How to Talk About America’s Complicated Past

An interview with social psychologist Dolly Chugh

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A few years ago, in what seemed like a feat of parenting greatness, the social psychologist Dolly Chugh and her husband decided to take their daughters on a family road trip through the Great Plains. The idea was to show them where the girls of Little House on the Prairie had grown up, and to learn a bit of American history along the way.

Chugh had read (and later, watched) the stories of Laura, Mary and the other Ingalls children as a kid growing up in Texas and New Jersey, and was delighted to find that her own children enjoyed the quintessentially American story, too. At a general store in South Dakota, they bought prairie dresses and acted out their favorite scene from the book. Chugh found herself humming “This land is your land, this land is my land” as they traversed the wide open, blue-sky scenery. All in all, it was a parenting win. 

The Ingalls family in the Little House TV show, 1974. (Getty Images)

Only later, did Chugh pause to consider some of the more disturbing messages from that classic story — like, for instance, that the Ingalls family home was built on Native land. Both Chugh and her husband are children of immigrants; had she done her biracial daughters a disservice by not explaining the more complex realities of that classic story?

Chugh is a psychologist and college professor, one who studies what it means to be a good person. So of course, she started thinking about this missed opportunity like a social scientist. Why hadn’t she been able to grapple with the uncomfortable reality of what those books represented in the moment? How much of it had to do with her own shame? Wasn’t there a way she could have explained to her kids that the Ingalls family were both heroes and colonizers?

Those are precisely the questions that Chugh explores in her new book, A More Just Future, but applied to America at large. How do we talk about our country’s past — our history that is racist, sexist, or whitewashed — while still acknowledging our problems, and progress, in the present?

I met Chugh a few years ago, when she invited me to speak to her business school students at NYU about my own book. We sat down to talk about her new book, problematic heroes, and how to grapple with “re-learning” our past. These are excerpts from our interview:

Jessica: You write in the book that you’re not a historian, or even a history buff. So why do we need a psychologist to help us grapple with our past?

Dolly Chugh: One of the good things about the present moment is that we have much more access to fuller historical narratives, whether it be the 1619 Project, which challenged my understanding of how slavery shaped the world we live in, or books like Caste. But for me, unlearning some of the history I’d been taught was also a psychological challenge. It was grief, at mourning the heroic yet hypocritical figures I grew up admiring. It was guilt, at sacrificing the truth of holidays like Thanksgiving — which was a strained gathering between Native people and “settlers” they saw as invading their land, bringing plague and warfare — in favor of the more comforting fable, in which friendly Indians and respectful colonists feasted in cross-cultural bliss. I felt shame for what happened in the past, and then, shame again for my ignorance about it.

It’s interesting to learn how so much of our history is not just whitewashed — with the bad parts left out — but also smoothed over for narrative’s sake, removing some of the complexity. I’m thinking right now about Rosa Parks.

Rosa Parks is a perfect example, and one whose story we have all heard a million times — or, at least, we thought we had. The story we learned was that Parks was an elderly Black seamstress on her way home from work, who refused to give up her seat on the bus because her feet were tired, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But this is not actually true. In reality, Parks was a lifelong activist, and this was a planned boycott. She wasn’t fatigued, physically, she was, as she has put it, “tired of giving in.” (For those who are interested, there’s an excellent new movie on the subject.)

Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. (Underwood Archives/Getty Images)

I refer to these as “racial fables.” They are neat and satisfying, but mislead us about how change happens. In fables, there is a clear cause and effect, good guys always beat bad guys, and our heroes are flawless. Because of the fable, we don’t see the many failed attempts at change and the massive resistance to the change. We expect a heroic action, followed by high fives all around. But that isn’t how it looked then or how it will look now. The problem with the fable is that we expect change in the present to look like what we think it looked like in the past. When it doesn’t, we declare the work futile, rather than realizing that change is messy.  

It can be overwhelming to realize how much of what we’ve learned about American history is wrong, but equally overwhelming to think about how we “unlearn” it all. Where do we begin?

One thing we can do is allow ourselves to see paradox. For example, it is a paradox that our nation’s forefathers built a nation on equality while many of them also enslaved other human beings. This kind of contradiction can be tricky to process, because our brains are wired to seek out consistency. But the reality is that two things can be true at once, and we need to give ourselves permission to see those contradictions. We can be a nation built on equality and our forefathers can have done some really terrible things — their behavior doesn’t have to completely undermine what our country stands for. 

So how should we think about these lessons? Is there a way to both acknowledge the wrong in certain stories — or the harm done by certain people — and to acknowledge their place in history?

I think there absolutely is. We can acknowledge that Columbus changed the course of the modern world, while also dispelling the notion that he “discovered” a land on which millions of people already lived, and to whom he was quite brutal. In my family, the focus of Thanksgiving is about gratitude, being together, and food — not on the holiday’s supposed origin. My husband and I have also very intentionally exposed our children to more knowledge and culture from Native American tribes over the past decade. 

So, can I ask: Do your girls still like Little House? Do you?

Absolutely! The Ingalls were a hard-working, loving family and remain powerful role models. And, they were perpetuating and benefiting from a system that many of us would describe as unjust. Both of those things are true. I will say that while I missed opportunities to explain our nation’s complicated history with my kids when they were young, they now teach me on a pretty regular basis the stuff I have wrong!

Dolly Chugh’s new book, A More Just Future, is out now.