I'm reading Clint Smith's How the Word is Passed with the overheated rejections of critical race theory (CRT) ringing in my ears, and the two together bring out the inevitable cognitive dissonance: how can anyone promote the notion that you can study American history without investigating how it was shaped by slavery and its racist aftermaths? That would be like trying to explain the structure of water without mentioning hydrogen. CRT is, thus, critical in the sense of elemental: without it, the thing you want does not exist. It is also critical in the sense of finding fault, something which its detractors seem to fear: if we speak about the racist legacy of slavery, then we cannot be patriotic lovers of our country, so patriotism (with its supremacist roots) must trump investigation and self-reflection. The detractors also seem afraid of how teaching about the racial forces in American society will expose the ways power operates in the United States, especially as it relates to the use of exploitation and violence to achieve political and economic ends. They don't seem to want to acknowledge that there are oppressors and oppressed and certainly don't want to have to take on any burden of guilt or complicity in maintaining such a situation. To me, at least, all CRT is saying, like Huck Finn said, is that you can't swing a dead cat in the United States without hitting something that has its origins and development connected to either slavery itself or to the social dynamics of racism over the last century and a half. And just like Huck Finn, there comes a time when a reckoning needs to be made. The United States seems to always be poised to have this reckoning and make this decision, then it goes awry in some way, often because the backlash to the idea of historical reflection and self-awareness becomes so fevered and essentialist (which is funny, given how CRT's enemies wrongly accuse CRT of teaching race essentialism). Even if CRT (whatever people think it is) is banned from being used in schools, as many states are doing now, the historical situation that gave rise to its thinking isn't going away, of course. Only when Americans—all Americans—can see their history clearly will they be able to make the inroads they need to make into solving the inequalities that plague their state. "Getting past race" is not the point, even if it were achievable; "getting past willful ignorance and the damage it does" is the point, and that is achievable. The whole goal of the American experiment has been to create a nation of people who can retain whatever histories define them while also engaging in the work of building a democracy based on liberty and equality. In other words, they can, and must, have dual consciousnesses: an intensely thick one built up from the layers of their personal histories and to which they have a fierce loyalty and a more rarefied one governed by the etiquettes of reason, logic, self-discipline, debate. This is, of course, a very unstable existential condition, more "dueling" than "dual," given how humans are built, because it calls upon the second consciousness to modify and influence the first, and humans don't seem to be good at having logic govern emotion, deliberation govern impulse. (Cue Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, and a great quote from H. Maynard Smith's Henry VIII and the Reformation: "A broad-minded man, who can see both sides of the question and is ready to hold opposed truths while confessing that he cannot reconcile them, is at a manifest disadvantage with a narrow-minded man who sees but one side, sees it clearly, and is ready to interpret the whole Bible, or, if need be, the whole universe, in accordance with his formula.") But, really, "going dual" is the only condition that will save us, akin to what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack-Up," that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Smith's book is an eloquent dissertation on what it takes to "still retain the ability to function," such as the two women, Grace and Donna (who called herself "a history nut"), who came to Monticello and were gob-smacked by the revelations of how Jefferson behaved as a slaveholder, something they both said had never been part of the history they learned in school. He describes their palpable pain as they struggle to balance the words of the Declaration with the auction block on the west lawn. As Donna said, "He might have done great things, but boy, did he have a big flaw." But, as Smith goes on to say, they continued to mull over what they had learned—they kept "going dual," in other words—at one point finding a continuity between the way Jefferson separated families for economic gain and the Trump administration separated families at the border (their meeting with Smith took place in July 2018)—this from what Smith describes as two "self-proclaimed Southern Republicans." What had this black man and two white women, talking together on the grounds of Monticello, achieved? What point had they reached? Smith doesn't explicitly answer those questions, but he clearly takes solace, if not delight, in two things. First, in how Donna and Grace manage to navigate their way through their dismay to a more truthful rendition about Jefferson and the slave system he helped create and maintain. Second, in how Smith, in conversation with (as he describes Donna) "a white, conservative, Fox News-consuming woman from Texas," trusted the navigation they had made enough to share photos of his fourteen-month-old son. "Going dual" also means going humble, going quiet; it means tamping down the velocity of indignation; it means understanding that uncertainty is the only certainty, that conviction is deafness and principle, intolerance; it means rejecting the abstract in favor of looking at how the actions of some maim the bodies of others. Can any of "going dual" be heard, felt, adopted, practiced in American society today? It doesn't seem likely at the moment, and because of that, the society has not retained "the ability to function." But it's what we need to do.