Everything My Mother And Father Did Was

You Notice Patterns. White Guests Often Are Mortified - That Word Again - When They Learn Their Ancestors Owned Slaves. But I've Never Had A Black Guest Who Was Upset To Learn About White Ancestry That Probably Involved Forced Sexual Relations.

So When You Do Your Family Tree And Margaret Cho Does Hers, And... Wanda Sykes And John Legend... We're Adding To The Database That Scholars Can Then Draw From To Generalize About The Complexity Of The American Experience. And That's The Contribution That Family Trees Make To Broader Scholarship.

I Got A Letter From This Lady Of Russian And Jewish Descent. She Asked Me If I Was A Racist Because I Didn't Do Any White People. I Was Shocked, Because My Mandate Is To Do Black Studies. It Would Have Never Occurred To Me If This Lady Hadn't Written This Letter. We Decided We Were Going Expand The Brand And Do Everybody.

The Biggest Surprise For Me, Without A Doubt, Was That The First Black People Who Came To The United States Weren't The 20 Who Arrived In Jamestown In 1619. All Of Us Had Been Taught That. The First African Came To Florida In 1513. And The Huge Shock Is We Know His Name, Juan Garrido, And That He Wasn't A Slave. He Was Free!

Conspiracy Theories Are An Irresistible Labor-saving Device In The Face Of Complexity.