Ty Seidule is the Chamberlain Fellow at Hamilton College, a New America Fellow, and was recently named to the Confederate Base Naming Commission. In 2015, his five-minute video lecture, “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” became a social media sensation with more than 30 million views. He served in the U.S. Army for thirty-six years, retiring as a brigadier general in 2020, after teaching at West Point for two decades.

Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on the Significance of Race is a ten-part podcast series of informed and enriching dialogues to help us better understand our world – how we got here, who we are, and where we are going as a society. This series engages in conversations with scholars, artists, filmmakers, and activists to investigate racial inequality, systemic racism, racial terrorism, and racial justice and reconciliation. Through education, art, and storytelling, we can all learn to be allies and engage the world to help evolve to a place of compassion and social equity.

Guest: Ty Seidule
Host: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by Public Podcasting in partnership with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University.

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[00:00:03] Dr. Ty Seidule: There's a difference between history and commemoration. History is what historians do to understand the past and in particular to help us understand ourselves today or understand something. That's one thing. Commemoration on what those monuments are, that is who we honor. I believe that we should honor those who represent our values today, and if they don't change them, if you honor confederates, you honor racism.

[00:00:32] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Heritage Future present, Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on the Significance of Race. A 10-part podcast series exploring racial inequality, racial terrorism, and racial justice and reconciliation while honoring the voices and stories of people of color. We take into account the complicated history of our country and humanity in general while examining where we are today, and looking at the challenges that lay ahead. Through art, storytelling and education, we can all learn to be allies and engage the world to help evolve to a place of compassion and social equity.

In this episode, we connect with Dr. Ty Seidule, author of the book Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. We discuss his book, the manipulated history of the south, and the symbols of supremacy and treason that triggered the debate on historical relevance. Here is Ty Seidule. Let's start by giving a little background on what the Lost Cause myth is.

[00:01:52] Dr. Seidule: Right. Well, if you imagine that the Confederate States seceded, the white citizens of the states seceded to protect and expand the institution of slavery. Why did they do that? They did it because they were fearful of Lincoln's election and so they seceded. They went to war to protect slavery and they lost. They didn't just lose just by a little bit. They were crushed, destroyed. United States Armies going up and down, Sherman to Atlanta, Sheridan to Shenandoah Valley, [unintelligible 00:02:25] through Mississippi and Tennessee and up through that area. They're just crushed.

When the smoke clears off the battlefield, they have to come to grips, when they sow the wind, they rip the whirlwind. They had to figure out how do they come to grips with this crushing defeat, which by the way, they went to war to protect slavery, and now enslaved people are actually not only the free, but with the 13th Amendment ending slavery, 14th Amendment giving equal rights, 15th Amendment which allowed all men to vote, the 180-degree opposite happened that they wanted. They created this myth about the Lost Cause.

It starts with Lee in general orders number nine in April of 1865 saying that they only won because of more manpower, material, and money. It's not true. Many smaller powers lost before. They lost because the United States was better, they had better leadership in Grant, Lincoln, Montgomery Meigs, Sherman Sherrod, and all these were better leaders. They lost because the cause was so awful. They had enslaved people and every time the US Army went further South, more enslaved people went North, meaning that they lost enslaved manpower while the North gained it. They had no immigrants coming into the South. Tons of immigrants came into the North during the war, giving them more people. They created more industry because they had a better financial system. Everything that was better, it was better in the North, but the South could have won if they wanted to.

Another part of this was the war wasn't fought over slavery. Well that's just bull hockey. The war was totally fought over slavery. Just read the secession documents. Mississippi says, "We're fighting over slavery." South Carolina says, "We're fighting to protect slavery." Georgia, "We're fighting to protect slavery." It was totally over slavery, but after the war they say, "Oh, no, no, we're fighting for states' rights." Yes, the states' rights to have slaves.

Another part of that Lost Cause was that enslaved people were happy and hard-working. It was the best labor condition. It was civilizing. Well, that's just monstrously wrong. Slavery featured the lash, it featured breaking families apart for profit, which they desperately hated. Selling 8 and 10-year-olds away, separating husband and wife. It featured legal rape, it featured torture and mutilation. It was just awful. That's another part of it.

Another was that Ulysses S. Grant, this great general, probably the greatest soldier ever to wear army blue was a drunk and a butcher. Not true. Greatest soldier that's ever been.

Another part of this Lost Cause was that reconstruction, that time from 1865 to 1877 when states came back into the United States, and that the United States developed these laws to make a biracial democracy in the South, that it was a failure because Black people weren't ready for the vote, they weren't ready to serve in high office when in reality 2,000 Black men served in high office. Finally, at the top of the Lost Cause myth was Robert E. Lee, the finest man, the finest general, the finest man who ever lived.

The important thing about the Lost Cause is that it is an ideological foundation for a white supremacist society. If you can imagine the pillars of this society, one is this Lost Cause myth, two is segregation laws, Jim Crow. Three is white terror, lynching, four is Black disenfranchisement, and fifth is Confederate memory and Confederate monuments. These are all pillars of a white supremacist society in the South.

[00:06:04] Host: Was there a thought that they could win? Obviously, you wouldn't fire those initial shots without-- What did winning look like?

[00:06:14] Dr. Seidule: That's a great question. Winning meant not losing. The North had to defeat the South. They'd had to go in and defeat every army until they gave up, which it did. It defeated, captured every single army and laid waste to the South, not in a deliberate way. It wasn't war crimes. They burned plantations. All the South had to do was make the North give up. If the North stopped fighting, the South wins.

Many a power, like Vietnam, there have been plenty of wars that America has fought. The American Revolution. That's what they looked at. All we have to do is make the British stop. There's a problem with that, is that why would the United States stop, particularly if Lincoln's president, if you're going to create a hostile power on your Southern border, and then it could lead to balkanization of the entire continent?

By the way, why do you get to leave? You came in in a constitutional convention. You can't just rebel. In fact, the US Constitution was created in part to stop rebellion. They had Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts, which they had no way of putting down under the Articles of Confederation. Guess what happened? When they created the Constitution, the first rebellion, Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, guess who comes? This is 1789 or something. Guess who comes to the front of the formation? I got that year wrong. I can't remember the year. Guess who goes in front of the formation?

George Washington puts his blue uniform back on, goes to the front of 10,000 soldiers to put down that rebellion. Yes, they could have won, but boy, they were going to-- Thank God for all of us that they had amazing leaders in the United States of America that crushed that rebellion, and forever stopped the idea that secession had sent insurrectionists, that seditionists can survive.

[00:08:10] Host: This Lost Cause myth permeated throughout the South. It wasn't included in textbooks, as you talk about in your book. You as a young person grew up with this idealization of the Southern Gentleman and of Robert E. Lee, specifically. With that mindset, did you think of yourself as somebody who was racist, or you just thought that these-- Is there a separation between the two?

[00:08:49] Dr. Seidule: It's a great question. I would not have labeled myself a racist. In fact, my dad taught at an Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Virginia, and he was there when it integrated in 1968, or '69. It was the last Episcopal school in the State of Virginia, maybe anywhere, that finally integrated. When it integrated, he coached Black kids. Black kids came over to our house. I remember watching a good friend, he's named Sam Reid, who would come over and we would watch Good Times, which was a popular '70s sitcom together. I wouldn't have said that.

Probably, I don't know, eighth or ninth grade, I read Roots, and saw the movie Roots, and saw the horrors of slavery there. Somehow, in my mind, I could think that the Confederates were still worthy of honor and say that I was not a racist. The problem is, which I discovered later, if you honor confederates, you honor racism. You can't say I honor Confederates because their cause is so awful.

What I didn't really understand is that there is no way that you can say Confederates without saying people that fought for slavery. That's the only reason that they were there. Once I got it in my mind, my entire culture had this racist component to it, and therefore was racist because it honored Confederates, and part of that was that there was deeply racist aspects of the southern white society that I was part of.

I don't think now that you can honor Confederates without acknowledging deeply that they fought to enslave humans which is just monstrous. Once you understand or read about slavery, the more I read about slavery, it's worse than any of us can imagine. I go to a plantation, I don't even call them plantations anymore, I call them enslave labor farms. To me, I went to a wedding at one of these, I don't know, 5, 6, 7 years ago, maybe 10 years ago now.

I was walking around it, I thought of being at Dachau. I've not been to Auschwitz, I have been at Dachau, and it was like, I'm at the site of mass atrocities. That's what this place is. When you start putting that language there, it's hard, impossible to then honor Confederates either for treason or for slavery.

[00:11:23] Host: I think the big difference is when you go to a place like Auschwitz or Dachau now it's memorializing the trauma, but yet at some of these slave labor camps, as you call them, they're honoring the tradition.

[00:11:40] Dr. Seidule: It's so true. Then you go to wedding, they're wedding venues and they literally whitewash the presence of these mass atrocities. That's one of the things that my culture did, is that it said the white planner class, white people and afterwards are more important and more worthy of veneration, are just more than Black people. That's the definition of racism, that's the definition of racism.

Those plantations, and there are a few, there's one in Louisiana close to New Orleans, I can't remember the name of it now, but it is changing its story to tell a more complete story. When I went to this one in Savannah, near Savannah, no monument, no placard, nothing told the story of the enslaved people that were there. Part of what history is, is I don't want less history, I want more history.

I want to know the stories of those who lived for generations and generations where their kids and their parents kids grew up under enslavement and talk about the fact that white men's first sexual experience was with an enslaved girl or a woman, and that their children, and they would sell their children and their grandchildren thousands of miles away. The monstrosity of the white planner class of white people that would do this, it's so awful. We've got to talk about that honestly. If you talk about the honesty of slavery, how can you ever honor Confederates?

[00:13:27] Host: This notion of the history that's taught and not taught, it makes me think about the portion of your book where you were talking about textbooks in Virginia. That is, where we're supposed to, as young sponge-like minds where we're supposed to get the information to develop our point of view of the world, of our country, of our state, and of our city. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the misinformation that wasn't those textbooks in Virginia.

[00:14:03] Dr. Seidule: Of course, when I first started I did not remember my fourth and seventh grade textbooks. I didn't remember at all, but as I was going back through and studying, I went and got them and I got them through an inner library loan and I started reading through them. It was amazing. The chapter that was the most amazing was How the Negro Lived. That was the name of the chapter, and I'll talk about how they came about, but let me first talk about what it said.

The picture on the cover of this is a family of two boys, two girls, husband and wife, and they are dressed in colonial finery and they're shaking hands with obviously a distinguished gentleman, lots of status. The family is actually an African family coming from the middle passage on a slave ship. They're coming into slavery. Really, we know that the middle passage was just an abomination, 15% mortality rate, and these holes that were 18 inches to three feet tall in human filth. Just the most awful conditions, and yet they were portraying it like it was a princess cruise ship.

It talked about the Civil War. It was a war between the states. It said slavery was good. It said, how about the lash whipping? Well, that was just the way they treated the slaves like they treated their kids. It was just punishment from a kind father, and all of these just horrific lies. Well, there was a purpose to this. First written in 1957, then redone in 1964. These were a reaction to the Truman's Civil Rights Commission to integrate, and the Virginia Governor, Harry Bird, said, "We are going to fight this with massive resistance."

He led the South in doing this, and these textbooks were to tell white kids and Black kids that segregation was best, just like slavery was best. The races are different and they should be kept apart, and that's the hideous lesson that my Virginia textbook said. These were taught in the '60s into the late '70s. They were still taught, still poisoning the minds of generation after generation of white and Black kids. It's terrible. By the way, these went back into the early part of the 20th century. Georgia did the same thing. These were not just Virginia doing it.

This Lost Cause myth of which these books were part of spread these racist white supremacist lies that helped inform a deeply, deeply racist society. As I call it, it was a racial police state that ensured that Black people did not have equality, that the only way they went into a courthouse was as a defendant. It was a way to ensure white political power because the South was a racial police state, and the textbooks were one form of enforcing that.

[00:17:09] Host: Would you say that, as a nation, we've done the same thing? I grew up in California and in fourth grade we studied the missions and now they don't teach missions, my daughter learned about indigenous tribes, and the reason being is the Spanish who ran the missions put the indigenous people into basically slavery as well. Is this a problem, I think of Christopher Columbus and the stories we've told as well, is this a problem that we have as a nation, as part of that American exceptionalism that we promote all the good and hide away the bad?

[00:17:52] Dr. Seidule: Yes. Really, it was a white people's history. That's what it was. It's to make white people feel good, and then it excludes all the other parts of it that we've done. The thing is that so often people think of history as a civics lesson, that you have to show only the good or to make-- It's a history of a winning story. Well, that isn't necessary to make a good society. In fact, a society that looks at its history honestly, and is willing to try to correct problems that it's had doesn't make a worse society, it makes a better society, it makes a more just society. The idea that we're going to have this triumphalist narrative doesn't make us better.

I think that there's a good comparison with the Germans who have taken what they did in the Holocaust, I was stationed in Germany in the Army in the 1980s, and they were barely dealing with it at all. I went back and served there for five months in 2016, and it's everywhere. Well, if you think about what they have done by embracing this, by making museums about the Holocaust or the Nazis, when they have these little remembrance stones where every Jew is taken out of a house, these little gold stones all throughout there, what it's done is make a more just society. We can't say that the Germans are doing worse now, they're doing better than they've ever done.

The fact that you are honest about your history and not at doing it triumphalist doesn't mean you're not patriotic. James Baldwin once said that I love my country and that's why I must criticize so ruthlessly. To criticize your country isn't a lack of love, it is a sign of love. It's a sign of patriotism. The idea that we can't criticize, that only patriots refuse to criticize, it's 180 degrees the wrong way. The fact that your daughter is getting that, it's going to make her a better citizen, not a worse one.

[00:19:48] Host: You use this line, which I had it right here, "When we identify our history, we can change the narrative." I feel like it's long overdue and we're slowly seeing the drips of that right now.

[00:20:04] Dr. Seidule: Totally agree.

[00:20:08] Host: You're talking about how those textbooks in Virginia were connected to the progress of integration and equal rights, and you bring that up a lot. A lot of confederate monuments and memorialization and names of streets and towns are in reaction to progress with equal rights and integration. It's obvious that that is just a form of supremacy.

[00:20:44] Dr. Seidule: Yes. My hometown of Monroe, Georgia, I moved there when I was in high school, and there's a confederate monument outside the courthouse. That monument that's outside the courthouse, every Black person that went in had to go through there, and then the only way that they were there, as a defendant. When in 1906, the same year as White Atlantans massacred Black citizens. It was also right back where Black citizens were taken from the courthouse and lynched. It was a sign of white supremacy.

That's what it was for that period, 1890 to 1920, is that things named after Confederates, Confederate memorialization was a symbol that the white race was back in charge in the South. If you go after World War II, then you start seeing that Confederate memorialization and Confederate names are a reaction to the nascent integration movement, the nascent Civil Rights Movement. That's when the confederate flag really becomes popular throughout the nation is as a result of integration. That's when Georgia puts the Confederate flag back on its state flag is in 1956 as a reaction to federal attempts to integration. It's when, at West Point, they first start naming things after Robert E. Lee.

Each one of these censuses, to scratch a Confederate monument, whether it's Monroe, Georgia, or I'll have to give you another one, which is the one in Arlington National Cemetery. That one is the most racist one I've ever seen. It's got a Black "mammy," overweight, taking a white baby from her "master" as he goes off to war. Deeply racist, 1914. It was the same time that Wilson is re-segregating the federal workforce. Scratch a monument, and that's in Arlington National Cemetery, scratch a monument and you see a reaction against integration or a pien to white supremacy.

[00:22:52] Host: Well, a lot of these monuments now are facing their demise. I think it was '90-something, '93 in 2020 were taken down, removed. Is there a place that they belong? Is there a way to hold them as historic pieces without celebrating their meaning?

[00:23:20] Dr. Seidule: Yes. It's, what to do with the Confederate monuments? Well, there is one place I've seen this, and that's in Budapest in Hungary. When the wall came down and in 1989, '91, whenever that was, the Hungarian government had statues of Stalin, Lennon, Marks, Angles, all over the country, put up by the Soviet oppressors. What to do with them all? They created a park on the outskirts of Budapest and put every one of those statues in one park. It's incredible. They're all there. You can walk among them and see statue after statue after statue. Basically what it makes you do is think about that Soviet era.

Well, we can't really do that here because the statues were all put up by either state or local communities. In fact, many of them were put up by the Marietta Marvel Company which went to local United Daughters of the Confederacy, a neo-Confederate group, and what they said was, "Hey, a little town in Georgia, this little town, they got their Confederate monument. You should bring yours, you should get yours too." All these towns have them, but they were put up locally. It can't be done at a national level. It has to be done locally, so locally you have to figure that out.

Locally, they're starting to do that. Many of them are coming down. The thing is they're huge, they're sometimes fragile, they're awful, and you can't put-- where are you going to put them? Some of them have been, as the one in New Orleans, that the verb I created for this is called Raiders of the Lost Ark. Basically if you see the end of the movie, Raiders of Lost Ark, what do they do with the Ark of the Covenant? They put it in a big box and hide it in a huge army warehouse. Well, that's kind of what they're doing with some of these. Others have just been destroyed. There's nowhere that you're going to be able to put them.

Most of them, unless the United Daughters of the Confederacy will take them and put them somewhere else, most of them are either going to be destroyed, but it's not my call to do that. Each local community has to decide what to do with them, and then do that. I encourage them all to make that and start having that conversation about what to do with them. Then what to do with the remnants? Should they bulldoze it over and put new art or should they do what they did in Richmond, which I love the Lee Monument, which has been graffitied, and then at night they project a different picture on there.

I love the one of a USCT, a United States Colored Troop, those are the soldiers that fought for the United States in the Civil War, projected against that Lee Monument. Oh my gosh. It gave me chills seeing that next to Lee. I couldn't think of anything perfect. I would even leave the Lee statue. I want it to come down, don't get me wrong, but seeing that USCT Black soldier superimposed on Lee, "Beautiful."

[00:26:09] Host: These aren't pieces of history. They are monuments. They're monuments celebrating people and celebrating traitors to our country. I don't imagine you would go through Germany and see monuments to anyone in the Nazi leadership.

[00:26:34] Dr. Seidule: Zero.

[00:26:35] Host: It's a conversation I was having just the other day with a family member where they were saying, "But it's history. But it's history." Ultimately it is history, but those monuments aren't historic monuments.

[00:26:53] Dr. Seidule: Right. Exactly. There's a difference between history and commemoration. History is what historians do to understand the past and in particular, to help us understand ourselves today or understand something. It also could be able to understand changes in society over time. There are a bunch of different types of historians that are doing different things which-- and part of it also is the methodology that we use that it helps creative thinking, it helps answer questions and problems. That's one thing.

Commemoration or what those monuments are, that is who we honor. I believe that we should honor those who represent our values today. If they don't, change them. One example of that is at West Point-- I spent most of my career at West Point. We have a fort there that was made of-- West Point was started by George Washington to be a defensive position to prevent the British from controlling the Hudson River. There are a number of different forts, readouts, all these things there.

Well, originally, there was a fort there called Fort Arnold, and it was named after Benedict Arnold. That Benedict Arnold tried to sell out the United States and give over West Point, what Washington called the key to the continent, to the British. He was a traitor. Everyone recognized that. When that occurred, they changed the name of Fort Arnold to Fort Clinton, another army commander who stayed loyal to the nascent United States. So they changed it.

We change statues and monuments all the time because it's about who we honor and commemorate. If it doesn't represent our values, in fact, if it's the antithesis of our values, and I would argue that treason for slavery is the antithesis of our values, then we should change them. Listen, if we want to change them again in 100 years, change them in 100 years. Our commemoration should represent who we are. That's not history.

Remember, these statues were put up not right after the war. They were put up at least 30 years after the war. For the most part, even longer than that. Then when you say we're changing history, one more point on this. I'm on a roll now. You're not going to stop me. When they say that we're changing history, which part of history are we changing? What you have to do is to say, if you're changing history, is that when that monument went up, let's say that one in Monroe, Georgia, 1906, is that the point you say that we don't want to change history, during that most racist era of our hit time?

Or if you want to go back further and say, oh, it was during the slave era, that's the period we don't want to change. Or was it during reconstruction when the Ku Klux Klan was there? Which area of history and interpretation is the right one? If you tell me that, which areas did we not ever want to change? Then boy, I'm going to take you to town because I'm going to just destroy your argument on what is history.

[00:29:50] Host: I'd like for you to talk about your decision to retire in 2017. What was your rank when you retired?

[00:29:58] Dr. Seidule: So the way this work is I retired as a brigadier general. I was a colonel for most of my time though my job meant that I retired as a brigadier general, so I'm a retired brigadier general.

[00:30:08] Host: Tell us why you made that decision.

[00:30:10] Dr. Seidule: Well, I had been writing about this stuff for a while, and in 2017 when the Charlottesville Massacre occurred-- well, actually it starts in 2015 when I did this video that said the Civil War was about slavery, and I got investigated by the army for doing a political speech. I was cleared but it was investigated. It made my bosses at West Point very uneasy, made the army leadership very uneasy, and they told me it made them uneasy. I was having trouble saying what I wanted to.

Then in 2017, after Charlottesville, I wrote an op-ed that said about the base names, that we have these base names named after Confederates. I didn't publish it because I felt the pressure. I could have probably done it but I felt like I was putting the army in a very difficult place that I didn't want to do it. I love the army, I love West Point, I couldn't do that. When I finally decided I was going to write this book, I could not have written it, particularly under the Trump administration, in uniform calling Lee a traitor for slavery, calling these base names deeply a racist element, and calling out the army for doing that. I couldn't do that in uniform, so I chose-- now, I didn't have to, I could have not published the book and kept serving. I could have totally done that.

If I wanted to tell this truth, not just in a speech at Chapman but actually in a forum and talk to the press about it all the time, I needed my full First Amendment Right, which I didn't have in the uniform and so that's when I did it. Let me tell you, I am jamming on the First Amendment. Oh my gosh, I get to say whatever the hell I want and I'm here at Hamilton College where-- I was so worried.

I went and gave a talk at the Black Lives Matter Plaza calling for the army to change these, talking about the racist nature of it and I told my college dean and president, I said, "Listen, I'm going to do that. Just wanted to let you know," and they were like, "Why are you telling us?" They said, "All we want you to do is make sure you let everybody know that you're from Hamilton College. That's all we want to make sure."

At West Point, it would have been, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, they fought, they’d go all the way up the chain of command and they denied my ability to talk to the press regularly. Now I did ABC, I've done CBS, I've done all these and the army, they have no ability to stop me. Wonderful thing, this First Amendment. I am just digging it completely.

[00:32:35] Host: I'm going to end with a question I'm sure you've been asked a lot lately. On January 6th we had the insurrection at the Capitol and it's so reminiscent to 160 years ago, it's not satisfied with the vote, not satisfied with the person who was elected to power and wanting to use force to change the system. With all of your research and as a historian and with a military background, how did you experience that day?

[00:33:15] Dr. Seidule: It was traumatic for me just like it was traumatic for so many American citizens. As an army officer it was traumatic because I was ready to put the uniform on and go kick some ass and put some people in jail because when I saw the flag of treason, the Confederate flag in the People's House, oh my God, I was just so upset by that. Emotionally, it just tore me up.

As a historian, I thought of a couple of things. The first was it was very reminiscent of a lynch mob. They even had gallows that they bought and a hangman's noose and they were saying, "Kill Mike Pence." They were looking for AOC. There were many, many things that they were doing and they were incited by a white politician that was very similar to what was happening in the South in the lynching years of incitement to go find and kill people. One, it looked like a lynch mob.

The second is that it was sedition and insurrectionists unwilling to accept the results of that. The third thing I thought of was as I saw the flag of treason go by over the shoulder of the guy that was carrying the flag was a picture of Charles Sumner. Sumner was a noted abolitionist who on the floor of the Senate after excoriating enslavers saying how evil the system of slavery was, a white Congressman by the name of Preston Brooks took his gold tip cane and started beating Sumner over the head on the floor of the Senate with his cane and giving him traumatic brain injury, took him four years to come back to the Senate after nearly dying. It made me think that political violence, particularly to enforce white supremacy, is as old as the republic. We are among the most politically violent of developed countries.

The other thing I thought about Sumner was that Sumner in 1862 is the one that wrote and put forward the oath of office that everybody in Congress took. He wrote the oath and the oath was, "To protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic." That's what they have to do. Who were those domestic terrorists? They were Confederates. Those were domestic terrorists that came into the People's House and the Congress had sworn an oath to deal with domestic terrorists because that's what their oath was.

To protect, support, and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, those were domestic enemies, that they can't have a purpose of evasion like the Confederates. I thought about the oath that I took, that every single person in that auditorium took as well, and it enraged me, it broke my heart and I know what has to come, which is we must have another commission to look at this because we can't have reconciliation without truth, and the facts and justice first.

[00:36:21] Host: Coming off of a very challenging year filled with a lot of violence, a lot of misinformation, and we're talking a day after a young Black man was killed in Minneapolis, what are you hopeful for?

[00:36:38] Dr. Seidule: Oh well, I am hopeful for a lot because our country changes slowly until it changes fast. I'm hopeful that when I saw the Chauvin trial, that the Chief of Police of the Minneapolis Police Department got up and said, "This is unacceptable." I don't think that's ever happened before, so I'm hopeful about that. I'm hopeful that the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, that when President Trump vetoed it, and by the way, he vetoed it because he did not want to change the base names, that there was a super-majority overrode that veto. It wasn't just Democrats, it was Democrats and Republicans are bought in to changing these base names, which also makes me hopeful.

I'm hopeful that after this, the three really just terrible racial violence of the 2015 Charleston Massacre, the 2017 Charlottesville White Supremacist Murder, and then the Murder of George Floyd that there are more white Americans feeling as though that there is systemic racism. Really, my book shows the effect of systemic racism on me, that I grew up with this is so inculcated because race is the virus in the American dirt.

It's our eternal pandemic and the only way that we can move forward is to really identify our past and acknowledge our racist past that will help us prevent a racist future. We are doing that right now in a way that we have not done in a long, long time, so I'm hopeful that we'll do that but we've got to continue to go after our past because that is the key to ensure white backlash doesn't come.

We've got to accept that these things happened in our past and then prevent them in the future. I am hopeful before I am wary too because there is an enormous, there's always that form of backlash coming after some progress. I think Reagan said this, "Trust but verify." There's more work to be done because if we don't work on this, on the problem of racism, we will go back to center and center for this country has been racism. I'm hopeful, but we've got to continue to work.

[00:39:07] Host: If you'd like to continue the conversation visit tyseidule.com or visit chapman.edu/wilkinson to watch his full lecture. For more socially conscious content, visit publicpodcasting.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.