Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust says history should make us uncomfortable; Fresh Air, NPR, August 22, 2023

 Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR; Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust says history should make us uncomfortable

"Drew Gilpin Faust is known as a historian, a civil rights activist and the first woman president of Harvard — but she was groomed to become a proper Southern lady...

Faust's new memoir, Necessary Trouble, takes its name from a quote by the late Rep. John Lewis, who Faust knew and approved of using his words. The book is about growing up in Virginia and coming of age during a period of rapid social transformation...

On the mischaracterization of slavery included in Florida's new standards of Black history education, proposed under Gov. Ron DeSantis

It's preposterous and it's extremely distressing. It's a complete distortion of the past, which is undertaken in service of the present, of minimizing racial issues in the present by saying everything's been "just great" for four centuries. Slavery was not "just great." It was oppressive. It was cruel. It involved exploitation of every sort, physical violence, sexual exploitation. We know that we have pieces of paper where slave owners wrote it down. I did a biography of a South Carolina planter who recorded in detail what his mastery of slaves entailed. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of studies that show this...

On the notion that students shouldn't be made to feel uncomfortable about history

It's a betrayal of the commitment to truth and to fact. And it so undermines the ability of people in the present to understand who they are. How do we have history that's not uncomfortable? How do we have any kind of education that doesn't make you in some way uncomfortable? Education asks you to change. The headmistress of my girls school many years ago said to us, "Have the courage to be disturbed, to learn about the Holocaust and see what evil can mean, to learn about slavery and think about exploitation that is empowered by an ideology of race that we haven't entirely dismantled. Understand what people did in the past so that you can, in the present, better critique your own assumptions, your own blindnesses, and make a world that's a better world." If we don't acknowledge those realities, we are disempowered as human beings."