Another
February
has passed, and once again too many
Americans view Black History Month as a
footnote, impacting African-Americans but
insignificant to the greater country.
Slavery was not merely a chapter in US
history, it was an institution that created
America.
However,
children are not learning about slavery, its
impact, and its relevance today, and it
shows.
Our failure to address a legacy of
enslavement and racial oppression makes the
US ill-equipped to deal with present-day
injustices and challenges.
The
Southern Poverty Law Center has sounded
the alarm by releasing a report, “Teaching Hard History:
American Slavery.” SPLC
insists the country needs an intervention,
and urges states, school districts and
textbook publishers to stop avoiding the
hard truths about slavery. According to
the report, the white supremacy and racism
afflicting America today stem from the
racial theories used to justify the
enslavement of African and native peoples.
“Slavery’s
long
reach continues into the present day,” the
SPLC says. “The persistent and wide
socioeconomic and legal disparities that
African-Americans face today and the
backlash that seems to follow every
African-American advancement trace their
roots to slavery and its aftermath. If we
are to understand the world today, we must
understand slavery’s history and continuing
impact.”
The United States teaches slavery
in a way that lacks historical context,
accentuates historical positives while
ignoring a troubling legacy, and covers a
difficult past only to the extent those
problems were resolved, the SPLC notes.
Schools
teach slavery as a purely Southern
phenomenon, and focus exclusively on white
experiences, with scant attention to the
impact on black people. Some teachers lead
students in re-enactments and role-playing
exercises involving slave auctions and the
Middle Passage — the forced journey across
the Atlantic in which at least 2 million Africans died -- which
could traumatize children and impede
learning.
Further, history curricula ignore
the role of white supremacy that justified
racial violence against African-Americans,
and the connections between the past and the
present.
A survey of high
school seniors, social studies teachers,
state history curriculum standards and
widely used textbooks tells the story. The
report found that only 8% of high school
seniors identified slavery as the cause of
the Civil War and 68% were unaware a
constitutional amendment ended slavery.
Moreover, fewer than one-quarter could
identify how specific parts of the
Constitution benefited slave masters.
Although more than 90% of teachers
claim they are “comfortable” teaching
slavery to students, 58% of teachers found
textbooks inadequate, and 40% said their
state provides inadequate support.
SPLC developed a rubric for
textbooks to determine how comprehensively
they covered slavery and the plight of
enslaved people. The best textbook the
organization reviewed achieved a score of
70%, with the average textbook earning a
paltry 46%.
Of
course,
states have their own standards for
textbooks. But none of the 15 sets of
standards that were analyzed by the SPLC
addressed how white supremacist ideology
justified the institution, and “most [state
standards] fail to lay out meaningful
requirements for learning about slavery,
about the lives of the millions of enslaved
people, or about how their labor was
essential to the American economy.”
This
clear disconnect from reality is what
happens when the school system fails to
teach how the trading of human beings
fueled US capitalism and the Industrial
Revolution, and made America a global economic powerhouse.
Think
about what would happen if students opened
a textbook and found that in 1860, nearly
4 million enslaved people of African
descent were worth $3.5 billion — more
than the nation’s railroads and
manufacturing combined, and the most valuable single asset
in America. Banks,
corporations and universities profited
from slavery, providing inherited wealth
for whites, with centuries of unpaid wages
for black labor, helping explain today’s
racial wealth gap.
With
post-Civil War Reconstruction came black
empowerment and federal troops to protect
the newly emancipated in the South. When
the troops withdrew, whites re-established
slavery through the economic exploitation
of sharecropping, criminalization of
African-American men, black
disenfranchisement, and a reign of
domestic terror including lynchings, massacres and assassinations of black
elected officials.
“In
the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, white
Southerners looking to bolster white
supremacy and justify Jim Crow reimagined
the Confederacy as a defender of democracy
and protector of white womanhood. To
perpetuate this falsehood, they littered the
country with monuments to the Lost Cause,”
wrote Ohio State University professor Hasan
Kwame Jeffries in the report.
If young people don’t understand
the history behind racial tensions in
America, they become adults who don’t
understand why NFL players kneel in protest
against repeated racial injustices.
As
students
saw Charlottesville explode, they should
have been able to call to mind history
lessons on Jim Crow, a time when white
supremacists erected Confederate monuments
honoring the “Lost Cause.”
The 1915
film “The Birth of a Nation” glorified the
KKK and the Confederacy, and President Woodrow Wilson, who
segregated the federal government,
screened it at the White House, declaring,
“It’s like writing history with lightning.
My only regret is that it is all so
terribly true.” Learning about Wilson’s
views on the Klan would help students
understand why there was such an outcry by
civil rights activists when President
Donald Trump proclaimed there were “very
fine people on both sides” in
Charlottesville.
Without
this historical knowledge, students cannot
understand why 6 million African-American
refugees fled the South between
1916 and 1960 in the nation’s largest mass
migration, or why we even needed a civil
rights movement.
We are
being forced to refight old civil rights
battles. Wealthy landowners constructed
race and white supremacy to “divide and conquer” and keep
enslaved Africans and European indentured
servants from banding together for
economic justice. Poor Southern white men --whose
labor was rendered obsolete and wages kept
low by slavery -- fought and died to
preserve the plantation police state.
Today, we
see how racism manipulates the white poor
and working class to believe people of
color are the cause of their problems.
Trump’s anti-immigration policies of “the
wall” and mass deportation for
undocumented immigrants from nonwhite
“shithole countries” harken back to the lawsadvocated
a century ago by white supremacists and
eugenicists to
preserve “pure, unadulterated
Anglo-Saxon stock,”stop the
“vast hordes” of brown
people from Asia, and promote the illegal deportation of
600,000 US citizens of Mexican
heritage.
Fifty
years before Colin Kaepernick took a knee
against police brutality, three athletes at the
1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City — two
African-Americans, one white Australian —
protested against racial
oppression with
their iconic Black Power salute during the
National Anthem. Just as these Olympians
were shunned and subjected to death
threats for their bold stance against
injustice, today’s NFL athlete-activists
are criminalized, labeled ungrateful and un-American. That
anti-racism protests engender more outrage
than racial injustice demonstrates this
nation must do better.
George Santayana famously said
those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it. Never will America
address its fundamental challenges if it
refuses to learn the lessons of history and
teach its children well.
This
commentary
is also posted on CNN.com.
