Should School Students be Taught the History of Slavery?
There’s a lively debate going on right now as to whether school students should be taught the history of slavery in the United States. Parents are making a reasonable case for refraining from getting into slavery with their kids. It seems reasonable to spare students from learning about whippings, the rape of female slaves, and the breakup of families, and the insidious persistence of a racial caste system in 21st century America.
It’s not as if children don’t have other challenges. They must cope with a changing climate, mastering an employable skill, finding a mate, raising their own kids, and navigating through a deeply divided political scene. Why wallow in the history of a practice, a vestige of the ancient world, that was ended by Abraham Lincoln in 1863? That was nearly 160 years ago. Do publicly funded classes need to elaborate on slavery’s gruesome aspects, especially in a way that brings to light the cruelty of white kid’s great, great grandparents. What’s it like for a young white student to learn that their ancestors exploited the ancestors of the African American kids? Aren’t there enough problems that can crush the tender spirits of our children without casting their forebears as brutes?
One can see how irate parents, all taxpayers and voters, can be infuriated at the thought of their local school districts teaching their kids such things.
Additionally, it’s not that Americans don’t know about slavery. Most people know that in the American South African-descent people were used to work the fields and tend kitchens. But way back in history. What’s more, forms of slavery pervaded of the ancient world. And yes, the practice came to America for a time. Then President Lincoln abolished it. It may not have even been so bad. The slaves in “Gone With the Wind” didn’t seem so unhappy. Most of us have gotten a sense that slavery in America was a kindly institution. And then it was gone.
So, Why Does It Need to be a Heated Issue Today?
This image of America’s relationship with slavery was in keeping with what I learned in history classes. I’ve carried this image into my mid-60’s. And at the risk of unseemly virtue signaling, I have spent my entire working life serving as the pastor of several Presbyterian Churches, which entails years of graduate school and a lifetime of study. My denomination is forthright in its opposition to racism and I’ve been required to attend racial sensitivity trainings.
I say this not to show off, but to say that it is easy to consider oneself at least one step ahead of rank ignorance. In fact, decades ago, I avoided teachers and trainers who specialized in racial sensitivity training because I thought that I’d heard it all and that nothing new could be said. I thought other social issues were up and coming and needed attention.
That said, what I knew about slavery in America did not extend very much beyond what I’ve said in a couple of sentences in the second paragraph above.
Retirement
I retired in 2017, relocated to Florida, joined a church, and, in an effort to be more socially engaged in my new community, joined a local interracial book club. In fact, I was an organizer for a group of about 10 readers in one of three racially mixed “reading groups.”
What I didn’t realize was that this little book club was on the cusp of what has been described as “America’s reckoning with race,” an expression that began to be used in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. In the last 5 years, our society has seen an explosion of book publishing about Black history and the experience of Black people in America. Books on race continue to dominate best seller lists. This website–First Light–currently sees 40 to 50 visitors a day coming to essays that I’ve posted on race. It seems like I got in on a national fad before it was a fad.
What really has made a difference in my life and faith was the reading itself. In that first year we read Ibram Kendi’s, Stamped from the Beginning, a lengthy study of how racist attitudes have tended to be inventions of intellectuals and scientists in the Modern period. A couple of months later, we tackled Ed Baptist’s, The Half Has Never Been Told. This was a detailed history of the practice of slavery and the Cotton Boom 19th century in America.
Reading these assigned books felt like graduate school.
Over the next two years, I read Wilkerson’s, Warmth of Other Suns. I became familiar with Carol Anderson and Harriet Washington. I wept as I read Bryan Stevenson’s memoir about his work with death row prisoners in his stunning, Just Mercy.
I’ve Changed
For the first time in my life I’ve paid sustained attention to the African American experience. All of us in our reading group, Black and White, have admitted that our attitudes about our country and about the Black experience were shifting. Slavery was no passing curiosity. Americans have enslaved Africans and African descent peoples for 300 years. Slavery was particularly odious in the late 1800’s when America became the world’s chief exporter of cheap cotton, a competitive coup that rocketed us into world economic dominance in the late Industrial Revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that Black Americans in significant part built America.
Tragically, the ending of chattel slavery did not end the low caste status and oppression of Blacks. Between 1877 and 1965 the American South maintained a rigid two-tiered society in which Blacks were subjugated by terror and violence. Even in the northern states, Black Americans endured an enforced second-class status, which continues today. My naïve, “educated” assumption that slavery was a vestige of the past, perpetrated by a few southern planters, lasting for a few years, and now gone forever was utterly wrong.
How had I missed such an influential aspect of my own country’s past? The answer, which is nearly as painful as the practice of slavery itself is that our abuse of our Black neighbors has been systematically and massively covered up.
For example, during the 1800’s there was a literary fade which produced hundreds of romance stories called Plantation Novels. The tradition of Plantation Romance Novels has buried pro-slavery advocacy in syrupy love stories set in idyllic Southern places. The stories seem innocent enough. They take place on a plantation (a cotton work camp). Two White people, often a Northern White woman and a Southern gentleman fall in love in an idealized Southern setting. There’s usually a good dose of religious idealism. And slavery is painted as a charming institution taking place as a picturesque aristocratic ideal–just the opposite image than that created by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Plantation Novel preserved a saccharine view of Southern life and completely covered up the dehumanization of slavery.
A second factor that has had a sweeping effect on our attitudes towards slavery and the 19th century American south is the formal history that has been written about it. This history was the prevailing attitude that informed the textbooks which I used in high school and continues to influence our attitudes today. This historical scheme is associated with the historian William Dunning of Columbia University in the early 20th century. Dunning painted the South as noble in defeat, dedicated to reconciliation with the North, the rebuilding of southern society, and doing justice to emancipated slaves. Dunning believed and taught that freed Blacks were incapable of managing either their own nor the affairs of community leadership. He further painted Reconstruction as a misguided disaster and the Northern states as exploitative of their vanquished Southern brethren.
The Dunning School dominated American interpretation of Reconstruction and more importantly American’s assessment of the abilities of Black Americans. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that the Dunning outlook began to lose sway in the face of the onslaught of more objective history, notably that of Eric Foner.
The reconsideration of Reconstruction and the history of race has only begun to be corrected–long after I and most American adults have gone through school. Now, I’ve lived through my adult life, worked forty years as a parish minister, served one congregation in the deep south for 14 years. acquired a doctorate, and spent untold hours studying for preaching and teaching. All of this time I’ve carried the naïve view about the role that race has played in my country’s culture.
I could list other factors that have served to obscure both what happened during the slavery years and the lingering afterlife of slavery, such as the Lost Cause movement.
Slavery and its aftermath has been covered up.
I Just Assumed I Knew All I Needed to Know About Race
What I’m saying is that despite my self-concept as an informed person, I really can make no claim to have any depth awareness of slavery and its impact. What I, together with generations of Americans, learned in school was likely to be propaganda. And since I’ve had the opportunity to take a leisurely look at some of the better accounts of what really happened in our collective past, I must say that all this fresh insight comes like a cold wave of hard truth. We’re really not as advanced in racial reconciliation and justice as long as we won’t even face squarely what has happened. The undercurrent of racial animus continues to influence our politics and interrelatrionships. And frankly, America’s sense of exceptionalism is purchased at the price of, let me be frank, lies.
What About Our Kids and Grandkids?
Now we ask the question whether our children will have the same reckoning with our national truth. As one who has been lied to, not by my parents or even my teachers, but by my society, do I wish to consign our upcoming generations to the same untruths designed to shield their feelings from shame? Of course, to do so necessitates that they will someday need to unlearn the distorted “history,” find their teachers to be liars, and then learn the truth about their heritage—with much the same sorrow and disappointment that I have experienced?
Nowadays, with today’s students the span between what schools teach in history and what is the truth about our national heritage will probably not take decades as it did in my case. The history of slavery and its racist afterlife is not only in the open but it is chronicled by hundreds of excellent books, documentaries, blog posts, lectures, diversity training, and under the leadership of capable teachers. Politicians pandering to gullible constituents can promise to remove painful history from classrooms, but they can’t change that history. Book burnings don’t work anymore. Today’s students don’t need to wait for a National Reckoning on Race and a revisionist historian like Eric Foner as I did. History has been revised and will be revised again.
Shielding kids from slavery is at best a waste of time and at worst is a vile lie that students will see through immediately.
