“Sad to
see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart
with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t
change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall
Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the
beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be
greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
– Donald
Trump, August 17, 2017
The words of an American
president do nothing to address the real problem of systemic racism.
Mixing Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee with founding fathers
like George Washington shows a lack of sensitivity to the issue at
hand. “History and culture” are living manifestations that
continue to influence the hearts and minds of all Americans. In these
changing times, we must come to grips with monuments that
commemorate equality and freedom and those that dishonor those
cherished ideals.
“You can’t erase
history” is the point often raised in arguments against removing
symbols of the Confederacy. People employ this statement in a warped
justification to keep these symbols on public grounds. If
acknowledging “you can't erase history” is a truism, then this
belief also validates the argument as to why many historical figures
should NOT be worshiped, idolized or moralized. Historical museums
or, if it’s your allegiance, private property are fitting contexts
for such images.
Why do some people make
Confederates like General Lee more sympathetic and more palatable by
stating that the Civil War occurred because of lack of compromise? In
truth, there was no compromise by the Confederacy, and all the
seceding Southern states made it very clear (in writing) that their
primary reason for secession was the North’s discontinued
compromise in allowing slavery to continue.
If those who now ignore
revisionist's pleas for understanding want “erasure,” they should
look to how American textbooks promote, research, preserve,
interpret, and disseminate information about Black life, history, and
culture to the global community.
The older mainstream
social studies curriculum either largely ignored Black history or
misrepresented the subject. Early renditions of history textbooks
typically classified Black people as docile, uncivilized, and lazy.
For example, a 1934 history textbook analysis by Lawrence Reddick
observed that Black people were portrayed as being content as slaves;
they liked to “sing, dance, crack jokes, and laugh; admired bright
colors, never in a hurry, and [were] always ready to let things go
until the morrow.”
Inspired by the 1960s
civil rights movement, systemic efforts to mainstream K-12 Black
history began to build momentum. Some change has occurred since then.
However, the Black history curriculum still needs to come from a
Black perspective with topics specifically geared towards the Black
experience, and many times these narratives need to be independent of
the way we (in large part, whites) typically frame U.S. history. The
curriculum needs to balance narratives of victimhood, oppression,
perseverance, and resistance, but unlike current renditions of the
curriculum, it should contextualize issues that connect with the
present.
A 2017 study from the
Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that many classrooms are falling
short when it comes to teaching about the United States' history with
slavery. It argued that textbooks and teachers have contributed to a
sanitized understanding of history by focusing on "positive"
stories about black leaders like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass
and the abolitionist movement.
The narrative is also
skewed by an over-emphasis on the experiences of white people before
and during the Civil War. Lessons that divorce slavery from the
ideology of white supremacy focus on slavery as a Southern
institution. These lessons downplay slavery’s impact on the nation
as a whole and additionally contribute to a lack of understanding
around the origins and impact of slavery in the U.S. – as do
teachers and textbooks that do not connect the legacy of slavery to
later historical periods like Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great
Migration and the Civil Rights movement.
The Southern Poverty Law
study found only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed could
identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Hasan
Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University, who led the
SPLC report, reported …
“It’s the
equivalent of kids not being able to do division. There is no other
subject we could teach as bad as we do American history and still be
employed.”
Maureen Costello, director
of Teaching Tolerance, said …
“Students are being
deprived of the truth about our history (and) the materials that
teachers have are not particularly good. I would hope that students
would look at this and realize that they deserve to know better …
and teachers need to know there are better ways to teach this
(topic).”
History of Slavery.”
Smithsonian Magazine. February 7, 2018.)
Finding out what children
are actually learning about difficult issues like slavery can be
almost impossible. How schools teach about slavery and racism can be
so sensitive, it is difficult to find schools willing to divulge the
information. Also, calling attention to the ways in which whites
continue to benefit from the legacy of slavery is very challenging
for teachers to admit (especially white teachers) and for wider
society to deal with.
An erasure of history? No
removal of a Confederate statue in the public square will delete or
obliterate the original sin of America – slavery. What it will do
is help justify the nation's never-ending search for the truth and
establish a new and stubborn denial to any commemoration of the Lost
Cause of the Confederacy as some noble ideology and to its leadership
as exemplars of old-fashioned heroic chivalry.
Correction duly noted. The
artifact has been placed in a place where people may learn the truth
about the most violent period of American history. No attempt to
erase this lesson has been made.
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