As a history professor specializing in white supremacy, Hale urges White Americans to look honestly at their family lore, and she uses her own as a lesson. She was told that her grandfather, a Mississippi sheriff, heroically guarded the jail where a Black man accused of raping a White woman was being held in 1947; yet despite his efforts, the prisoner was killed. When Hale read about the incident in the local newspaper archives, she found a very different story, but she kept her findings to herself until white supremacists attacked her students during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Vague lessons about racial injustice aren’t enough, she realized. People need to expose buried family secrets like hers to counteract the “denial of black humanity at the heart of white supremacy.” (Little, Brown, Nov. 7)