L. Danyetta Najoli, co-founder of The Black American Tree Project, explains how the project’s immersive story-telling design evokes a sense of reckoning with slavery’s origins. Dr. Jack Tchen, the Inaugural Clement A. Price Professor of Public History and the Humanities and Director of the Price Institute at Rutgers University, takes a deep dive into histories of dispossession.
Learn more about The Black American Tree Project and Ohio Humanities, which supported the project through a grant.
Explore Dr. Jack Tchen’s public history project, Dismantling Eugenics, watch his NYU Skirball “Paradigm Shifter” interview, and take a dive into “Hacking the University: Reckoning with Racial Equity, Climate Justice, and Global Warming.”
Read more about this episode’s topic and guests at our website.
Sydney Boyd: Hello and welcome to Making Meaning, a podcast that explores how and why the humanities are an essential part of our everyday lives. In this series, we hear stories from our nation's humanities, councils, and leaders across the greater United States about the role the humanities have played during the pandemic and are playing in our recovery.
I'm Sydney Boyd from the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Today, I'm thinking about how the stories we tell about lived experiences, past and present, can confront how racism operates at structural, institutional and personal levels.
COVID-19 is not the only pandemic that Americans have had to face recently. Since 2019, hate crimes are up 40% targeting black Americans, and 70% targeting people of Asian descent, according to the FBI. There's a lot to learn behind those numbers, but a part of it has to do with empathy. How do we stand in someone else's experience and history to see the whole picture and our role in it? That's why I was interested to hear about a program that teaches people about the legacies of racism through an immersive experience.
Participants assume different roles and work with a facilitator in a 90 minute interactive workshop designed to evoke a sense of reckoning with slavery's origins. It's called the Black American Tree Project and was and Ohio Humanities grant recipient.
I spoke with Danyetta Najoli, who co-founded the project with Freda Epum in 2019. Since then, they've run the program in 10 different states, several countries, and with people from first nations lands. The experience starts with a tree.
Danyetta Najoli:
We actually use a tree to represent the black family and its lushness and wholeness in pre-colonial Africa, actually, what that looked like. And we have the Black American focused person standing with a family member on each of the branches and in the physical presentation of this, they are connected with a piece of yarn that they're holding.
Surrounded around the tree are institutional forces. So there are about 10 institutional forces that are all those different categories, like the medical industrial complex or society at large or education. So there are people that are seated around this tree and they have a pair of scissors near them so when they read their script to justify the subjugation, they also take the scissors and cut the tie between the Black American focused person and the family member, and then they escort that focus person to the edge of society.
So each time a vignette is read, a person is severed from their family and moved to the edge of society, and then you begin to see the visual progression of a fragmented tree which depicts a fragmented family. And then you show the edge of society, which becomes more populated by people that have been broken from their family for various reasons. And it literally kind of shows a colony within a nation. So now you have this new group of people that have been severed from society.
Boyd: I know that a key part of this process is scripted dialogues and narrations. You have different roles for institutions that have led to the devaluation of Black Americans, like a real estate agent. Also roles for those affected by structural forces, like a homeowner. I'd love to hear a little more about the role scripts play in the experience.
Najoli: We wanted to have a visceral impact that cuts to the core of a person and helps them to recognize their own ability to affect positive social change in majority white spaces. But we also wanted Black Americans to feel a sense of truly being heard and seen in a country where there's not a singular collective and structural effort to make amends from the brutality and negative generational impact of American slavery. And so with the roles, we try to look at each main role, each institutional force, and try to empathize from the Black American focused person's perspective, from the family perspective because again, when they're severed, what happens with the family? There's a hole there.
And then the justifier. The justifier has a bit to say about justifying their position. So from American slavery, there's justification there around bringing people here to basically make the country. And then there's also education. We show what happens there in education. Even in home ownership, we look at that as well. Just trying to give a peek into a compilation of a person, because we're not taking a specific story and saying, okay, this is what happened. Like for instance, with Emmett Till traveling to the south and being lied on.
We're not putting that because we feel like those stories you can get from different historical places, but we wanted to have a compilation that showed what could have happened to a particular person. And we also recognize that the fact of the matter is in many cases, people have experienced multiple of these subjugation so that we are breaking them out into vignettes simply helps to illuminate them, but that doesn't mean that a person could not have experienced generational trauma through slavery and then on to education then on to housing and then the police system. That brings on its own set of compounding issues.
Boyd: It sounds like you're taking empathy to this whole new level in your work.
Najoli: We really were looking at empathy as a main driver. We knew that a lot of times, if you're not proximate to the issue or proximate to the problem, of any problem, but specifically with this, it is hard to empathize. And so one of the reasons that we have scripts is so that people are reading out of their mouths that they are the person in that moment, and it does something. Even people who have been in this work, they have come through this project and they have said that it's really another level of learning and another level of feeling that they hadn't experienced before. It confronts the issue, but it also personalizes it for each individual that experiences it, because they can walk away feeling a certain way and do something in their own sphere of influence that they may not have done before.
Boyd: Do you see any challenges standing in the way of the project as it develops?
Najoli: From a standpoint of sustainability, currently we have the Ohio Humanities grant that allows us to continue this work while we're working in our non-profits. We are also actively applying for other grants, but I think the other challenge is people knowing more about it, and then also people aligning with the concept of what we're doing. Because obviously, to me, there's still a great chasm of division in the country and people are in different spaces, but we invite people to join us and to iterate with us and to grow and learn with us. That's how we position ourselves.
Boyd: Yeah. I mean, the kind of work that you're doing takes time, and I hope to come to a session, but I also understand that until I do that, I won't fully understand what it is to be in this, and that's the power of the immersive quality of what you're doing here. But it does take time, because people have to go through it.
Najoli: Exactly. They have to go through it. And like you said, the time, which can prove to be a challenge for most people, because we want people to pause from the business of the day, and that's a big ask for many people. We hope that people will find the project to be worthy to stop for a minute and port into this experience and tell us what they think about it too, and how it impacted them.
Boyd: Helping people confront these painful histories... Painful histories are difficult to deal with, and this is really important work.
Najoli: I look at what our country is dealing with really as... I look at America really as a person and a body. And when you think about it, any body that has any level of maybe dysfunction or discomfort, it takes that person, that body to say, okay, let me come to grips with this. Let me at least be open. Because if not, then the dysfunction will still be there.
Boyd: Dysfunction has deep roots, so I turned to someone who studies just that, deep history. Dr. Jack Tchen is the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities, and Director of the Price Institute at Rutgers University.
I remember sitting down and devouring Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, a book he coauthored about the centuries old origins of pervasive stereotypes about Asian people. And that was only scratching the surface of what he's been working on lately, like the histories of dispossession and enslavement around New York Harbor.
Dr. Jack Tchen:
My current work is really looking at the origins of that port to begin with. How it becomes a colonial trading port, why it becomes that, but more importantly, the earlier preconditions of enslavement that built the wealth of the region and also the dispossession of indigenous peoples.
So I've become really quite obsessed about that. And for me, coming to terms with those questions about the relationships to the land, which from a native indigenous point of view is not strictly about the soil, but about the relationships to really all living things. Land, the waters, the beavers, the beaver pelts, the great forest that became the mast for European colonial ships, for example. All that land and the relationship to the land is something that I certainly have never understood. And I focus so much on commodities and goods and the wealth that emerged out of trade, and then of course, how very large tracks of that land get basically taken, and really, out of very corrupt deals where favors are given.
So half a million acres, for example, go to the Elizabeth Patent. Unbelievable. Half a million acres. And also, the Barbados Plantation, which is really around Hackensack. Those sites of these large transfers of land become the sites in which enslaved Africans get put to work. So there's that intimate relationship that we historians have really not quite dealt with. And for me, these are very compelling issues that we have to understand in relationship to our current lack of responsiveness to global warming.
Boyd: Jack's work with eco-justice, anti-colonialism and reconstruction efforts of indigenous communities, is personal. His parents and older sister took a steam ship from Hong Kong to Seattle in 1950. A year later, Jack was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He was the first U.S. citizen in his family.
As a kid, he remembers that navigating stereotypes about Asian people was just a part of his everyday life. Later, he started uncovering histories of people and ideas outside of what his textbooks included.
Tchen: Peter Fitzpatrick talked about the founding myth of the west is that there are no myths, and that somehow it's all rational, it's all about legal structures and about the rule of law. But if we look into this earlier period, we know that that's really a story that we tell ourselves. So in some ways I think these questions of founding myths of, well, why is it that there's discrimination against these people? Well, it's something wrong with those people, right? That would've been said of Chinese. That was also said, of course, of indigenous peoples, that they weren't really good, independent Western minded farmers who were capable of owning the land as citizens.
Those kinds of political and economic philosophies were really part of the founding mythologies of this nation in various ways and the judgments waged on those who were other than the Puritan Protestants and the values that they brought with English political philosophy as well.
These myths get in the way of our ability to actually understand what happened, and there're convenient stories like the purchase of Manhattan and what were the original ecological relationships in the region, and how did humans as the colonists begin to disrupt those kinds of relationships that indigenous people had cultivated for thousands of years? So those kinds of fundamental questions are ones we're asking now, but not ones that those mythological origin stories invite us to engage with. And we have to now create new stories. I think that's the challenge.
Boyd: Jack faced this kind of historical reckoning in his own family. When his parents immigrated, they had come on a visitor's Visa and wanted to find a way to stay. But in 1950, the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in effect. The law only allowed a quota of 105 Chinese people per year, and that quota had already been filled. So his parents decided to have a baby on U.S. soil, and that baby was Jack.
That quota was in place because of the 1924 Johnson Reed Act, which separated quote unquote, "Welcomed immigrants from unwelcomed." The law basically favored European immigrants, while excluding Asian immigrants among other people of color. In his words, he wouldn't be here without the quotas or the exclusion laws. Two big things that drive his work, racism and eugenics, had a direct impact on his life.
Tchen: In the following Yellow Peril and Chinese Exclusion, I've kind of hit upon the 1924 Johnson Reed Immigration Act, which was driven by eugenicists that were largely based in New York. So that becomes the basis of the eugenics and dysgenesis discussion about well-bred or bad-bred. And the bad-bread, the dysgenic breeds, which then of course gets extended to the so-called races of mankind, individuals or groups that should be culled from the population. They should be eliminated from the population.
So the 1924 Immigration Act, but also the Chinese Exclusion Law, but if we really think about it, also the dispossession of indigenous peoples from the lands and the enslavement of African-Americans, et cetera, et cetera, are really longer through lines of this kind of sorting system.
Boyd: Tracing dispossession and figuring out its origins has to do with finding and telling the stories of those communities that others, at some point decided were quote unquote, "Unfit." Those groups were excluded in the big picture narrative that we tell about our country.
Tchen: So as America becomes more and more industrialized, and also as this country expands, that's where eugenic and dysgenic policies begin to kick in. Not so much as a false science, which it was, but really as a way of measuring testing and ordering society in a way in which the new emerging state, as it was becoming more and more powerful and more and more wealthy, it comes up with management systems. That depends a lot on the statistical kinds of measuring obsessions that the founding eugenicists are also involved in.
That's a very important distinction that I think we tend to ignore, but the fit and unfit and the undeserving and the deserving has really central kinds of axioms of how the political culture emerges. In those moments, you get these dangerous, very oftentimes racially driven formulations of otherness in which those other people don't have the kind of internal values and virtues that we have, and therefore they are not us. And those kinds of values of who is a proper citizen defined by proper ownership and proper property ownership, those kinds of distinctions of otherness itself play, of course, fundamental roles in the formulation of how American society expands and how that history that we can now recognize in that contemporary day is played out.
Boyd: When I talked to Jack, he was planning a huge event called Dismantling Eugenics: A Convening for the end of September. It would look to lift up grassroots movements and uncover oppressive legal and social structures in a very long history of racism. Poets, performers, writers, organizers, teachers, and activists from all over the world joined together to not only dig into that history, but also look ahead to questions that the future demands from us and that the humanities can help us answer.
Tchen: There's a particular difficulty in the United States of really thinking of coming together as a people to say, yes, there is such a thing as ecological relationships to the land and that we can see how in that part of our region or in this part of our region, there are serious dangers that we should all be concerned about. I think because of the fragmentation of, quite frankly, racism and the idea that those who are wealthier are better and therefore deserve better places that are safer. Safe from floods, safe from the increasing heat that we're getting. And that those who are undeserving really have not worked hard enough to earn their place in being at a better place. So I think these legacies need to be surfaced and unless we do that, we're in bad trouble.
The whole argument about carbon emissions and pipelines and automobiles and consumption and the oil companies, those are all grounded in all sorts of questions about what counts as a commons and what counts as something that we all share in terms of values, and is there such a thing in the United States, especially as a commons, is there something that we can all say that we can come together as a people? I think those are very difficult questions because we are so badly fractured and fragmented as a people. Those segments then seem to on a day-to-day basis justify and rationalize our sense of, well, we don't care about them. And if we don't care about them, we're also not caring about the region as well. The land. The once bountiful, bio-diverse region that we live in, but that's a shadow of the way it had been. So I think that kind of understanding of relationships with nature and creatures and the waters and the air is linked to also the disregard and disrespect for the people around it.
Boyd: Thanks to my guests, Dr. Jack Tchen and Danyetta Najoli. At the top of the show, you heard the voices of Faith Sauli, Stephanie Gibson, Laura McGwynn and Kevin Lindsey.
Making Meaning is a podcast from the Federation of State Humanities Councils, and is part of its Humanities and American Life Initiative, which is generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. You can learn more about our work and member programs by visiting our website at statehumanities.org.
The show is produced by LWC. Elizabeth Nakano is our producer and sound designer. Jimmy Gutierez edited the series. Jen Chien is executive editor. Cedric Wilson is lead producer. You can find more episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. I'm Sydney Boyd. Thanks for joining us.
CITATION: Boyd, Sydney, host. “ Living Histories of Race and Racism” Making Meaning, LWC Studios. October, 27 2021. statehumanities.org/