Candis Watts SmithEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment. In Black Evidence: A History and a Warning (W.W. Norton, 2026), political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, du...

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment. In Black Evidence: A History and a Warning (W.W. Norton, 2026), political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, du...

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment. In Black Evidence: A History and a Warning (W.W. Norton, 2026), political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, du...

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment. In Black Evidence: A History and a Warning (W.W. Norton, 2026), political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, du...

Democracy Works host Candis Watts Smith joins Cara Santa Maria on the Talk Nerdy podcast to discuss her new book, Black Evidence: A History and a Warning . From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment. In Black Evidence , Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament. Talk Nerdy host Cara Santa Maria is a clinical health psychologist, science communicator, podcaster, and Emmy Award-winning journalist. In addition to Talk Nerdy, she co-hosts the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and coauthored Skeptics Guide to the Universe book. Subscribe to Talk Nerdy Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Transcript: - Hello, and welcome to the "What's Career Got To Do With It" podcast, where we hope to provide a space for honest conversation and information that encourages the listener to take the next steps in their career journey. Wherever you're at in this process, we hope this episode will meet you with affirmation, guidance, and maybe some laughs along the way. - Joining us today is Dr. Candace Watts Smith, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Professor of Political Science. As we discuss and answer or many to the question, how do we tell our own story? - Welcome. - Thank you. - Thank you for coming. - Much appreciated. - Woo. - You've already experienced this unrecorded, so I'll just- - It's super sidebar. - Okay, the way you introduced this episode, it was like, "Listen." - Listen to what I have to- - Listen. - Okay, all right. ♪ To the sound here ♪ - Starting off hot, y'all, welcome, good morning. - Welcome, that's all I can say. - We're happy you're here. - I am thrilled to be here with you. - And I think the first question in this entire thing just is in the title. So we would love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself and tell our listeners about you. - Yeah, sure, thank you for having me. I'm grateful for the invitation and to be in conversation with y'all. I wear many hats around here. This summer, I think really is indicative of that. So I started out, I had to take a trip to Louisville and DC and that was, you know, both of those were in my capacity as VPUE as the Vice Provost. The DC trip was amazing because I was meeting with founders of new universities. So, you know, Duke is turning 100, but meeting a university founder on day one or year one, just kind of what innovations are they doing at their school and how can we think about incorporating their insights here at Duke? I had to go to Rutgers as a faculty member, thinking about how can we incorporate strategies into our classrooms for difficult dialogues. And I mean, we got an election coming up. We got, you know, the AI chatter, we got conflicts all over the globe. We got a lot going on, and so how do we get students and faculty members to think critically and have productive conversations? I gotta spend a week in South Carolina on a writing retreat, trying to write a textbook that is not boring on American politics and a book about listening and listening to our fellow citizens to enhance democracy. And then I spent a lot of time on 85 going to Charlotte, to the National Whitewater Center with my family. We live in Southgate, where I'm the Faculty in Residence. And now I'm here with y'all. So just about myself, Ben, I'm Vice Provost, faculty member, faculty in residence, triple Dukie, and I'm grateful to be here with y'all. - Come on. - Ah. - Come on. - We're grateful to have you. I think hearing you just even begin to start with, all right, this is kind of what's been going on in my life and then hit the high points too of, this is a little bit about me as well. One of the things that we encounter on a day-to-day basis with our students is responding to a question like that and how to navigate that, how to tell stories. And even in your work, just hearing, listening to stories and how they emerge out of wherever they're coming from and how they're getting started. And also from the political sphere of how we tell our story in a politics standpoint. And as a country, how do we tell our story? That is such a big question that so many of our students have. And oftentimes, they get caught up in the very beginning and they want to list the resume, or they want to list a little bit about maybe an accomplishment too much, or talk about one accomplishment too much and forget all the other things that make them who they are. Maybe that life side of things, "Oh, I traveled down to the Whitewater Center with my family." These are important parts of their story that I often think they miss. And I would love to hear from yo