Today’s thread will focus on the invisibility of racism in history textbooks.
What your history teacher told you: Over the years white America has told itself varying stories about the enslavement of blacks. In each of the last two centuries America’s ,most popular novel was set in slavery- Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind. Until the Civil Rights Movement, American history textbooks in this century pretty much agreed with the version that Gone With the Wind presented, that slavery was an ideal social structure whose passing was lamented. Slavery was also not the cause of the Civil War, it was states rights and money.
The truth:
1. American history textbooks cannot be faltered for not mentioning that the first non-Native settlers in the United States were black. Educationally, however, the incident has its uses. It shows that Africans rebelled against slavery from the first. It points to the important subject of the three-way race relations-Indian-African-European-which most textbooks completely omit. It teaches that slavery cannot readily survive without secure borders. And, symbolically, it illustrates that African Americans, and the attendant subject of black-white race relations, were part of American history from the first Europeans to settle.
2. “Perhaps the most persuasive theme in our history is the domination of black America by white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life. Issues of black-white relations propelled the Whig Party to collapse, prompted the formation of the Republican Party, and caused the Democratic Party to label itself the “white man’s party” for almost a century.”
3. “Over the years white America has told itself varying stories about the enslavement of blacks. In each of the last two centuries America’s most popular novel was set in slavery-Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The two books tell very different stories: Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents slavery as an evil to be opposed, while Gone with the Wind suggests that slavery was an ideal social structure whose passing is to be lamented. Until the civil rights movement, American history textbooks in this century pretty much agreed with Mitchell. In 1959 my high school textbook presented slavery as not such a bad thing.”
4. “History books now admit that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. In the words of The United States-A History of the Republic, “At the center of the conflict was slavery, the issue that would not go away.” Before the civil rights movement, many textbooks held that almost anything else-differences over tariffs and internal improvements, blundering politicians, the conflict between the agrarian South and the industrial North-caused the war. This was a form of Southern apologetics. Among the twelve textbooks I reviewed, onlyTriumph of the American Nation, a book that originated in the 1950s, still holds such a position.”
5. “Americans seem perpetually startled at slavery. Children are shocked to learn that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.”
6. “Most textbooks downplay slavery in the North, however, so slavery seems to be a sectional rather than a national problem. Indeed, even the expanded coverage of slavery comes across as an unfortunate but minor blemish, compared to the overall story line of our textbooks.”
7. “To function adequately in civic life in our troubled times, students must learn what causes racism. Although it is a complicated historical issue, racism in the Western world stems primarily from two related historical processes: taking land from and destroying indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans to work that land. To teach this relationship, textbooks would have to show students the dynamic interplay between slavery as a socioeconomic system and racism as an idea system.”
8. “The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery is the idea that it is appropriate, even “natural,” for whites to be on top, blacks on the bottom. In its core our culture tells us-tells all of us, including African Americans-that Europe’s domination of the world came about because the Europeans were smarter.”
9. Only two textbooks discuss what might have caused racism. The closest any of the textbooks comes to explaining the connection between slavery and racism is this single sentence from The American Tradition: “In defense of their ‘peculiar institution,’ southerners became more and more determined to maintain their own way of life.” Such a statement hardly suffices to show today’s students the origin of racism in our society-it doesn’t even use the word!”
10. ““Although textbook authors no longer sugarcoat how slavery affected African Americans, they minimize white complicity in it. They present slavery virtually as uncaused, a tragedy, rather than a wrong perpetrated by some people on other. Textbooks maintain the fiction that planters did the work on the plantations. “There was always much work to be done,” according to Triumph of the American Nation, “for a cotton grower also raised most of the food eaten by his family and slaves.””
11.“For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination. Textbooks cannot show the influence of slavery on our foreign policy if they are unwilling to talk about ideas like racism that might make whites look bad. When textbook authors turn their attention to domestic policy, racism remains similarly invisible.”
12. ““Since textbooks find it hard to say anything really damaging about white people, their treatments of why Reconstruction failed lack clarity. Triumph presents the end of Reconstruction as a failure of African Americans: “Other northerners grew weary of the problems of black southerners and less willing to help them learn their new roles as citizens.”The American Adventure echoes: “Millions of ex-salves could not be converted in ten years into literate voters, or successful politicians, farmers, and businessmen.””
13. ““Describing the 1954 Supreme Court decision [(Plessy v. Ferguson)] that would begin to undo
segregation, The American Way says, “No separate school could truly be equal for Blacks,” but offers no clue as to why this would be so.””
14. “Some historians date low black morale to even later periods, such as the great migration to Northern cities (1918-70), the Depression (1929-39), or changes in urban life and occupational structure after World War II. Unfortunately, no textbook discusses the changing levels of white racism or black reaction in any of these periods.”
15. “High school students “have a gloomy view of the state of race relations in America today,” according to a recent nationwide poll. Students of all racial backgrounds brood about the subject. Another poll reveals that for the first time in this century, young white adults have less tolerant attitudes toward black Americans than those over thirty. One reason is that “the under-30 generation is pathetically ignorant of recent American history.” Too young to have experienced or watched the civil rights movements as it happened, these young people have no understanding of the past and present working of racism in American society.”