- You became a historian and this has been the subject that you have spent years and years investigating . Why ?
- I wanted to know, why was it that the black part of town in my hometown didn’t have and , why was it that I didn’t know any white people who did yardwork for a living, and yet everybody I knew who did yardwork for a living was black, why was it that black women worked in white houses doing domestic work. Why is that ?
- Why wouldn’t the answer be something as simple as it’s the long of ?
- That’s the answer. But it’s far from a simple answer. You know. And I still find, teaching in the Afro-American Studies department, I still find that , , young African Americans, going into a predominantly and historically white institution, an intellectual institution, have to their own sense that maybe they can’t cut it. There are young black people growing up who think that studying, that being a scholar, is white and their race. That’s white supremacy. It doesn’t wear a hood and a robe (reference to the Ku-Klux-Klan), but it’s all the same.

Tim Tyson is a historian at the University of Wisconsin and Duke University.