Clint Smith reckons with America's racial history in necessary 'How the Word Is Passed'

Many Americans take cold comfort in a sort of historical vacuum, where what happened yesterday should somehow have no bearing on what happens today. Entire states, making a big, bad boogeyman out of “critical race theory,” are insisting that school lesson plans downplay the role of racism and slavery in teaching history.

“The Past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.” “It’s not even past.” This wisdom could work as the credo for Clint Smith’s new book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America” (Little, Brown and Company, 352 pp., ★★★1/2 out of four). By traveling to former plantations, cemeteries and beach communities and dealing with Confederate monuments, prison conditions and Lost Cause nostalgia, Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic, aims to show how what happened scarcely over 150 years ago can’t help but cast a shadow on what’s going on now, especially not when for the price of a bus ticket you can be taken back to the scenes of the crime. 

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