Instill Respect For Teachers.

My Brother And I Had A Really Privileged Relationship With My Parents... They Treated Us Like Adults.

It Turns Out One Of My Ancestors Fought In The Continental Army, So I Was Inducted Into The Sons Of The American Revolution.

The First Slave Came To Florida In 1526. The First One We Know By Name, Esteban, Which Means Stephen, Came A Couple Of Years Later. So, We Start With The Stories Of Juan Garrido And Esteban To Show That African-american People Have Been Here A Century Longer Than Anyone Thought, And That The Diversity We See In The African-american Community Today Has Existed Since The Beginning.

We Really Invented The Genre Of Tracing Family Trees And Going Back As Far As We Could On The Paper Trail. When The Paper Trail Disappeared, We Used Dna Analysis. The Technology Was Just Being Invented That Allowed You To Trace Ancestry Through Dna.

We Have To Stop Making Excuses. One Of The Things That I'm Careful To Show Is The Horrendous Effects Of Institutional And Structural Racism, But In The End, You Can't Wait For White Man Or A Black Man To Come Riding In On A White Horse To Save You. We Have To Save Ourselves, And That's The Lesson Of "the African Americans."