A White Guy from Kansas goes to the Mississippi Delta . . .
A conversation with Dave Tell about history, memory, and relationships
I like to say that I knew Dave Tell before he was a Big Deal. I know that most people still don’t know who Dave Tell is, and that’s just fine by Dave. But he really is kind of a Big Deal. He may be the U.S.’s leading scholar of public memory and race. He’s been behind a Smithsonian exhibit. He wrote the book on how Mississippi does (and does not) remember the murder of Emmett Till, and he’s friends with the Till family. Dave Tell is a white guy from Kansas who James Meredith—the black man who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962 and then went on to support David Duke—approached several years back and asked to write about his complicated historical legacy. Dave is a person who knows how to deal with complex histories with grace and acuity. He has the trust of a lot of very important people. He’s someone we can all learn from. To wrap up this little season we’ve been having here at Civic Fields on place, history, and foundings, I asked Dave to join me in an exchange . . . a set of mini-missives. He graciously agreed. (BTW, the “a white guy goes to the Mississippi Delta” part is at the end.) -Ned
Dave,
Thanks for doing this. You were the first to chime in when I wrote “A Nation without a Founding?” a few weeks ago. I was conscious of several problems with the post, but I decided to hit “send” anyway with a belief that Civic Fields readers, who are not run of the mill, would grasp at least some of what I was trying to get at.
The first problem of which I was aware of is endemic to any attempt to make sense of a national culture these days: it’s just so damn complicated, and at the same time in some ways so damn simple. That’s why Boston and Las Vegas have been on my mind as “types”—it seems to me that if we zoom out a bit they represent two Americas, one historic, complex, and old (kudos to our Boston correspondent, Matt Pitchford, for helping us here) and the other relatively new, relatively simple, and lacking any civic founding whatsoever. I think MAGA is generally aligned with the latter. This is what I mean by “a nation without a founding.” It has to do with the way large scale economic forces have dramatically won out over civil society and polity in whole swaths of American culture. What Bernie Sanders calls “oligarchy,” which I take as code for hyper-capitalism, is not just about the alienation of Americans from their own economy, but about their alienation from their own government and polity. Powerlessness.
But I was also aware of being called out for exactly what you named in your email to me the day the post was published—ignoring race and racism. And I was glad to receive these charges from you, of all people, because I knew I could engage you in a conversation and because, at least as I read your profound and eloquent Remembering Emmett Till, I knew you had wrestled mightily with histories that, in my view, come quite near to what I am trying to say about capitalism and American culture.
In your book you write about the economic and ecological remaking of the Mississippi Delta on the backs of a slave-labor system, about the way Emmett Till’s murder grew out of that system, and about the ways attempts to officially remember Till’s murder in Mississippi rarely seem to transcend these racist economic and ecological dynamics of the Delta.
So, was it that I just didn’t talk about race in my post? Is that what got you on the email with me?
-Ned
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Hi Ned,
The first thing that triggered my response was not race per se, but rather your claim about the infrequency with which the MAGA-world references the founders. You couldn’t have known it, but I’d been thinking about this very topic.
September 17, 2025 was the 238th anniversary of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. To mark the occasion in my class on race and memory, my students and I spent our class period thinking about the different ways in which the constitution—and the founding more generally—intersect with current American politics. We read executive orders from Trump, the report of the 1776 Commission, and excerpts of the 1619 Project.
I opened class that day by trying to impress on my students the importance of foundings. Whether or not they resonated more with Trump’s 1776 Commission or the 1619 Project, I wanted them to recognize that people at the highest levels of power were arguing about the founding of the country. Trump founded a commission to leverage the legacy of the founders; Biden cancelled it; Trump reinstated it four years later. The to-and-fro of presidents on both sides of the aisle arguing over the founding of the country seemed important to me, and it seemed a powerful lesson on the importance of foundings (or origin narratives more generally) for questions of personal and cultural identity.
When your post landed on October 2nd—just a couple weeks after my lecture—it seemed both right and wrong. On the one hand, I agreed with your sentiment that the MAGA-right had abandoned the constitutional project. On the other hand, I couldn’t agree with you that the founders were “missing in action in the MAGA-world.” Having just waded through the 1776 commission, it seemed to me that the founders were all over the MAGA world—that report alone cited them 59 times in 45 pages.
So my initial response was born from this tension: a movement that talked constantly about the founders, but which did not seem to care for the constitutional project of the founders. So while I agreed with your larger point, the story seemed more complex than you allowed. It’s not simply that the MAGA world ignored the founders, it’s that they invoked them in particular ways for particular reasons. This is where race comes in. If you look at the context of the 1776 Commission, it seems painfully obvious that the founders were invoked to erase certain legacies of black Americans.
All of this might shift our conversation ever so slightly. It’s not that one party celebrates founding and the other ignores it. Rather, every political movement (right and left) requires its own version of the founding. Which begs the question: why do foundings matter? What is lost or gained with particular visions of the American founding?
-Dave
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Dave,
Let me start by saying that I think you are right about MAGA’s references to the founders. I was wrong to minimize the frequency with which the MAGA world, at least in certain circles, refers to them and is indeed invested in a certain kind of founding narrative. This said, this still seems to me to be an entirely rootless movement. It traffics in a symbolic economy—and I think it is literally an economy—that harkens back to what you and I used to read about in graduate school when we were studying “postmodernism.” Frederic Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard—remember them?
The gist of that admittedly very complicated body of post-Marxist theory (or in Jameson’s case, still Marxist) was that in the postmodern era symbols are wrested from their referents, the sign is released from the signified, and made cultural tokens, so to speak, that do their own very powerful political, cultural, and economic work, but quite apart from what we used to call reality, facts, or history.
So, while I very much agree that foundings matter—its what we both are saying—I do not think they really matter in MAGA world.
I don’t know how else to say it: these people are quite serious in their own way, but they are not serious about the past. They are, to use the metaphor I appealed to in “A Nation Without a Founding?,” developers rather than founders. Founders look at a situation and ask “How can we make something new out of what we’ve already got here?” Developers look at a situation and see only barriers that might get in the way of economic capitalization—everything is dispensable. For me, Trump’s vision for how Gaza could be transformed into a giant resort community hits the nail on the head. He’s incapable of seeing history; he sees only crude economic opportunity.
This is why, I would say, the 1619 Project set certain MAGA elites off. That project was making claims about history and was using those claims to severely complicate anything like a simple narrative of American history. The 1776 Project, in turn, did not offer an alternative history as much as a refusal to take history seriously at all. To draw from that post-Marxist critical vocabulary we learned, the 1776 Project merely sought to smooth out “history” so as to render it a fungible commodity in what is essentially a project among MAGA elites to render the world more usable for Capital (or money).
I therefore have a hard time seeing the Trump and Biden history wars as a mere tit-for-tat. While I am no big fan of the Biden administration (who is anymore?), and while I have questions and political and philosophical concerns about the 1619 Project, I find myself wanting to resist the equivalence you seem to be drawing between “left” and “right” on the matter of foundings. I think there is a tit-for-tat, but I think the battle is asymmetrical. The 1619 Project was grappling with history, real history; 1776 Project was purely symbolic.
-Ned
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Hi Ned,
I think you’re concerned with the quality of the invocations of the founders. You note that the 1776 Commission refused to take history seriously. The MAGA world is “overwhelmingly not serious about the past.”
A few reactions, since we are moving a lightning speed here:
First, I agree. If I may use the 1619 Project and 1776 Commission as indicative of two basic approaches to the founders, there is no question (in my mind) that the 1619 Project is qualitatively better. By “better,” I mean that it engages with more historians, it engages peer-reviewed scholarship, and situates the founders in their historical and social contexts. For example, Jefferson’s lyrical proclamations about liberty need to be set in the context of Monticello and the Hemings—the multi-generational enslaved black family whom Jefferson owned, assaulted and exploited.
By contrast, the 1776 Commission (and MAGA more broadly) ignores inconvenient contexts (the Hemmings), slights peer-reviewed scholarship and tends not to engage other historians.
For all of these reasons, the 1619 Project is better. It is thicker in the sense that it is more connected to independent traditions of scholarship. It is denser in the sense that it is interwoven more intricately with others who have wrestled with the same stories. It is more resilient, because it is more interconnected.
The 1776 Commission is a slender historical thread. Its refusal to be in conversation with larger trends is what renders it as vulnerable as a thread. It has no thickness or density. To stick with the metaphor, the 1619 Project is a rope woven of many strands. It is hard to disentangle and harder to break.
Second, although I do have some not-quite-repressed memories of working through postmodern treatises in grad school, I much prefer my metaphor of thickness to the postmodern relationship of signifier and signified. The language of sign/signified/signifier suggests too much of a zero-sum game: either a signifier is connected to the signified or it’s not. But in the case at hand, what’s at stake is not the fact of a connection to the “real” founders, but the quality and robustness of the connection. To return to my Jefferson example: MAGA is correct that Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal.” This is a thread of historical truth. It is connected to the signified, but only by the slenderest of threads. The 1619 Project by contrast, adds some critical context to this claim, making the 1619 claim not only more true, but thicker, more resilient.
Third, slender history has consequences. As I tried to show in my response to your initial post, the shitty MAGA version of the founders sets the stage for some of the cruelest Trump policies. This makes me wonder if the MAGA world does indeed take the founders seriously? Just because it’s shitty history, doesn’t mean it’s not deadly serious.
The consequences of slender history are why I like my metaphor of thickness. When you claim that the MAGA right doesn’t take history seriously, it might function to hide the consequences of poor history.
-Dave
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Hi Dave,
I am not so sure that thicker histories are more resilient in contemporary capitalist culture. It seems to me that the “thinner” the better with regard to staying power in contemporary culture.
Still, I very much like the shift to thick and thin as metaphors here. So, let’s end this little exchange with me asking you how you think the United States might, just might, move toward a “thicker” polity?
-Ned
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Ned,
At the top of our exchange, you mentioned my book Remembering Emmett Till. Graduate students often ask me how it is that a white guy from Kansas has spent two decades writing about black history in the American south. Sometimes the questions are tinged with hostility, as if to tell a story is, de facto, to appropriate it for personal gain. More often however, the questions are driven by a desire to replicate the feat. The students want to tell hard stories too, and they want to know how to do it ethically (even if they are wondering if that is even possible).
I fear that my answers always disappoint them. There is, I believe, no abstract answer to the question of how a white professor can tell black stories. Everything depends on relationships.I tell my students about my relationship with the Till family. I tell them about the mistakes I’ve made with the family, and how those have been rectified. I tell them about the long, trial and error process by which we all (the Till family and I) figured out how I could contribute to the story they were telling. Over the last 11 years, I’ve figured out exactly where the Till family wants my help and, for what it’s worth, I also know the parts of the story for which they reserve for themselves the right to tell.
And then I tell my students about my relationship with James Meredith and my attempts to tell his story of integrating the University of Mississippi.
And then I tell them about my relationships with a group of black men on the east side of Kansas City who asked me to help them tell their story.
The point is this: I tell every story differently because I have different relationships with the Till family, Mr. Meredith, and the elders in Kansas City. And so when people ask me how it is that I, of all people, tell the Till story, the only honest answer is not an abstract principle about how a white guy narrates black stories, but rather about my relationships with the family. Although my whiteness matters, so do all the events on which I’ve worked for them, the grants I’ve written for them, the gigs I’ve secured for them, and the websites, exhibits, and roadside markers I’ve created for them. Once you take the relationship seriously, my whiteness is just one part of a thick relationship—a relationship that is thick enough to have honest conversations about race and storytelling.
A similar principle might be at work here. I’m not sure that there is a one-size-fits-all formula for how to create a thicker polity.
But we could do worse than making a commitment to treat our interlocutors in all of their thickness. To never treat people as a slender thread—as if there were only one thing true about them, be it their race, criminal record, immigration status, or bank account. Even if the MAGA right tends to traffic in thin histories of thin founders, the people who do the trafficking are just as much the products of robust history as we are.
-Dave
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Dave,
Well put. I am not one to minimize the importance of relationships. It is very Putnamesque (as in Robert Putnam, one of the not-yet-cannonized because not-yet-dead figureheads that floats over Civic Fields).
I think one of the things I’ve struggled with is seeing folks who I know on some level are thick human beings act so incredibly thin. I see this on “both sides,” as they say. It seems like there is this almost gravitational pull toward thinness in U.S. civic and public life these days.
I appreciate you taking the time with me and Civic Fields. Here’s to thickness and relationships!
-Ned