Arts and Culture reporter Imani Spence sat down with author Baynard Woods in early July to speak about his book “Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness.” In the book, Woods talks about how his South Carolina upbringing primed him to accept white supremacist ideals and how he grew to understand their insidious nature. The interview has been condensed for clarity.

Imani Spence: When did you start to write this book?

Baynard Woods: In some ways I started it right after the [Freddie Gray] uprising, on the day that Dylann Roof, who grew up ten miles from me, drove down to Charleston, South Carolina, went to Emanuel AME Church, and murdered nine people, including a man named Clementa Pinckney, who was a state senator. My family had taught me to have some kind of pride and a connection to the Pinckney family. I wrote a story for The Washington Post that day. I had started looking more into what was actually handed down to me because Roof, not only did he grow up ten miles from me, but he had that same bowl cut that I had as a little kid, honestly.

Roof went to those places as as pilgrimages. Like, he recognized the truth of what they were in a way that most white people were ignoring. After the murder of Trayvon Martin, [Roof] had become curious about race and about whiteness. What he found was the conservative Citizens Council [Council of Conservative Citizens], which struck me is exactly the same thing. In the book, there’s a scene where my friend Glenn found the KKK, or David Duke’s nicer National Organization [Association] for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) pamphlet. And so that was when I really started thinking I have to ... figure this out. But it took a long time.

During the Trump years, I reported on the alt-right, and the white supremacist movements very deeply. And then immediately after finishing “I Got a Monster” [a book about the Gun Trace Task Force that Woods co-wrote with Brandon Soderberg], I started writing the proposal for this book, and started writing it before [”I Got a Monster”] was out, during the intermediate intervening time, waiting for it to come out. I realized it was easy for me as a white person to say, like, ‘Oh, look how bad the cops are.’ I realized that cops and white people follow the same logic. It’s the logic that we, as white people or police, expect to be protected by the law but not bound by the law, and expect everyone else to be bound by the law, not protected by the law. They realize that was codified in the so-called slave codes of South Carolina of 1740. And that that came down to me into my way of thinking, directly from there until then. So that ... even felt more urgent that I couldn’t be like, let myself off the hook just by writing about how bad Wayne Jenkins [of the Gun Trace Task Force] is, that I had to push beyond that. And so this was an attempt to do that.

Yeah. So were you able to kind of co-research these books? You said you finished ‘I Got a Monster,’ but it wasn’t out yet when you pitched this book, so you didn’t do any research at the same time?

Well, so the way that books work has that staggered thing, so we turn in the first draft of ‘I Got a Monster,’ then I wrote the proposal for this. I sent that proposal off, we got the edits back, then, you know, got edits from my agent on the proposal. ... I sold it at the end of December 2019. I was super lucky to be able to go to South Carolina for the month of February 2020 and spend time in the archives. One of the archive trips ended up being a big scene in the book: where I go to an archive in Clarendon County with my dad. The archivist, a young Black woman, and I discover this document that says, ‘Dr. Woods plus maiden slave’ at the top. The document has this whole genealogy of a Black man that descended from the same great-grandfather whose crime I was researching.

So it was a valuable trip. Little did I know that the two weeks after I was back, everything was shut down, and I was never able to do an in-person archive trip again. Jessica Douglas, a local archivist, helped me find a really crucial document — the coroner’s report of the 1871 assassination [of Peter Lemon]. I found a lot of other stuff online. It was ... also my dad’s last trip that he was ever able to leave the house really again. During COVID, he got diagnosed with ALS. And he was dying as I wrote the book, so yeah, the books overlap in considerable ways, but there was never a moment when I was like, one day, we’re spending half the day writing this and half the day writing that. I wrote on this book, until the beginning of July 2020, turned in some chapters, and then took all of July and August off of this to do all of those articles, related to ‘Monster’ and during that uprising of 2020.

When did your editor come to you? And was like, “This is not where it needs to be, it needs to be a different format.”

No. So I mean, this is crazy. The timeline was just so so intense. I filed it on exactly the moment of the 150th anniversary of the murder of Peter Lemon, April 19th around 5 p.m. of 1871. I sent [the draft] on April 19th at 5 p.m. of 2021. I left the next day and went to South Carolina, and met with George Frierson, an activist in Clarendon County who I had been corresponding with for a long time, and we went to the location where Peter Lemon was killed.

I sold the book to Hachette books, and then Krishan Trotman, my editor, got her own imprint, Legacy Lit. So it was a long time in between. She called me on that day and was like, look, as a whole, even the chapters that she had approved earlier, just weren’t working. She said, ‘You know, I bought this book, because I wanted to know what it feels like to be white right now, and what I got was a historical treatise, all from the outside, and I think you’re kind of copping out.’ [Trotman] basically was like, ‘Give me new pages in two weeks, or I don’t know that we’re going to be able to do this.’

The whole book was written and copy edited and everything less than a year after it was started. One chapter, actually, from the old draft, made it: the chapter where I’m teaching in D.C. Everything else was pretty much brand new, started in late August of last year. I wrote it insanely fast because, as it happened, my dad was very badly dying and in just awful shape. I was staying in South Carolina while flying back and forth, staying up all night because he needed his legs adjusted constantly. He was just in misery. He was a major part of the book.

I was able to use that emotion. The paragraphs and sentences proved to be this nice levee system for dealing with the hurricane-force emotions. Also, the emotions allowed me to sneak around the rationalizations in my mind.

Writing ‘I Got a Monster’ was all about dealing with liars; reporting and learning how to deal with liars. This was the worst, pointing at myself. But the emotions, and the speed of it allowed me to get past that, and which is terrifying, also, and to be vulnerable, and to be really just as open and honest as I could. And so the one rule was, like, just do not lie in any way to yourself, and don’t try to make yourself better, and don’t rationalize.

Who was Peter Lemon?

So Peter lemon was born into bondage in Clarendon County, South Carolina, in 1842. I haven’t been able to find, as it’s so often the case, much about his life during his period of bondage. But when the Civil War broke out, he fought for the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry with Daniel Chamberlain, leading it, who later became the governor of South Carolina. Lemon returned to the state once the war was over, and Reconstruction had begun. He was elected the chief county commissioner in 1868. It was such a violent election that year. Hundreds of people were murdered by the white supremacists who were effectively waging a guerrilla war. They were using it to stop the formerly enslaved people from being able to exercise their franchise for the first time.

Lemon also was running a militia then, to fight against those groups who were known as the Ku Klux, and became the Ku Klux Klan conspiracy. There were a number of Black militias in the county and all throughout the South. Lemon was high-ranking in one of these. He also leased land from a carpetbagger named Leander Biggers, who was also from Massachusetts. Biggers was a white man who held Republican meetings at his store for the local officials like Lemon.

The Klan started a huge campaign of violence in the winter of 1871, leading into that spring, and they first took out ... and beat and tortured both Lemon and Biggers. Both left but came back, then the story gets really convoluted and weird here.

Lemon was given another letter that said to leave town or die. He believed that he knew who wrote that letter and he wasn’t going to take them seriously anymore. So, he crosses out his own name, that it was addressed to, and writes the name of a white man above it. The white man who was known in congressional testimony as ‘the eccentric druggist,’ and that’s who I believe, it’s my great-grandfather in the story. That man attacks Lemon with a pistol, is held back, and doesn’t kill him. Then Lemon gets another letter calling him to meet someone in Manning. In the main town, he goes there, no one shows up on his way back, he’s ambushed and assassinated.

I gathered from the testimony, it was six to eight white men that ended up ambushing him out in the country on the road. And that’s, that’s where Frierson and I went and found that place, and also found where he was, where he was buried, and then where those protests started from the streets.

So, how did you link up with George Frierson?

I had been finding these documents and sending them back to the Clarendon County archives. And the archivist there, M.L. Witherspoon, who’s spectacular, she was interested in what I was sending in stuff. Then she writes me and says, ‘Hey, there’s a guy named George Frierson, you really ought to meet him. He came in asking about Peter Lemon.’ Frierson was a Vietnam vet. He gives historical presentations, particularly on Black veterans from that area. He had come across, I believe, Lemon’s military record, but didn’t know much else about him; didn’t know about his political career. We were able to team up. Frierson’s previous experience in the George Stinney case just taught me so much about how possible ways that we can attempt to repair the past, or at least, about what our obligation to the past is, in some regard.

Frierson is a person who also was helping kind of piecing together things about Lemon. But then … he was not a descendant of Lemon’s. Did you testify in court for one of Lemon’s descendants?

So Frierson and I gave a presentation to the Clarendon County Council.

We were telling the story of Lemon and asking that he be memorialized by the county, pointing out to them that he died doing the same thing they were doing, serving the county. An easy way for them to [honor Lemon] would be to name the county’s administrative building after him. At that meeting, and then also, as a deacon of the church where Lemon was buried, is ... a deacon there who does believe that he’s a descendent of Lemon. His last name is Lemon. He hadn’t traced it back in an official way. But the graveyard is full of a lot of Lemons and his family came from Clarendon County. So then I spoke to him, he’s the deacon of the church, about buying a tombstone to put in the graveyard, there, as a memorial stone.

The two prongs that we’re working on is the public one of having the county acknowledge them, and the state as well. We’d love to get a historical marker at the place where he was assassinated. Then privately, for me and for my family, to provide a memorial in the gravesite as a way of some small sort of personal reparation. It’s not just the county government, or the structural system or anything, it was people who then passed on things to us. We have an obligation to do this.

When I was reading the books and the reflections that came out of it, it does feel like your your adult, today intuition, kind of reframing. How did you think of that?

It was both. It was the collaborative. I was shielding myself from being deeply intuitive, but that is where I function best. I function best in chaos. I function best with my back to the wall. Nicole [King, Woods’ wife] always says when there’s danger, she runs away from it, and I run towards it. And yeah, so like, it was her being, like, you’re going to be just ... you have to be as utterly honest as you can.

And I was ... it was a weird situation, too, or an interesting situation, because I was like, the white dude on this BIPOC press. D. Watkins is also on Trotman’s imprint, Legacy Lit. So we were trading, trading back and forth and back and forth. So there was a point really, really late where I’m like, I’m actually the only white [person who] was read[ing] this book. We better get some white sensitivity readers ... so we got my agent and Nicole and Brandon [Soderberg] to read it. Nicole was the only person who had veto power, also. And to her ever-loving credit she didn’t exercise it. Yeah, Krishan kept pushing every time. She was like, ‘This rings false. This doesn’t seem right, let’s go deeper.’ And her edits weren’t ever like, rewrites, so she wasn’t she wasn’t saying ‘You need to be intuitive.’ But she said, ‘You’re doing it from the outside and you need to do it from the inside.’

How did you decide to include these specific stories from your childhood?

The answer to how was very laboriously and through discarding hundreds of other ones. What I looked for were the moments where there was a gap between my self-conception and my my objective or material reality at a given moment. I tried to mine those gaps. I thought in those gaps, for the moment, that I’d be able to see whiteness at work. I started, though, with my mom, when she’s explaining to me how the Yankees stormed the capital in South Carolina. I realized that I didn’t have a voice for childhood. But I did have a voice when I was 14 and was skateboarding and I was starting to understand a little bit more about my place in the world and questioning things. And so then when she’s [Krishan Trotman] like, ‘This isn’t gonna work,’ it became obvious where to start.

There were countless things that were thrown away. There were countless things that were only added at the last minute that I thought I couldn’t add, but then I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I have to [put these in] in order to really be honest.’ That was hard. Because sometimes you’re like, ‘Is this my story to tell?’

I tried to narrow it to stories that were really mine to tell or centered on my reaction to something. And ones that didn’t make me look too good. I want the kid like Dylann Roof, or the children of the people who are banning CRT, to sneak this book under their beds. I want them to be like, the sex and the drugs and the drinking and the smoking, and the, you know, kind of Kerouac-ness or whatever, or Philip Rothiness, or something like that, to make them want to [be] sneaking around rather than feel like homework. And the same way that ‘Monster’ [does], we wanted to use the form of the thriller to sneak all of these antiracist and antifascist ideas into the form of the thriller without ever having to say those ideas... by showing them.

Here I wanted to be able to make a book for the people who are never going to read a corporate training manual, like ‘White Fragility’ or something. Who aren’t going to be reached like that; who aren’t joiners, and aren’t going to take a workshop. You know, the people who are loner weirdo people like I was. The people who think that they were liberal or progressive or ally or woke or whatever word. I also have thought it many times, and all of the ways that you’re still involved in the economy of white supremacy, and that it is an economy that was invented alongside of capitalism, and works like it.

It’s it’s really important that white people who are trying to do better not pretend we’re already perfect. Then we’re lying. We’re, you know, condemning everyone else while having flaws, huge flaws, in our own ways. And we see, oh, the way that we’re an ally is by shunning someone or condemning someone else, rather than looking at the ways that we are actively benefiting from this economy.

Then trying to see how we can put ourselves in the way of the harm that economy does. And use the power that we have to play defense against the larger economy itself. And so it wasn’t gonna work if I described all of the external conditions, and it wasn’t gonna work if I was holier-than-thou in any way whatsoever.

How do you feel about journalistic ethics you’ve been taught? In context, with how you’re like approaching renouncing your first book, and hoping to do the same with this one. But every journalist is writing so much. Have you thought about that?

At [The] Real News [Network], we had a lot of discussions about that, and I was sort of responsible for enforcing that and teaching journalistic ethics.

I had column at the City Paper called Conflicts of Interest, and it was sort of a media reporting column, because it’s such a small town and especially as an arts reporter, everyone knows everyone, as in this situation. [Imani Spence: Baynard and I have known each other many years. First meeting when I was a producer at the Marc Steiner Show where I produced his podcast, Democracy in Crisis. I dog-sat for him and even worked for his wife for a while. This town is very small.]

So I would just write columns that would mine that, and would ... look for my all my own personal flaws.

It’s sort of the Eminem ‘Eight Mile’ strategy for the Detroit reference. If I tell the readers of the paper all the ways that I suck, then you know, their letters have no bite. And I don’t have to pretend to be objective or anything. We [City Paper] lost a bunch of advertising and stuff for being openly on the side of [2015 Freddie Gray] protests.

But our arts coverage, our hiring, all kinds of things were racist for forever. The crime reporting that many of the crime reporters did there, and the most crime reporting in general, is racist. Two of the things that I think are most racist about journalism right now that have made me question how I was working [are], one, was objectivity, also comes with this idea of ‘institutions trust institutions.’ The [Baltimore] Sun is always going to trust the police more than a victim of police [brutality]. Institutions, regardless of who runs them, support white supremacy, in many cases. So a lot of stories happen because they’re trusting white supremacy and the authority that comes with it.

And then, also, they’re like, ‘Oh, we need to make sure that this is clear to an imaginary reader in Duluth. Or in Baltimore, it’s probably in Dundalk. That’s always a white dude in there, and a white woman. There’s a lot of stories geared towards fear and the different ways that gender dynamics and power play into whiteness, is a whole other thing that’s also built into the model of objectivity.

So yeah, I very much question that. In the middle of 2020, at the beginning of COVID, I’m working on this book. I get the stimulus check and the Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT) was raising money because there were tons of juveniles, as the court says, in detention waiting for trial.

They were being held only because they couldn’t afford the $17 a day for the ankle bracelet. So incarceration is always terrible, but especially in that moment of COVID, being home, rather than in prison, was a demonstrable good. I wanted to continue writing about BALT. I probably couldn’t work for somewhere like The New York Times now, or The Banner, if I were to give them money. The good of this is getting mostly young Black men out of chains directly, even if it’s to ‘e-chains’ in their house. ... How can I have journalistic ethics and ignore human ethics? It was a moment of deciding like, I have to have human ethics as the important thing. It was a way to send that check signed by Trump to reparations.

It was a way to say like, you know, if every white person who had a salary still would have put their stimulus check into either something like that, or into supporting Black businesses that would have been lots of money. So at that moment, it was like, “Fuck journalistic ethics.” Since then, I’ve been doing things that I’ve never done here before, by being a citizen, and it’s a really interesting sight.

I testified about Poppleton and about police at the taxpayer night. I’ve never done anything like that, because I’ve always covered those things and amplified others’ voices. I’m not doing local reporting now. So why would I not engage in and have been more openly involved with activists? I’m not interested in objectivity at this point of my life at all, but I’m very interested in honesty, and objectivity often gets in the way of honesty. Who would rather have reporters say ‘I have a very strong opinion about this but I’m gonna pretend not to.’ That’s exactly the same problem that I write about in the book. That white people have problems in our whiteness and pretend we don’t. You know ‘I’m very down,’ and then you end up continuing to not see harm and perpetuate harm because you’re not willing to look at what your own biases and stuff are.

“Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness” is available everywhere books are sold. On the cover of the book, readers will notice that Woods strikes through his own name. He wrote about why he does that for the Washington Post.

imani.spence@thebaltimorebanner.com

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