"You Can't Erase History" -- Just Read White American Textbooks

“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).”

(Jason Daley. “Study Reveals Deep Shortcomings With How Schools Teach America’s

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.