Brené Brown: Hi everyone. I’m Brené Brown, and this is Unlocking Us.

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BB: Welcome back to our new eight-part series that I’m calling On My Heart and Mind. We kicked off the series with my conversation with Valarie Kaur on the power of revolutionary love and being a sage warrior. I am loving seeing the feedback from people that listened to the conversation and read the book. It’s just hope and love in book format. So really an invitation to pick up her new book, Valarie Kaur, Sage Warrior. In the series, I’m also going to be talking to my favorite cultural critic, along with bell hooks, Roxanne Gay. We’re talking about black gun ownership. Dr. Mary Claire Haver and I are talking about menopause. My sisters and I will be talking about grief, love, and unexpected joy. As many of you know, my mom died on Christmas morning this past year, and it’s been a very hard three or four years through her dementia diagnosis. Something we just… Caught us off guard and then kicked our ass for many, many, many, many months. And so we’re going to share some of what we learned about ourselves, about each other, about grief, and about our mom.

BB: Today I am talking to someone that you may remember from an Unlocking Us episode Dr. Sarah Lewis. So I talked to Sarah Lewis, I don’t even remember how long it… Maybe two years, about her book The Rise, which has gone down in history as one of the big life changers for me, especially some pieces that are actually related to her new book. Her new book is called The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. I will tell you that as expected, Dr. Sarah Lewis is the most disorienting person. She’s a historian. She’s just a lot of different things that come together in a way that make you question everything you thought you knew. I just love her work.

BB: Her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, took her over 10 years to write. It uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States. When Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the country’s racial regime and how we learned to disregard the truth and accept a very insidious, slow layering of lies. I mean, I was so shocked reading this book. Poor Steve, I was like, “Oh my God, you’re not going to believe this.” He’s like, “What? What? Tell me.” I’m like, “No, you need to read the book.” “Oh, stop saying that,” then like 10 pages later, “Holy shit.” Yeah. I mean, and he is like, “Okay, you have to read the book out loud, or you have to just like stop reading and stop saying that to me.” You know, the part of Rise that really changed my thinking about everything, including how I work, was this piece on aesthetic force. And that’s what this book is about. It’s really about how visual tactics have really long secured this false idea of racial hierarchy in spite of the truth being right in front of us. And the book offers a really powerful way to start dismantling the mythology that I think we’ve all been leading into.

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BB: Before we jump into the book, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Sarah Lewis. She’s the founder of Vision and Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She’s the author of The Unseen Truth, the book we’re going to talk about, the bestseller, The Rise. I love the subtitle for The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. And she’s the author of the forthcoming book, Vision and Justice. She is the editor of the award-winning volumes, Vision and Justice by Aperture Magazine and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems. She is the organizer of the Landmark Vision and Justice convening at Harvard and co-editor of the Vision and Justice book series launched in partnership with Aperture. Her full bio is much longer, and it’ll be on the podcast page on brenebrown.com. I’m grateful for Sarah, this stunning book, this conversation. Let’s jump in.

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BB: Dr. Sarah Lewis. Hello friend.

Sarah Lewis: Oh, my friend, Brené Brown. I’m so thrilled to be with you.

BB: I faced a serious dilemma getting ready for this podcast.

SL: Uh-oh.

BB: I really did. And I’ll tell you why. The Unseen Truth, your new book that we’re going to talk about.

SL: Mm-hmm.

BB: Has left me at the intersection of speechless, shocked, enraged, and grief.

SL: Hmm. Can you tell me why?

BB: I’ll start where it’s easiest in the cognitive piece where it’s just such a brilliant piece of scholarship. It’s such a… Maybe the most important history book I’ve ever read, and I am still processing. It’s such a bomb dropper. I know this is like a weird thing because people are like, “Say more, say more.” Before we get into it, I want to set a table for folks who haven’t had the privilege of knowing you or meeting you yet. And we had just an incredible conversation about your book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.

SL: Yes.

BB: Like our first date. Yeah.

[laughter]

SL: Great first date. We’re on our second or third.

BB: Yeah, we’re on our second or third. Yeah, we’re moving right along. I want to back up to that and, and I want to back up to The Rise, that book.

SL: Yes.

BB: And I want to set a table first about what you’ve changed forever in me. Because that’s how I went into The Unseen Truth. And so right now I’m working on a project where I am looking at 20 to 30 lessons over the last decade that have forever changed how I think about myself and my work.

SL: Wow. Beautiful.

BB: And you are in that very short list.

SL: Oh my goodness.

BB: And what I’ve learned from you about aesthetic force.

SL: Hmm. The power of culture to change our perceptions of the world orienting towards justice. Yes.

BB: Say it again.

SL: The power of culture to change our perceptions of the world and orient them towards justice.

BB: Your work on aesthetic force, gave language to what I know is true and had me think about things much more deeply. There’s a quote from you that I think about all the time. How many movements began when an aesthetic encounter indelibly changed our inherited perceptions of the world. Tell me what you mean by aesthetic encounter.

SL: So there are encounters with works of art of all kinds, music, performance, visual culture. And by movements, I’m thinking about justice movements of all kinds.

BB: So going back to this quote, “How many movements began when an aesthetic encounter, a moment of interchange with art, indelibly changes perceptions that we have inherited about the world.” What does that mean to you?

SL: You’ve gotten to the heart of what animates all of my work, thinking about researching, and writing about the force, often hidden underestimated, of culture, broadly defined, art, music, performance, for doing the work we often attribute to politics and law. Often culture gets us to see what we don’t know we don’t know, about ourselves, about each other and that chapter in The Rise looks at moments in which we begin the movements we associate with law and politics. And we see how they actually began on stages and on museum walls and in encounters with works of art often, that simply transform what you think is possible. I found that there was this way to salute the extraordinary power of culture in ways that could help us understand how we got here. And what really created the movements, the justice movements, that we are often part of now.

SL: So it’s a salute to the artists, to the leaders, but it’s really very much so, a call for us to consider the power of vision and seeing and perception as one of the critical tools that we have for political work. And this is an idea that Frederick Douglass really launched, through his long-forgotten speech, which he held dear, he delivers it during the Civil War, about the importance of what would’ve seemed like a trifle at the time. Pictures, many pictures, no? For American progress. And you can imagine how stunned the audience was. Right? It’s as an orator whose opinion was valued by Abraham Lincoln, who is known as a masterful leader, who often would focus on force and combat.

BB: Do you think we’d be talking about aesthetic force without Frederick Douglass?

SL: We would not. Frederick Douglass begins the idea on American soil and he’s the headwaters for of all of our discussions about the function of art and culture for politics and progress. It begins with him.

BB: There’s something I read about you in the Harvard Crimson and… She’s smiling like, “What’s coming?” [laughter] If you could see her right now, she’s got an anticipatory look on her face.

SL: What have the students said about me?

BB: There was just a line that I loved that said, she describes herself as, “A woman who takes seriously a mission put on her life to understand what we have failed to see.”

SL: Thank you, Crimson Reporter.

BB: Whoa. I have no question after reading The Unseen Truth that a mission has been put on your life.

SL: Well, it took an extraordinary amount of courage for me to write The Unseen Truth. In fact, this is one of my first conversations about it. A book that took 10 years to complete. It’s a book that really helps us, I hope, to think through how the fictions underneath so many of the categories we take to be fact, actually, are blocking our ability to see each other accurately. It took courage to write it because it tackles I think one of the greatest lies in American life, that there’s any basis to the hierarchy of humankind that we live with, that is this racialized world of American society, that puts white Americans on the top, right?

BB: Right.

SL: And everyone else below. And this book looks at the evidence, the moment when we really could have turned a page and called a fiction a fiction about the idea of racial whiteness and racial domination and hierarchy. But we didn’t. And the shock and surprise I had when I encountered so much of this material, the earthquake, I think it would set off if I unleashed it as a book, I thought would both live out the mission. It would allow for us to better understand what we’re failing to see about our society but would also cost me something to do. And it cost me a level of kind of time that isn’t always required for even research of this kind.

BB: So let me start here. The vision and justice work that you do, it’s an initiative that includes original research curricula. And it really examines the foundational role that visual culture plays in generating equity and justice in America. I mean, I’m starting to see a theme here.

[laughter]

SL: There is a theme.

BB: Like, what we see and what’s left unseen shapes everything we believe about ourselves and other people.

SL: Mm-hmm. Exactly. We have this understanding, just casually, that we can’t become what we can’t see. Right? But in fact, the depth of that fact is not fully understood as it relates to political life of all kind and race as well. So the theme that runs throughout all of the books, Vision and Justice, The Rise, The Unseen Truth, is really taking seriously the power of vision, on all levels in our lives, yeah.

BB: Yeah. What was the first aesthetic encounter that made you think this mission had been placed upon you?

SL: All right. Well, there is a moment. I was in the archive, I was… This maybe over 10 years ago now, and I came across an image that stopped me in my tracks. And it was a photograph of what was at the time in the 1860s, one of the most popular performers in American life.

BB: Oh God.

SL: And I was struck. It was a woman who seemed to look as if she was white, but she had this massive afro. And I was just stunned by who she was and what she represented. She was billed as a woman who represented the purity of the white race from the Caucasus region, a Circassian beauty. And she was staged by the famous impresario…

BB: Oh God.

SL: P. T. Barnum. I mean, P. T. Barnum invented the notion of fame. He was the most famous man in the 19th century. There he was with this performance, and I thought, “Why is this making him this much money? Why do people care about this performance? And why was it so widely circulated? Photographs associated with it?”

BB: So not only did I see the pictures in your book, I went down this incredible Google rabbit hole.

SL: You did?

BB: Are we saying Circassian beauties, right? Is that the term?

SL: Yes.

BB: Okay. Place in a historical frame for me, will you? What’s happening at the same time… This was the other rabbit hole that I went down.

SL: Okay.

BB: The German head guy.

SL: So you’re asking me about Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, this famed naturalist who really begins the classification system we still kind of live with. He writes this thesis, 1795, and he inaugurates the term Caucasian for whiteness through it, creates a fivefold classification system. And he uses so-called data at the time to substantiate the idea. Things that we would laugh at today as fact, right? The so-called beauty of the women in the Caucasus region because a jeweler at the court of Louis XIV states that, in his travel narratives around the world, John Chardin, he lists the biblical lore about the region. It’s where Noah’s Ark apparently comes to rest. And but the final reason is to do with the symmetry of the skulls. And he’s given this skull by Samuel Morton, who is collecting them as a way to create a kind of seemingly data to justify the idea that there’s a hierarchy of human races.

SL: And this term gets launched and it’s amplified by some of the most famed writers of the day. You know, Lord Byron and Pushkin and many others, Alexandre Dumas. So there’s a lot of lore around the Caucasian idea and the Orientalism, too, traffics in it. The women are highly valued and are sold for effectively the most on the market, Circassian women. So we have him to thank for this confusion [laughter] really. And that’s the man you’re asking about Blumenbach, natural scientist, summoned for this work. It’s why we use the term Caucasian for whiteness, because that was the seemingly scientific evidence that there was a basis for the idea of racial whiteness and also white racial supremacy. The rationale for that selection of that area of the world though, in the 19th century, is revealed as a fiction.

SL: It’s revealed as having no basis at all. So during the Civil War, there was something happening alongside it that Barnum knew about, that all Americans knew about, the Caucasian War. And this takes place across the Black Sea, and it’s widely followed.

BB: It’s with Russia.

SL: With Russia. Yes. So Russia’s just trying to invade this region of the Caucusus to gain access to the Black Sea, so the Ottoman Empire would not. And the popularity of that war with its parallels to the Civil War, associations with slavery and the leader of the resistance, is often compared to the leader of the Confederacy. People followed it and understood through it that they had been sold a bill of goods. They were not in fact being told the truth about the region. It’s reported on and seen as effectively anything but white. It’s revealed to be anything but white. And that fact rattles Americans, and P. T. Barnum puts on stage a woman who clearly does not represent an idea of whiteness that they’ve been told exists there.

SL: What those photographs answer is the question about whether anyone questioned it at all, right? The photographs show that P. T. Barnum was making his money because he was able to really capitalize on the nervousness about whether there was really any basis for this racial regime. Americans are trying to really solve for the nervousness at the heart of the racial project, and they’re trying to shore up the racial regime that we still live with today. But what the visual culture surrounding it shows is that they were never able to really do so, and instead just covered up the fictions about race that makes it so difficult to dislodge.

BB: It’s a weird moment in someone’s life when you read that you’re not who you think you are. I’m not going to lie, I’m going to say that the book is disorienting. You love that about it, don’t you?

SL: Well, you know why I’m smiling? I think that we’ve all been so disoriented by race that it requires an experience of another kind of disorientation to get to the truth. So that’s why I’m glad and gratified. [laughter] I mean, I was disoriented writing it. That’s what forced me to continue. I thought, I’ve got to make my way out of this maze.

BB: There was a part of me, the not intellectual part, but the curious part and the emotional part, that I did the deep dive on the Circassian beauties, asking myself, “Are these my people?”

SL: I mean, I had to go to the Caucasus region myself, and I’m not…

BB: No.

SL: Identified as Caucasian. In order to figure this out… Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Right before the pandemic, I went to the Caucasus region to finish The Unseen Truth and learn there that people in the Caucasus region who are the actual Caucasians, by and large know nothing about how we use the term here to signify racial whiteness. So, I went there with Nell Painter, the historian, in 2019, through the invitation and organizational work of this group of actual Caucasians who live in the United States and New Jersey. And they asked me if I wanted to explore the Caucasian diaspora, which spans around the world. And so, I went to Georgia, Istanbul, and the heart of Abkhazia, and went to this Caucasian conference. And really, the fundamental question I had the whole time is, “Do you know anything about the relationship between this geography of the world and the racial regime of the United States?” And when those who I interviewed did know about it, it was always from American culture.

SL: It was, I went to a study abroad program, and I met someone who treated me like a god because I was from the Caucasus region, and it turned out this person was actually a white supremacist. And it was coming to the United States and going to a doctor’s office being asked to fill out a form and seeing Caucasian and ticking that one because of the association.

BB: My people are represented here on this form. This is amazing and so random.

SL: Yeah, exactly. And, but they… The group that I met with learned about my research in part because they were thrilled to see someone finally come in and create a cleavage between the actual history of the Caucasus and the genocide that took place through the Caucasian War and the racial regime that was instantiated through scientific racism in the United States. So it was a shock for me to meet them, but I’m so thrilled that I did. And yeah, there you have it.

BB: I want to play back what I think I understand, and then I would love for you to set me straight.

SL: I don’t think you need to be set straight, but okay.

BB: Well, I kept asking myself when I was reading this, “Is this a wild exercise in confirmation bias to secure a truth of physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual superiority?” Is that what’s happening here?

SL: It is an attempt to shore up that. Exactly. Yep.

BB: How… This is where I get so overwhelmed. I feel like I’m in class. It’s like, this is my best feeling ever. But for those of y’all on the ride with us, just strap yourselves in, buy the book, read along. Is it… I mean, this is… I don’t know how to phrase this. Like, is this quest for false confirmation of what is not true so widespread and pervasive that it seems, as I’m reading this book, that it’s happening with multiple people in multiple places to develop a fabric of a big, fat, racist lie?

SL: Yeah. I mean, part of, I think… The relief that happened for me when I began to research and write the book was to understand that the confusion about race, despite its force and prevalence in our life, is not about culprits so much as it is culture, received culture, conditioned culture. And so much of it is based on fiction that we do have to struggle every day to actually see what’s in front of us clearly. You’re conditioned to see things that are not true as true because of the organizing force of race.

SL: We’re all living with the sort of stench air of fictions that have become fact. We often think that we can change how we see race through images and cultures and laws and norms, but in fact, the real argument of the book is that race so fundamentally changed how we see, that it’s as difficult to grasp as air itself, right? So, this book looks at an example when you can begin to see how people were trying to sort out how their vision had shifted so much and were bewildered by the fact that it had.

SL: And it just so happens that it’s to do with this forgotten moment in history, the Caucasian War, the Civil War, but it extends really to the current day. It’s something people know as historians about American life, about the Caucasian ideal is insignificant in effect to how we see race today because we have other terms that we came to use, Aryan, Nordic. But really, what the book examines is how the foundation of that fiction created a regime to cover it up, whether it’s the sort of censorship that we’re still living with today, which was strategic earlier on to eliminate those fictions, censorship of curriculum, for example, or kind of racial detailing to just cohere a sense of fact about white racial domination. And this is why it felt important to write, that we must address this fiction if we’re really to see each other clearly. I also found relief in it because I felt as if it was another way to express love for American democracy, in the country, without needing to lie about it, like to be able to say “This has just happened to all of us and let’s….” We have the capacity to eliminate these fictions if we’d like and move forward.

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BB: I was struck and overwhelmed by the relevance of this work on things I saw on the debate stage.

SL: Oh, tell me. Oh, I want to know.

BB: No, I mean, like you can dismiss this as a long time ago at your own peril.

SL: That’s right. That’s exactly it.

BB: Well, I mean, it was actually, having read the book, pretty clear. Here you have an absolutely qualified Black woman sharing a stage with a person who’s absolutely not qualified, but who has convinced himself and others that simply due to the superiority of his whiteness and his gender, he deserves to be there. And if you’re thinking, “Hey, you don’t know that he believes this thing about his superiority.” Of course I do. His belief about his racial and gender superiority is not arguable. He openly leverages it to gain support from a group of voters who were violently holding on to a history that never existed. I mean, many of us know that that false history was curated, insidious, and self-serving to those in power. But when you go back to the origin of that story and dismantle it piece by piece, like you’ve done, it’s just breathtaking to understand how it happened. And then to apply the lens you give us to see it unfolding today.

SL: That’s right.

BB: And so it’s not like a 30-mile hike through the desert from this book to the debate. It’s a primer on what happened.

SL: That’s right. Exactly. Exactly. It exposes and offers the connective tissue between that moment and today. I mean, the way in which I think we can see just even the lessons about white racial supremacy just naturalized in textbooks, teaching.

BB: Codified. Right?

SL: Yeah. This is how you talk about it. This is how we’re going to frame whiteness. All of it’s propaganda, right? Because, I mean, you have to find a way to convince people that a fiction is true. And this is so much of what we have forgotten we did. And that’s what allows for the debate stage to look the way that it does today, in effect, between our two candidates.

BB: You can’t make sense of it, and you don’t understand the depth and pervasiveness of it without understanding the unseen and the seen in history. Like, I just kept reading. I mean, a million things came to my mind when I was reading. The controversy of the bell curve. I mean, the modern day P. T. Barnums.

SL: There’s so many moments, and the book could have been, you know, 200 books, to connect the history to the current day. I think part of what we have failed to see in American life is that we can’t have a conversation about race without actually examining the facts that got us here. And we oftentimes don’t even know where to go looking for those facts.

BB: I’m trying to find… I wrote down one of my favorite people, Clint Smith. I’ll say two good things about him and one bad thing about Clint Smith. The good things are he’s an amazing poet, an amazing scholar, I believe he’s an Arsenal fan, but we’ll forgive him for that.

[laughter]

SL: Okay. I didn’t know that.

BB: Yeah. But I want to read what he wrote, because I was so interested in the endorsements on the book. “In The Unseen Truth, it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear. Every chapter is suffused with revelations that expand and clarify our understanding of the past. This book has changed the way I look at history. It’s changed the way I observe the world. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”

SL: Yeah, I’m so grateful to him.

BB: I read that and then I will tell you the first question that came to my mind.

SL: Tell me.

BB: Is I wonder if it’s going to give me an indispensable resource as a white person? As the worst and best of the middle-aged white women, I wonder if it’s going to give me that. And I was like, man, chapter one, I’m changing my identity. Chapter two, I’m not related to these folks. I can tell from here.

SL: I love it. I love it. [laughter]

BB: You are the first podcast guest of many hundreds that has me refusing to check a box on my doctor’s list moving forward. I am not of that place. I am super clear about why everybody thinks so, and I’m not signing on to it anymore.

SL: No. My apologies to everyone else who might feel the same way. All the forms that we have to create anew. [laughter]

BB: I mean, I love it because that’s the codification of… I don’t know, I’m sure you have a poetic way to say the codification of bullshit, but like that…

SL: Sounds good to me. [laughter]

BB: Okay. [laughter]

SL: I mean, yeah, yeah. And it makes it so easy to not think. If you just have a form, it’s really it. Administration is not a neutral action, right? It allows you to take action without thinking about it.

BB: I looked over at my husband at some point when I was reading about the Woodrow Wilson piece and said, “Man, when they say red tape, they might be talking about blood.” Like bureaucracy is a weapon.

SL: That’s indeed it. That is it. Woodrow Wilson was very clear about not wanting to explicitly confirm that segregation was happening. But really when you see through the lives of those who I chronicle in the book who were working for Woodrow Wilson, some of the early first Black federal clerks, right? And you understand how so-called neutral administration ultimately blunted and cut off opportunity in their lives because administration really became the surreptitious way to enact racism in political life in the period of deep segregation. You start to see the work of so-called bureaucracy anew.

BB: What masked Wilson’s blunt views and what made the intention to segregate the federal government so hard to prove was that the language of rational management and mechanical efficiency both obscured a direct discussion of racial conflict and politics and became the means to create racial discourse via proxy couched in oblique terms.

SL: Exactly. Exactly.

BB: Wait. Rational management and mechanical efficiency.

SL: There we go. Yeah. I mean, it gets us all the way to the current day monument debates. You know, why are we speaking about things that don’t seem to get to the heart of the matter, public statues? There are ways that we signal as a kind of sonar throughout the environment, who counts and who belongs. And we’re looking at the roots of it, right? And what you just read in Wilson’s administration, that’s the beginning of the launch of confederate monuments on courthouse lawns, right? And lines of sight where people go to understand the regime of a state or of an era. It’s all done through oblique angles because ultimately the central question in American life is how we tell the story of who we are.

SL: So much of the tension of the foundation is unspeakable between slavery and freedom, in effect. And that unspeakable quality, it gets translated into creating a bureaucratic regime in the federal administration that functions through oblique angles and through the deliberately withheld, through the deliberate indifference and through the use of signs and symbols and visual culture as a way to state what can’t be written down. So, this regime and Wilson’s administration isn’t something to simply be left into a discussion about history itself. It’s really to look at the origins of much of what we deal with today that’s unsaid, but that’s acted upon. Racial detailing in Wilson’s regime is the beginning of racial profiling, for example.

SL: You’re able to make a declaration and codify a regime about racial belonging without an outright decree. Racial profiling is the same thing. I don’t know. We just happen to stop these folks. So, this is one of the reasons that the historical deep dive was important. It allows us to see that it’s not about culprits, but it really is culture and conditioning.

BB: Yes.

SL: That’s gotten us to this moment.

BB: Culture and conditioning, you know. And source code.

SL: Yes, source code. I love that. Yes, this is the source code.

BB: This is the source code.

SL: Yeah, yeah. We don’t often get the chance to go back to the source code, and I don’t think that we can go forward without doing so, you know?

BB: No, I’m telling you, you go forward at your own peril without understanding the history and the source code. Like, you can’t… Because one thing that I think is dangerous that we do today is we don’t go far enough back to find the source code.

SL: Yes, exactly. And that’s why… You know, you asked me about Blumenbach, 1795. That’s why I felt committed to go far back, because without it, it’s bewildering, as you say, to just, yeah, you arrive and you think, “How did we possibly get here?” There is a foundation. There is a source to all of this. You can access it in the archive. The issue, though, becomes, why isn’t it accessible? And then you realize, oh, okay, there was a mission to cover up this history, and it took place through things that seem to be neutral, like classification systems and libraries. Like, why is it that I can’t find anything about the Caucasian ideal and how it was taught to every student in America in the 19th century on maps and atlases, which was a required class? Oh, okay, they changed the classification system. All of a sudden, that history, I now have to access manually, basically. I have to dig into the archive, know what I’m looking for, go through every single map and atlas, which I did at the New York Public Library.

SL: You know, it requires that sort of labor. So, it’s at your own peril, but it’s also, I think, on the backs of those who are willing to do it. My hope is that it creates a foundation for others to continue some of that spadework that seems deeply unglamorous, right, but is, I think, really necessary to maintain the political fire we need to arrive at a point of racial justice, perhaps, not in this generation, but the generations to come.

BB: You know, the source code’s important when they make it really hard to find.

SL: Exactly. Oh, my God. [laughter]

SL: Oh my God. And things that were once accessible to me, I learned were inaccessible as soon as they realized the topic and the title of the book, so that was really how I knew. Thanks to my research assistants who have faces that don’t look like mine and names that might not, well, at least departmental affiliations that aren’t African and African American studies at Harvard and were able to get me what I needed. And in places that you wouldn’t expect, I think there’s an aspect to this project for me that felt as if I was looking at a possibility of taking a thread out of this tapestry we’ve all used and some have used to keep warm to feel good about their racial identity, white racial identity, but inevitably once pulled, reveals that the whole weaving is unstable and it was about to come undone anyway, so why not just tug at it and start again?

SL: So every piece of evidence, every chapter was a kind of thread like that. Oh, okay. You just take a quick look at the 19th century maps and atlases circulating and you realize all these fictions about white racial supremacy that were being passed off as just fact about the world. [laughter] This is just… This can’t stand, this can’t stand. And that instability is always underneath our feet. And it’s why I think racism can be so deadly because in fact it’s not based on anything at all. It’s forcing us to contend with something that’s not real.

BB: God. Yeah. When you push against it, it’s like pushing against air.

SL: Exactly. Exactly. Which is why it has to be so firm, right? Because once you do that, you realize, oh, this is all a house of cards, all of this, all of this. There’s no basis for any of this.

BB: Wow. What we’ll do to prove that we are better than other people when we are in fear about our own pain. Pain not caused by those people, but pain caused by being alive in a hard and beautiful world. Like, what we will do is beyond my comprehension sometimes.

SL: Yeah. Ah, so I so enjoy your mind and your heart [laughter] and the clarity of your worth.

BB: It’s a strange place.

SL: No. It’s a gorgeous place, and I’m smiling because for 10 years I’ve been told by my dear friends, “Sarah, this book is going to perhaps put you in the witness protection program.” [laughter] Because of how much it really has pulled back the curtain on topics that aren’t often discussed. But I now see, and I’m really relieved to feel that it in fact is more likely, I think, to kind of start a revolution within people to see the world clearly.

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BB: I went on so many research rabbit… I mean, you know, the research rabbit hole. Like, you know, I read three things and I’m like, “I want to know what that looks like. I want to know where that is.” And then I got Google maps and then I was like, “There’s got to be a better way to the Black Sea for the Russians.” And then… You know?

SL: Heck yeah. I love it.

BB: Yeah. And you know what I appreciate about you the most, your unflinching willingness to tell the truth and never back away from what’s hard and never also… while simultaneously, and I don’t know how you do it. I’m not there yet with your book… find something beautiful in people.

SL: Oh my god, thank you. That description makes me think of the power of the miracle that took place in my life. We all have miracles in our lives. I had the force of this near death car collision create one in me, that I spoke about publicly for the first time with you years ago in our first conversation. And that experience is what I think intensified my commitment to tell the truth. It was… When you crawl out of a burning car to save your own life, you think very differently about the life you’re living. And everything has to be worth that effort, right? To have confronted, the end. So I do live life, as everyone else, with the common sort of fears we have, but I really do my best to be unafraid. I think of that moment often with compassion for myself to say, “Sarah, if you could do that, why are you afraid of saying the truth on the page?” And I saw this book in that collision I had that white light experience that often people describe with near death experience. And felt very much that this was somehow for, I’m not sure what reasons, meant to come through me. But when I healed enough to get back to writing this book, that I had been writing for over 10 years, I added a kind of fire to it, and a level of clarity that I hoped could best convey the truths at the heart of its message.

BB: What is your hope for those of us who walked through those pages with you? And had to put it down and walk away, and had to intellectualize when it got emotionally too hard. For the Clint Smiths who have this new pair of glasses. What’s your hope?

SL: My main hope is that we summon the will to do away with the fictions that prevent us from being not just our best selves, our true selves, but the society that in fact we are destined, I think, to create. The book asks though, to summon that will, after going through a process of really reeducating yourself, deconditioning yourself, from any understanding you might have had about whiteness, about race, about why we’re in this quandary in the first place. It is an invitation to come back to class and to remember that we’re all students in this. And it’s a reminder that the very… The idea that race is a fiction, that racism is real, Wesley Lowery’s quote, is true. But to not understand how it was constructed, I think prevents us from being able to dismantle the effects of racism on our lives. My hope is that the book functions as a guide through this labyrinth and maze and gives us also more compassion for ourselves and for each other.

SL: Because we have all been, I think in effect, we’ve been fooled by who we thought we were. It wasn’t done by one man, one woman, one figure, one leader. It’s not done by one political party or another. It was done through work in culture long ago that we never questioned. And if we did, never got enough force to get off the ground. But we have that will to be able to change the narratives about who counts and who belongs in the American life. And my hope is that this book gives us the ammunition and the clarity to understand that if we don’t, we are creating and perpetuating the problem. Yeah. So those are many of my hopes.

BB: The challenge I issued myself as I was reading a couple times was we have been fooled and we have participated to some degree in the fooling. There’s an equation around power, around when you choose to believe and you know better.

SL: That’s right.

BB: And I think it’s very interesting how today in culture what we see is efforts being made to go after the historians. To go after the people that are pulling back the curtains on the visuals that were not true and the visuals we missed that were true. Because there were some beautiful photos in this book. I’ll never not be moved really by… What do you call the photos that have the, I don’t know how to say it, daguerreotype.

SL: Oh yeah, the daguerreotype, yeah.

BB: Yeah. Of Frederick Douglass.

SL: The most photographed American man in the 19th century. Frederick Douglass. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He is.

BB: I mean, isn’t that amazing?

SL: Mm-Hmm. He understood the power of that image to change our understanding of race and dignity and human life.

BB: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Dignity. Wow. I mean, you just look at it, you just… I don’t know, it feels royal. Like you want to bow or something. You want to…

SL: Absolutely.

BB: You want to… [laughter] You want to do something like… [laughter] If you met the Pope or something.

SL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BB: And you knew it was warranted when it’s like… Yeah.

SL: Exactly. No, this man, yeah… You have to understand how you’re fashioned in the world. And he understood how he was fashioned and why, I think, there was that attraction to his figure, his very being. He also knew how handsome he was from it, as we understand it, [laughter] it’s very clear.

BB: Well. He, he nailed that part. Yeah.

SL: Exactly. So, and he used it as a political tool and we owe…

BB: Aesthetic force.

SL: That’s right.

BB: Dr. Sarah Lewis. The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. So grateful for your… The mission that’s put on you, the tenacity. It a hard mission to bear, and we are incredibly better for it.

SL: Thank you.

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BB: Okay. What’d y’all think? Do you see what I mean about disorienting? It’s all you never believed was true, but then a complete dismantling of the source code. I just… I’m so grateful for her work and I’m grateful for the mission that’s been put on her as she says. It’s a hard mission to bear and we are grateful for it and we’re better for it. You can learn more about this episode along with all the show notes on brenebrown.com. We’ll link to Sarah’s new book, The Unseen Truth. We will have transcripts for you within three to five days of the episode going live. There’s also an opportunity to sign up for our newsletter on the episode page. It’s kind of special content for just newsletter recipients. Some fun stuff, kind of what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, thoughts on what’s going on in the world, we don’t push out too much. So if you’re like me, a newsletter a couple times a month is, that’s plenty of news. Alright. Stay awkward, brave, and kind. I’ll see you next time.

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BB: Unlocking Us is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group. The music is by Carrie Rodriguez and Gina Chavez. Get new episodes as soon as they’re published by following Unlocking Us on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media podcast network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcasts.voxmedia.com.

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