My childhood’s safety…endowed me with resources that I recognize now as resilience. I’ve been able to remain relatively optimistic in my character, as opposed to fundamentally anxious or fearful of injuries familiar from hurtful experience…. I always knew beneath the surface of my consciousness that disregard was not a correct appraisal of my worth, of my intelligence, of the soundness of my thinking and my being.

If Painter’s homelife provided a sense of self-worth, school provided new opportunities. She attended Oakland Technical High School at the same time as Huey Newton, when racially selective class placements internally segregated their school. One of the few Black students in AP classes, Painter dreamed of going to Howard until the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier joined her family for dinner one evening. Frazier considered her a poor fit for the Black Ivy; Painter presumes that this was because the women enrolled at Howard at the time were understood to be courting husbands. “Nell Irvin,” Frazier told her, “you are too smart and too dark to go to Howard.”

Whatever one might think of this advice, Frazier’s intervention did lead Painter to forgo Howard and instead enroll at UC Berkeley, where she found new opportunities that transformed her racial politics. She spent time at the YMCA that once hosted Malcolm X, where she learned about Operation Crossroads Africa, through which she traveled to northern Nigeria in 1962. There, she met Black Muslims from a “part of the continent that I hadn’t known about before…. More reason not to be able to generalize about some all-encompassing Blackness.”

Berkeley also introduced her to a radical milieu. Painter “hung around the edges of a proto-Afrocentric movement, the Afro-American Association,” whose members included Cedric Robinson and whose organizing inspired Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to establish a similar group at nearby Merritt College. But Painter was not a perfect fit for the Afro-American Association. “Like so much Blackness back in those days,” she recalls, “the racial default was male.” Whether by push or by pull, this realization led her to seek out a more heterogeneous Black radicalism too.

Her continued travels compelled Painter to find a focus in her search for diversity among Black people: class. After graduating in 1964, she joined her parents in Ghana, where she noted upon arriving that “everyone was Black, an even, opaque, velvety Black that I had never seen in the United States. The customs officials, families greeting passengers, taxi drivers, policemen, they were all intensely and beautifully Black…. The people in the airport not only looked different from American Black people; they also carried themselves differently.” In this predominantly Black country, Painter’s American understanding of race changed. “In the independent republic of Ghana,” she writes, “the issues were not racial, but economic”—for example, the question of whether the Ghanaian state should promote agriculture, which would lead to both profits for and the exploitation of Black people. Accordingly, Painter learned to think about the specificities of Black people not only in terms of gender but also in terms of class.

After the coup that deposed Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, the socialist-leaning Painter left Ghana and returned to the United States, where she earned graduate degrees in African and African American history at UCLA and Harvard and became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Yet even as she climbed the ranks of the academy, discrimination followed her. At one lecture, a white stranger struck up a conversation with her and assumed that she was hired because of affirmative action. Later, after moving to North Carolina, her students complained that affirmative action stigmatized Black people. Reflecting on both experiences in 1981, Painter observed:

White people tell me I must be on easy street because I’m Black and female…. On the other side of the color line, every Black student knows that he or she is fully qualified—I once thought that way myself. It is just the other Black people who need affirmative action to get in.

Both experiences, in her account, reaffirmed “the same old White-male-superiority line, fixed up to fit conditions that include a policy called affirmative action.” Instead of protesting that she was qualified, Painter writes, she became “one of the few people I know who will admit to having been helped by affirmative action.” Two departments that had never hired Black people hired her. Rather than emphasize her own excellence, the ever-secure Painter saw the institutions that barred Black people—not Black people themselves—as deficient. As a result, she emphasized in print that affirmative action corrected institutions, not Black people.

For Painter, her identity and her biography had become sources of insight. The historian who had found travel revelatory and who came from parents who had fled the South turned to a familiar subject—migration—for her first book. Painter undertook research on Black Americans who left the South after Reconstruction and published her study as Exodusters in 1976. “People had tried to leave, and thousands had succeeded,” Painter recalls in I Just Keep Talking. But “more than forty years after the publication” of Exodusters, she continued to be haunted by those who remained—in particular, “a woman’s description of torture, of murder, in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana,” warned “of what atrocities Americans are capable of.”

Painter continued to study the collective agency of Black people and the violence impeding their efforts to eke out better lives in her 1979 book The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, which chronicled Hudson’s activism in response to state repression and Depression-era exploitation as well as his dedication to organizing the interracial poor.

Even when Painter moved beyond the South, her work still carried those themes. In the 1989 book Standing at Armageddon, she tells the history of Reconstruction’s rollback by examining the violence of the Jim Crow regime and the ways in which Black Americans sought to survive its assaults. Meanwhile, in her 1997 biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol, she emphasizes Truth’s contributions to the 19th-century women’s suffrage movement and also her influence on 20th-century feminist movements.

This twin focus on repression and resilience also shapes many of the essays, memoirs, and articles collected in I Just Keep Talking, whether in her discussion of Martin Delany, Harriet Jacobs, or her own life. For Painter, Black people are never homogeneous, and they are never strictly objects. Rather, they are always history’s subjects.

Late in her career, Painter began to turn toward the visual. After retiring from Princeton, she studied art full-time, earning a BFA at Mason Gross in 2009 and then enrolling in an MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned a degree in 2011. Like many other art students, she was self-conscious, unsure of the worth of her work, and subject to the mood swings of her professors. The publication of her New York Times bestselling book The History of White People during this time complicated matters even more. Shortly after she appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss the book, an art teacher named Irma visited her studio. “You can’t draw, and you can’t paint,” Irma told her, and then asked: “Why did you choose to go to graduate school when the biggest book of your career was coming out?”

For a time, Painter internalized Irma’s criticisms and questioned her choices. But the Painter of I Just Keep Talking has found a renewed faith in her art’s relationship to her history. Looking back on her scholarly career, she notes that her aesthetic interest was foreshadowed by her writing on images of Sojourner Truth and by the juxtaposition of Black art and history in her 2006 book Creating Black Americans. And the visual, of course, also structures The History of White People. Though its examination of the social construction of whiteness debunks the easy association between phenotype and race, the book remains, in Painter’s words, “attuned to the importance of physical appearance.” Her 2018 memoir of her time as an art student, Old in Art School, further demonstrated that she could marry text, history (her own), and art. Her scholarship was not an impediment to her aesthetic practice so much as a source of strength underlying it.

This blend of artistic and historical interests sits at the center of I Just Keep Talking. Throughout, readers are confronted by the juxtaposition of the image and the written word. Text sometimes abounds in the art, as in her 2022 piece Same Frustrations, which depicts a journal with the words “same frustrations for 25 years” visible. As she argues in one essay:

Text, rooted in history, supplies one sort of meaning, while art, a work of imagination, conveys meanings that exceed the historical archive. They are not the same thing. It’s too simple to say that the text speaks historical truth, while art ranges further, reaches beyond the limits of the archive. But the contrast between what history says and what art suggests is well worth recognizing. History and art draw on two different kinds of power.

Painter may once have believed that her career as a historian undermined her later work as an artist, but now she sees the two as complementary. Her words and the words of others, and her art and the art of others, testify to one way to carve out a path of survival in the face of difficulty.

Like many late-career publications composed of an author’s uncollected works, I Just Keep Talking doesn’t offer an individual argument so much as a written and visual portrait of the author. Spanning over 40 years of publication, the essays represent Painter’s growth as a historian, as a writer and theorist, and as an artist. Her attention to race and gender, for instance, enables her to critique, in a 1992 essay, Clarence Thomas’s representation of Anita Hill as a villain, and these subjects resurface in a 2000 essay on how Harriet Jacobs used 19th-century assumptions about Black women to compel the reading public to oppose slavery. Throughout, Painter combines the historian’s concern for individual circumstance with an analysis of the relationship between power and identity.

Painter’s histories of the rollback of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow are especially prescient. In recent years, we have seen the Supreme Court roll back the Voting Rights Act and other gains of the civil-rights movement in ways that resemble the court’s late-19th-century backlash against the gains made by Black people during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The current court’s striking down of a constitutional right to abortion has likewise created a set of interstate conflicts much like the 1850s court’s fueling of interstate conflicts around slavery, most notably in its Dred Scott decision. There are important differences, too, but Painter’s work on these eras reminds us of how Americans have found ways to survive the state’s repression and, more generally, that those whom the state seeks to make powerless still have and exercise agency.

One avenue for exercising this agency was (and has remained) flight, as in the Black migrations of the 1870s and 1920s. But Painter’s histories, her art and autobiographies, and her life also offer another view of how to exercise freedom in the face of persecution: by staying, organizing, and collectively seeking to build livable lives. This is the story of Hosea Hudson and the many communists of the South. In the midst of the Great Depression, Hudson and his comrades remained in the South, committed not just to organizing themselves but even to putting their bodies on the line for one another. For Hudson, as for Painter, individuals may exercise freedom, but collectives guarantee its existence.