leads one to enslave children

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to make bricks for your comfort
and convenience.

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It's hard history,

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because it's hard to talk
about the violence of slavery,

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the beatings, the whippings,
the kidnappings,

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the forced family separations.

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It's hard history, because it's hard
to teach white supremacy,

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which is the ideology
that justified slavery.

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And so rather than confront hard history,

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we tend to avoid it.

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Now, sometimes that means
just making stuff up.

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I can't tell you how many times
I've heard people say

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that "states' rights" was the primary
cause of the Civil War.

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That would actually come as a surprise

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to the people who fought in the Civil War.

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(Laughter)

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Sometimes, we try
to rationalize hard history.

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When people visit Montpelier --

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and by "people," in this instance,
I mean white people --

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when they visit Montpelier

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and learn about Madison enslaving people,

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they often ask,

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"But wasn't he a good master?"

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A "good master?"

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There is no such thing as a good master.

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There is only worse and worser.

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And sometimes,

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we just pretend the past didn't happen.

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I can't tell you how many times
I've heard people say,

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"It's hard to imagine slavery
existing outside of the plantation South."

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No, it ain't.

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Slavery existed in every American colony,

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slavery existed in my home
state of New York

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for 50 years after
the American Revolution.

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So why do we do this?

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Why do we avoid confronting hard history?

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Literary performer
and educator Regie Gibson

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had the truth of it when he said

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that our problem as Americans
is we actually hate history.

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What we love

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is nostalgia.

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Nostalgia.

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We love stories about the past

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that make us feel comfortable
about the present.

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But we can't keep doing this.

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George Santayana, the Spanish
writer and philosopher,

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said that those who cannot
remember the past

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are condemned to repeat it.

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Now as a historian, I spend a lot of time
thinking about this very statement,

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and in a sense,
it applies to us in America.

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But in a way, it doesn't.

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Because, inherent in this statement,

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is the notion that at some point,

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we stopped doing the things

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that have created inequality
in the first place.

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And a harsh reality is,

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we haven't.

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Consider the racial wealth gap.

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Wealth is generated by accumulating
resources in one generation

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and transferring them
to subsequent generations.

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Median white household wealth

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is 147,000 dollars.

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Median Black household wealth

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is four thousand dollars.

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How do you explain this growing gap?

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Hard history.

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My great-great-grandfather
was born enslaved

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in Jasper County, Georgia, in the 1850s.

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While enslaved, he was never allowed
to accumulate anything,

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and he was emancipated with nothing.

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He was never compensated
for the bricks that he made.

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My great-grandfather was also born
in Jasper County, Georgia, in the 1870s,

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and he actually managed
to accumulate a fair bit of land.

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But then, in nineteen-teens,
Jim Crow took that land from him.

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And then Jim Crow took his life.

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My grandfather, Leonard Jeffries Senior,

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was born in Georgia,

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but there was nothing left for him there,

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so he actually grew up
in Newark, New Jersey.

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And he spent most of his life
working as a custodian.

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Job discrimination,
segregated education and redlining

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kept him from ever breaking
into the middle class.

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And so when he passed away
in the early 1990s,

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he left to his two sons

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nothing more than a life-insurance policy

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that was barely enough
to cover his funeral expenses.

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Now my parents, both social workers,

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they actually managed to purchase a home

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in the Crown Heights section
of Brooklyn, New York, in 1980,

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for 55,000 dollars.

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Now Crown Heights, at the time,
was an all-Black neighborhood,

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and it was kind of rough.

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My brother and I often went to sleep,

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by the mid-1980s,

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hearing gunshots.

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But my parents protected us,

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and my parents also held onto that home.

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For 40 years.

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And they're still there.

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But something quintessentially
American happened

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about 20 years ago.

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About 20 years ago,

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they went to sleep one night
in an all-Black neighborhood,

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and they woke up the next morning

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in an all-white neighborhood.

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(Laughter)

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And as a result of gentrification,

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not only did all their neighbors
mysteriously disappear,

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but the value of their home

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skyrocketed.

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So that home that they purchased
for 55,000 dollars --

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at 29 percent interest, by the way --

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that home is now worth
30 times what they paid it for.

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Thirty times.

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Do the math with me.

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That's 55,000 times 30, carry the zeros --

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That's a lot of money.

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(Laughter)

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So that means,

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as their single and sole asset,

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when the time comes for them
to pass that asset on to my brother and I,

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that will be the first time
in my family's history,

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more than 150 years
after the end of slavery,

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that there will be a meaningful
transfer of wealth in my family.

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And it's not because family
members haven't saved,

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haven't worked hard,

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haven't valued education.

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It's because of hard history.

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So when I think about the past,

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my concern about not remembering it

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is not that we will repeat it
if we don't remember it.

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My concern, my fear
is that if we don't remember the past,

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we will continue it.

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We will continue to do the things

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that created inequality and injustice
in the first place.

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So what we must do

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is we must disrupt
the continuum of hard history.

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And we can do this by seeking truth.

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By confronting hard history directly.

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By magnifying hard history
for all the world to see.

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We can do this by speaking truth.

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Teachers teaching hard history
to their students.

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To do anything else is to commit
educational malpractice.

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And parents have to speak truth
to their children,

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so that they understand

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where we have come from as a nation.

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And finally, we must all act on truth.

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Individually and collectively,

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publicly and privately,

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in small ways and in large ways.

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We must do the things that will bend
the arc of the moral universe

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towards justice.

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To do nothing is to be complicit

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in inequality.

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History reminds us

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that we, as a nation,

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stand on the shoulders of political giants

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like James Madison.

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But hard history reminds us
that we, as a nation,

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also stand on the shoulders
of enslaved African American children.

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Little Black boys and little Black girls

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who, with their bare hands,
made the bricks

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that serve as the foundation
for this nation.

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And if we are serious
about creating a fair and just society,

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then we would do well to remember that,

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and we would do well to remember them.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)