Before we begin a warning, this episode contains material that may be upsetting to some listeners.

Not long ago, I drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama.

It's a straight-shot west on I-20, 150 miles of rolling hills and tiny woods.

I got off the freeway on the downtown exit just before what the locals call the malfunction junction.

I drove a few blocks south until I came to Kellyingroom Park, which covers a full city block right in front of 16th Street Baptist Church.

I wanted to see a statue that stands in the park, a famous statue.

I always love statues. I find them moving. I don't know why.

Maybe it's because there are representation of something that we have chosen to take seriously, to memorialize in a permanent form.

With a statue you're saying to the future, this is what I want you to remember about my generation.

The statue I came to see is at one end of Kellyingroom Park. It's of a police officer, big guy, menacing, heavy pair of sunglasses.

He is a dog on a leash, a big German shepherd, and the dog is lunging.

Huge fangs bare to the young black boy, who's leaning back, hands to his sides, almost like he's sacrificing himself.

It's called foot soldier. It looks simple, but that statue is not what you think. Trust me.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This episode is the second in what are going to be a few episodes this season on race and civil rights.

On race in the United States, I'm an outsider. I'm Canadian. My family is half-west Indian, which is a very different cultural experience than being an African-American.

My mom had a friend at Jamaican who went down to Georgia once in the 1970s. When she came back, she said the racism there cut like a knife.

I couldn't have been more than eight or nine, and that phrase startled me. It seemed so visceral.

But then I moved to the US as an adult, and it seemed like the way race was discussed didn't cut like a knife at all.

What I saw around race in the United States was evasion and euphemism.

The subject of my last episode was the brown decision. For half a century, the integration story has been told with all the suffering taken out.

Why? Is it really necessary that every grand civil rights narrative be turned into a fairy tale?

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