Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future

Jesse Hagopian (he/him): On behalf of the Zinn Education Project, we would like to welcome everybody to our people’s history class with scholar Jason Stanley. This class is in preparation for the 5th Annual Teach Truth Day of Action. Across the country educators are under attack, laws banning honest education about race, about gender, about history, about justice, they’re spreading. They are threatening our students. They’re criminalizing teachers, and they’re denying young people the tools to understand the world. And we can’t stay silent. So, we are inviting you to join us for the national Teach Truth Day of Action and help us defend the freedom to learn.

I’m incredibly excited to welcome scholar Jason Stanley. He is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and a Distinguished Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Stanley has written seven books, including How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Jason, thank you so much for being with us.

Jason Stanley: It’s an honor to be in conversation with you, Jesse. I’ve admired the work you’ve been doing, and the work that the Zinn Education Project has been doing, and it was sort of — as you know from my book — a model of how to combat this authoritarian movement that we’re seeing, not just in the United States, but across the globe.

Hagopian: Oh, no doubt. I mean, it was a special treat to reach the end of your book, when you talk about what we do about rising fascism, and to see the Zinn Education Project highlighted as an organization that everybody should learn about, just really touched me. We appreciate you amplifying our work. I’ve been quoting your book very much in all the columns I’ve been writing recently.

I wanted to start with a question about what is fascism, because your work is widely known for helping people understand that fascism is not just a relic of the past, but really a set of strategies that continue to shape politics. Today you write, “Fascism is not a historical artifact, but a reoccurring political logic, one that depends on mythologizing a lost past, stoking a sense of victimhood, and building a hierarchy of purity.” So I was hoping you could talk to us about your definition of fascism, what its essential features are, and also how you would assess the degree to which the United States has historically exhibited those characteristics.

Stanley: Well, Hitler in Mein Kampf says the United States is the model for the national state that he wants to erect in Germany based on race. So if we listen to Hitler, fascism in the United States has an old legacy, the second Ku Klux Klan. As Nancy MacLean shows in her book Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, the second Ku Klux Klan is basically ideologically indistinguishable from the various versions of Nazism, the Völkisch parties arising in the 1920s in Germany. The idea was, there was the dominant group in the United States, the great race. Madison Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, is an American book that influenced Hitler. He read it when he was in prison. The great race is supposed to be white Americans, or as they’re now called Heritage Americans. The idea was that they’re threatened by an influx of immigrants.

An example, the sort of case that Madison Grant keeps coming back to is Polish Jews. The idea is the great replacement theory, and the great replacement theory is all over Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It’s obviously the central theme. And the idea is that the Marxist, leftist, Jewish globalists are opening the borders, using the media, the arts, [and] the institutions to argue for opening the borders, for allowing feminism and LGBTQ equality, in order to destroy the dominant group and their traditions. This is the ideological structure of fascism, and it justifies incredible violence against the perpetrators of this group. The perpetrators of great replacement, which, in the case of the Nazis, were Jews. But not orthodox Jews, not Zionist Jews or people living in Israel, but rather the idea was that leftist, Marxist Jews, globalists — you know me. I mean, I’m not a Marxist, but I would be the image of the kind of Jewish person behind great replacement theory. Who’s dominating the institutions? Who’s pushing feminism and LGBTQ equality and destroying the traditions of the dominant group? So this justifies violence against this group, which would then include opposition politicians, the media, and obviously immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, and the other scapegoats.

Hagopian: Yeah, no doubt. Thank you for breaking down that history, because the textbooks ask us to not include that history of how Hitler based his philosophy on the Eugenics movement here in the U.S., and the KKK. They don’t want to reveal the fact that the white supremacist ideology that was homegrown here was the basis for fascism. Your research and writing is such an important corrective to what many of us are asked to teach in our classrooms every day. So, I wanted to connect this to what makes education fascist, You write that “fascist education works by strategically erasing accounts of history and current events that include a diversity of perspective. This narrowing is inconsistent with multiracial democracy, antithetical to egalitarianism, and carries the possibility of conjuring mass violence.” You lay out five major themes of fascist education, as well, that I found fascinating for us to think about in terms of national greatness, national purity, national innocence, strict gender roles, and the vilification of the left. So, can you walk us through what makes a system of education fascist, and how can we tell when we’ve crossed that line? How do these themes show up in today’s schools? Which I think is why it’s important for educators and students to recognize them as part of a broader authoritarian project.

Stanley: Yeah, if you just imagine in your head a cartoonish version of an authoritarian state run by a leader. Well, I should add that the difference between American fascism, which in the Black intellectual tradition, Jim Crow has always been theorized as fascism. But in European fascism in the mid-century European movements there’s been a demagogic leader who creates a cult of personality. So if you want to look for a more characteristically European form, you would expect a demagogic leader who takes over a main political party and makes that main political party just about him. And that wasn’t the structure of Jim Crow. The structure of Jim Crow was a racial hierarchy.

But if you’ve got a situation like Putin’s Russia, a personalist version of this that looks much more like Nazi Germany, and you can fill examples in, as you will, from other contemporary countries of cultural leaders around taking over a major party. Now, if you look at my description of fascist education in Erasing History, you’ll see that it bears suspicious similarities to what we already have. And this is one thing that you see in the secondary literature on Nazism, that the Weimar Republic already claimed that Germany was the greatest nation ever. And Germany had a good claim. I mean, Germany’s university system was the best university system. The Weimar Republic had the culture in the 1920s in Germany, the science, the scientific achievements. Harvard University is the Humboldt University of its time, or Yale University.

So Germany and German education. What you see in some of the books behind me on German education, Nazi education before, was they didn’t have to radically transform things because the textbooks already said Germany was the greatest nation on earth. The textbooks already said Germany was the height of civilization. If you look at [W. E. B.] du Bois, he talks about this. He talks about how Europe conceives itself as the height of all civilization, and yet they give us these horrific wars. So fascist education says, if you just conjure up in your head like a cartoon model of an authoritarian society, it would be everyone worshiping the flag. The flag takes on some kind of sacred meaning. The nation is the greatest nation on earth. You teach the founding fathers as great men. The greatest men in history you teach.

You know, in Mein Kampf there’s a lot of education. Hitler says you should represent Germany as the successor of Greece and Rome. So if you look at your textbooks and they say your country is the successor of Roman democracy, of Greece and Rome, and the founders of your country are the inheritors of this tradition, this was Hitler from German education. This kind of glorification of the nation, this kind of inflated self-importance, and the idea, what Hitler says in Mein Kampf is, the exact quote is something like “German education has lost the art of picking great men of the navy to exemplify the nation’s greatness.” So the idea is, education would take the form of listing great men of the nation, representing the nation as the successor of Greece and Rome, saying, “It’s the greatest nation on earth,” taking its symbols like the flag and giving them a kind of holy, sacred status, eliminating non-dominant perspectives. I think you can’t really talk about fascist education without talking about democratic education, because democratic education requires everybody’s perspective. You can’t incorporate other perspectives unless you know about them. You don’t move a multicultural democracy by just relying on the dominant group knowing its own perspective. They can outvote everyone. You have to influence their votes by having them know the perspectives of other people. Fascist education gets rid of that, and thereby represents people who are not in the dominant group as threats to the nation.

Hagopian: Yeah, that’s so crucial. I especially appreciate the way you describe how fascist education in Germany didn’t have to be a complete rupture with the past, how it could take what already existed to its logical conclusion and emphasize the greatness of the nation above everyone else, just to a heightened degree. And how we’re seeing that reoccur is really striking at this moment. I wanted to drill down on that a little bit more to think about why fascists fear teachers so much. You argue that “Virtually every advancement that society has made towards greater equality began with educators. This is why fascists attack teachers.” So, if you could expand on that and talk to us about why educators pose such a threat to authoritarian regimes, and what does this tell us about the current wave of attacks on teachers? I think the Washington Post did a study that showed 160 educators have been fired or pushed out of schools around the country for teaching about race or gender. And this was back in 2022. So we know it’s a lot more since then. I think you know, UCLA has put out a study that shows now almost half of all students in the U.S. go to a school where their teacher is under these educational gag orders that restrict them from teaching about race or gender.

Stanley: Yea, this is a global fight. That’s one thing you’ve got to see. It’s not all these strategies. I’m a patriotic American. I’d like to say that I would. I would like for it to be the case that our authoritarianism is special and fancy in some way, but sadly, it’s not. It’s a boring paint-by-numbers authoritarianism. If you look at Hungarian schools, they’re filled with just nationalist claptrap. I’m mostly embarrassed that we seem to be influenced by tiny European backwaters like Hungary. If you look at what happened in Hungary, they took Imre Kertész off the core curriculum of the schools. He’s the only Hungarian Nobel Prize winner, in literature, post-war. He’s Jewish Holocaust survivor who brings to bear the perspective of Hungarian Jews. They removed his work, the only Nobel Prize winner, because, you know. Think about removing Nobel Prize winners in literature from curricula. Who will tell you about minority perspectives in that country?

And then they replaced Imre Kertész, with two very minor antisemitic writers from the 1920s whose work has never made it out of Hungary. Now, in Hungarian schools, you learn all this nationalist junk. It really helps just to have in your mind like a comic book that you might read in 5th grade of an authoritarian country. That’s what they’re trying to do here. The teachers just tell you how great the country is, how great the leader is. If they do any criticism of the country, then they risk being fired. Authoritarianism is a culture of fear and intimidation, so they encourage you to turn people in all the time. You know this from all the books on authoritarianism you’ve read. So you try to build up a culture of getting students to turn people in, getting families to turn people in, people turning their neighbors in for not adhering to state ideology. This is all kind of paint-by-numbers, and I think it does help to think of it as a comic book you might read when you’re in elementary school about Oceania, or about some authoritarian country. They’re trying to create fear, and I think they’ve been successfully creating fear. A democracy needs a society.

Plato, in The Republic, says democracy will lead to tyranny. I won’t go through the whole argument here, but it’s a persuasive one. All of democratic political philosophy after Plato is like, how do we stop democracy from turning into tyranny? And basically, the remedy is, you have an education system that makes people not afraid of each other. Because democracy turns into tyranny because a demagogue comes and says, “Look at these people. Look at the people who don’t have as many votes as you. They’re an existential threat to you. I’ll protect you from them.” Plato maps that out in Book 8. So, if you have an education system that teaches you about everybody, and that their freedom is not a threat to you, then you’re not going to be scared of them. You can ensure the safety of a democracy by making sure all perspectives are represented, and you can ensure you can keep people in fear, for instance, by not telling them about structural racism, or not telling them about mass incarceration so that they don’t understand it. When there’s a protest movement against those forces, it just comes across to them as a riot.

Hagopian: Yeah, misinformation is just so central to that project. I’ve been writing about how this attack on education is not peripheral to the rise of fascism or authoritarianism in this country. It’s actually a prerequisite, that you can’t get to a fascist rule without dominating the schools and teaching people to fear each other and fear other groups teaching people despair and powerlessness, that there’s nothing you can do.

Stanley: When you just teach people about great men rather than social movements, people feel history is the actions of great men. That’s what Hitler says in Mein Kampf, the education system is the teaching of the actions of great men, because fascism is a great man who does things for the nation. Hitler even says it’s the real German democracy when there’s one fascist leader because that person has all the responsibility, and there’s no freedom in a democracy because if everyone makes the policy, then no one is responsible. Yeah, I won’t go into Hitler’s logic, but he says if you’re just teaching great men, then people feel powerless because you’re telling them that change only happens with one great man who does something. Of course, change doesn’t happen that way.

Hagopian: Exactly. I mean, that’s what all of our lessons are aimed at, helping young people see how history is shaped by social movements, by ordinary people who are fed up with what’s happening in their society, and looking at the way people have collectively united to change society. One of the things I really appreciated about Erasing History is that you note that even within repressive educational systems, teachers can play a crucial role in subverting authoritarian narratives. You write, “Black teachers in segregated schools often taught students material and ideas outside the state curriculum, planting seeds of critical thought and resistance, even within a system designed to suppress them.” And last week we got to host the directors of the Archive.

Stanley: You hosted my friends, Jarvis Givens and Imani Perry. Yes, in that chapter, and Jarvis, he’s a big influence on me. His work on Carter G. Woodson. Obviously, my discussions with Professor Givens over the years have been very influential on me, and the Black Teacher Archive, which I discuss alongside the Zinn Education Project in the final chapter of my book, both of these are models. And I draw on the Black Teacher Archive to give examples of resistance.

Hagopian: Yeah, no doubt. I’ve learned so much from Jarvis, too. We have that in common. I mean, Fugitive Pedagogy is such a brilliant book, and I’m so glad that you drew from that text to help us understand the way authoritarianism and fascist ideologies were at play during Jim Crow, and how Black teachers resisted. Maybe you could talk just a little bit about how Black teachers’ examples can guide educators today who are being forced to teach under censorship regimes and curriculum bans?

Stanley: Well, that’s a great question, because we’re obviously in a greater surveillance environment right now. Obviously, Jim Crow was a horrifying situation. But they didn’t have video cameras, and they were in segregated schools, so they had less fear of being reported. Now, again, go back to the comic book, we’re in a situation where everyone’s being encouraged to turn each other in. There are online forms to turn your professors in in states like Tennessee, for teaching critical race theory. We’re in a different kind of threat situation now, as we move into this total surveillance state. But Black teachers preserved the histories of slave rebellions, the agency of Black Americans. They preserved the histories that counteracted the toxic white supremacist ideology about the end of Reconstruction — that it was because of corrupt politicians, the sort of things that Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction collects. The idea that Black Americans didn’t free themselves. That quote that Du Bois gives of Black Americans are the only group in human history that were freed without lifting a finger to free themselves. So, Black teachers kept that record.

Recently I was in Hudson, Ohio, speaking at the Hudson Library, and I didn’t know anything about Hudson, Ohio. As I got there, I realized it’s where John Brown is from. I did know some stuff about how textbooks represented John Brown. I remember what my textbook said about John Brown. They all said he was some crazy white dude. And John Brown was one of the most heroic people in U.S. history. But I’ve never seen a single textbook that represented him as a completely rational, ethical person who was doing exactly what any hero would do under the circumstances. That is not how John Brown is represented in textbooks, as the most heroic white man of the 19th century. So fighting back against these misrepresentations, particularly not representing the agency of Black Americans in the freedom struggle. As you said, Jesse, it’s all about agency. In fact, denazification, John Dewey was very influential in denazification, and the West German denazification in the education system was all about granting agency to students. It was all about student-led curricula, student government, student journal, student newspapers, things like this. Agency. And that’s what you saw Black teachers doing.

Hagopian: Yeah, no doubt. It’s an inspiring legacy. And there’s so much to learn from digging into that archive. I’m glad you raised John Brown, because I feel like one of the central arguments that we hear from what I call uncritical race theorists on attacking honest education, they say that we’re all trying to shame white kids, and that’s why social justice teachers got involved in education. We’re just out here trying to teach them to hate themselves and their family. I don’t actually think that’s what those uncritical race theorists actually fear. I think their real fear is that we’re teaching them to embrace John Brown and to be proud of white people like the Grimké sisters who organized against slavery, or Howard Zinn, who wasn’t just a historian, but an activist and an organizer. I think what they really fear is that we’re teaching a different tradition of white resistance that’s about multiracial collaboration for social justice.

Stanley: I mean, John Brown is the most terrifying person. I once saw John Carlos speak at Yale. He was one of the two Black athletes, with Tommie Smith, who raised their fists.

Hagopian: A friend of mine.

Stanley: He’s great. Isn’t he brilliant? One of the questions was, how come every representation of that omits Peter Norman, the Australian white sprinter whose career was over, who never got to race again because he joined them in their protest? Tommie Smith and John Carlos were his pallbearers at his funeral in Australia, and Carlos said, “Well, he’s like John Brown. He must be erased from history.”

Hagopian: That’s right, that’s exactly right. And that’s what they’re trying to do, to erase any example of multiracial solidarity for antiracist society.

Stanley: Like when Du Bois talks about poor whites, the poor whites who refuse to fight in the Civil War on the side of the South. We don’t benefit from this.

Hagopian: It’s got to be left out of the textbook.

Stanley: Exactly.

Hagopian: And it has been for so long, even before Trump’s attacks. I think we’re seeing him just take as a starting place the corporate textbooks that have already been silent on Black history, and now enforce it with new teeth.

Stanley: Which is what you see in the secondary literature on Nazism.

Hagopian: Yeah, it’s stunning. Thank you so much for that analysis. We are going to be back in just a few minutes to continue this conversation.

[breakout rooms]

Hagopian: Alright, alright. Welcome back, everybody. We appreciate it. I hope that you have had great, rich discussions in your breakout rooms. I’m excited to be back with professor Jason Stanley. I have more questions for you, if you’re up for it.

Stanley: Being in conversation with you, Jesse, is an honor and a pleasure.

Hagopian: Right on. Let’s keep going. I really appreciated something else about your book. In your discussion of Israel you show how education has been used as a tool to uphold settler colonialism and justify ongoing violence against Palestinians, and that really touched my heart. I just co-edited a book with Rethinking Schools called Teaching Palestine, because it’s such a deafening silence in our curriculum. I was so happy to read these words in your book, when you said “the law makes explicit that the Israeli state is a non-democratic apartheid state. The unsurprising result of a founding ideology premised on erasing the history of the land’s previous non-Jewish inhabitants.” So many people leave out Palestine and Israeli apartheid in their broader analysis of authoritarianism and fascism, so I was hoping you could talk about what parallels you see between the erasure of Palestinian history in Israeli schools and the curriculum bans and truth suppression happening here in the U.S? And how would you describe the connection between settler colonialism and fascism? This is something I’ve been grappling with myself, trying to understand what language is most accurate to use.

Stanley: Yeah, in Hitler’s second book he talks about the genocide of the Indigenous people of the United States admiringly. I mean, it’s not like the Nazis venerated the Indigenous people of America as one with nature, but they also thought their genocide was an example of the powerful dominating the powerless — colonialism. The literature on fascism by theorists like Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt and Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes that it begins with colonialism. Césaire says Hitler was the worst man on earth, not because of what he did — which was done to many Africans by Europeans — but of who he did it to — other white people. I don’t fully agree with that. I think that what white people do to each other is awful, as well historically, as Du Bois notes about World War I.

I was just in Hamburg, and there was a sign of a memorial for the 40,000 men of Hamburg who were killed in World War I. So, you know, Europeans can mass slaughter on their own. But colonialism is . . . There’s this boomerang hypothesis that we get from Césaire, and it’s in Arendt as well, that it was the savagery of colonialism. I mean, in 1946, du Bois noticed that, which is very early for him to notice that it’s central to the Nazi ideology, the loss of their African colonies, their place in the sun. And that’s why Hitler is like, “Okay, let’s go do that in Eastern Europe. We lost our colonies in Africa? Well, let’s gain some over there.” So, colonialism. And there’s a structure, and this is a structure I’m elucidating in Erasing History, as you know. It’s a structure that your work also follows and recognizes, which is that this kind of erasure . . . What you do in colonialism is, you say the group you’re colonizing has no history. So Russians say there’s no history of Ukraine. You know, it’s all made up. There was never a history of Ukraine. There were just Russians.

In Israel, the official ideology is that Palestinians don’t have a history. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o talks about how at the schools he went to, like Alliance High School, everybody knew British history. They were educated in British history, but they didn’t know the history of the land they were on. They could recite ad nauseum about the different British royal families and their legacies, but they didn’t know anything about Kikuyu history. That’s why Jomo Kenyatta facing Mount Kenya is so powerful, because he gives you a social history of the Kikuyu people that was completely erased by British colonialism. This is what fascism is predicated on.

Hitler says there are three groups of people: the civilization creators, the civilization destroyers — those were the Jews — and those who have no civilization. Those were like Slavs, for him. There’s one group that has civilization and they have history. So, what you do is you erase a group’s history, and then you can do anything with them because they don’t have a history. [Look at] the British in Kenya. They took all the Kikuyu land, they penned up the Kikuyu in dusty areas, and they could only leave the reservations if they had a job on a white farm. Then they said, “Okay, but we’re giving you Christianity.”

I don’t know how much we want to go into it, but I would like to talk about settler colonial practices versus settler colonial states, because most states are settler colonial states. Canada, the United States. As my colleague, Ned Blackhawk, makes clear in The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Indigenous people were settler colonialists of each other all the time. Indigenous empires were constantly at war and taking other people’s land. And so, humans are humans. Settler colonial practices are deeply problematic. But calling something a settler colonial nation is, in many cases, just calling it a nation. But settler colonial practices and genocide are things that can easily go together, because if you say the people have no history, they have no claim to this land, where are they going to go? What do you do with them? And there you have mass violence. The Nazis said, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of the Jews. They don’t belong here.” And they considered sending them elsewhere. The Nazis didn’t turn anti-Zionist until the mid 1930s, because that was part of the matter. Okay, they’re going somewhere else. That’s why you do see a lot of anti-semites being pro-Israel, because they’re like, “Okay, that’s a Jewish country. This is a Christian one.” Or whatever.

Einstein and Arendt worried that Israel would one day become fascist because it was based on ethno-nationalism. And I think it’s without doubt an apartheid state. I don’t agree with the racial stuff, with “oh, this is a white supremacist project,” because then you’re marching into . . . I think this is just like the crux of the debate, and I think it’s a wrong move, because 55 percent of Israel is not white, and the Mizrahi are the largest Jewish group and they’re pretty much all Likud and Netanyahu supporters. Not all, but the great majority. And the Ashkenazi Jews, the one white group, regularly vote majority against Likud. So I think the talk of white supremacy occludes things. But it’s definitely the settler colonial practices that we see, the very significant erasures. And there’s work by Dr. Hadeel S. Abu Hussein, an Israeli Palestinian lawyer, who has a book on critical Palestinian studies showing how the land laws in Israel, which are facially neutral, have tilted things towards Jews rather than Palestinians. So those kinds of analogies hold very strongly.

Hagopian: Thank you so much for including that, especially in this time, when we’re seeing schools bombed and . . .

Stanley: Scholasticide.

Hagopian: Yes, scholasticide occur, and we just have to be . . .

Stanley: We’re seeing a genocide.

Hagopian: Yeah, we have to be able to name the genocide and the scholasticide and include it in our analysis. 

Stanley: Especially, as Peter Beinart just wrote in The New York Times, they’re also trying to erase who’s Jewish. Something like 38 percent of American Jews under 44 think that Israel is an apartheid state. Similar percentages think it there’s a genocide happening. So we are not considered people. I mean, I’m not under 44, unfortunately.

Hagopian: I wouldn’t have known. But it’s a generational fight among American Jews, and they’re just erasing that fact. It’s beautiful to see, especially younger Jewish people, but Jewish people of all levels just say, “Never again for anyone,” and stand up for Palestinian rights. That’s the kind of solidarity that is going to make a difference.

We just have a minute here, but I wanted to end by asking you, given all you’ve studied about the role of education and enabling fascism, what do you believe are some of the most effective ways for the educators at this session, for the students that are right here with us, and other community members, how can they resist? And what lessons can we draw from past movements to guide our struggle?

Stanley: Well, I think you know the Zinn Education Project provides materials. People should do reading groups on their own; the kind of organizing around collective knowledge, collective education, outside formal structures, because the formal structures are going to be surveilled and policed. But reading groups, finding material yourself, reading Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro. These classic texts. Obviously Black Reconstruction. It’s a little long, but it’s the greatest. It’s world history, really. It gives you a characterization of a structure that is everywhere. Like you use race to break apart people so they can’t form a labor movement. That happens everywhere. It’s an international text informing yourself about what’s happening in other countries, because what’s happening here is what has happened and is happening in other countries. Informing yourself; so read widely about India, Israel, [and] Hungary. I was recently in Tennessee, and my friend Justin Jones, the young state representative, when I met him, his first question was, “What do you know about the Danube Institute?” The Danube Institute is Viktor Orbán’s, the autocrat in Hungary, it’s his think tank, and the Tennessee State Legislature had passed legislation praising the Danube Institute. That’s the level of interpenetration that exists. So having reading groups, having little campuses off site, I think, is essential. Because once you see this, what’s happening in the structures, it really isn’t so scary, because it’s like, “Okay, this is exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, and they’re doing it.”

Hagopian: Our ancestors overthrew slavery and Jim Crow. We can link arms and do it again today. Thank you so much, Jason. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us here at the Zinn Education Project.

Stanley: It’s a tremendous honor. Knowing that Howard Zinn’s work, the perspective that you find embedded in Zinn’s work, and the long history of the labor movement and Black liberation and the women’s movement, women’s Liberation, LGBTQ liberation, all of those movements become represented with the labor movement, as well, which is very central.

Hagopian: Those are all the struggles we’re trying to keep alive and teach young people about. So, thanks for being part of this movement.

While this transcript was edited, there may be minor errors or typos — if you notice something you believe to be incorrect, please contact us at zep@zinnedproject.org.