So, there are these white mothers down in Tennessee who worry that textbooks for second graders about the Civil Rights Movement will make their kids feel bad about themselves. You know, there’s pictures of black people being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses and of white people jeering at Ruby Bridges as she tries to attend a segregated public school in Louisiana. And I get it. Content like that is going to raise some questions and who can tell how an impressionable young child will process it all? Maybe they’ll conclude there’s something wrong with them because they’re white.
It’s kind of weird, though, that these white mothers don’t ask how black kids will feel when they discover that blacks were slaves for hundreds of years. You think that might do some damage to their self-esteem? Should we not teach about that in school? The thing is, they’re going to find out anyway from their own families, but without a school lesson the white kids might not hear a peep about the history of white supremacy in Tennessee.
Teaching people history is at least in some sense neutral. It’s true that you can emphasize certain things and you’ll inevitably leave most things out. But it’s not supposed to be about how it makes people feel. That’s largely up to them. We’d like it everyone could agree that slavery and segregation were wrong, but people might come to a different conclusion. Some white kids might conclude they’re naturally superior and the fact that blacks were once enslaved proves this. Some black kids might feel similarly. If that’s the lesson people take from the history, it’s unfortunate but it’s not a reason to censor what happened.
Just today, I learned that Michael Flynn, a white man, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and briefly the national security advisor to President Donald Trump, is going around telling people that the government is going to put COVID-19 vaccine in people’s salad dressing.
Now, that’s something that might one day be taught in a second grade classroom. Kids will learn that a prominent white man was behaving this way during the height of the COVID-19 crisis and that might make the little white boys feel some kind of way about being white. I know that if I felt a strong solidarity with other white men, Flynn’s behavior would make me ashamed. But I think it would be really silly if I decided this history should be glossed over to preserve my feelings or the feelings of my white son.
Hell, when we teach about the Holocaust, we don’t worry that white Christians will be totally demoralized and consumed with self-hatred. Why? Because what the Nazis did doesn’t reflect on everyone who looks like them or who shares some of the same cultural and religious features. That doesn’t mean I can’t feel a bit shitty about how my own cultural background overlaps German history and development. It doesn’t mean I can’t hang my head a little bit about how my forebears treated Jews. The lesson is supposed to be that I shouldn’t be like them. I shouldn’t repeat their mistakes, let alone their atrocities.
That’s what should be taught about Michael Flynn, too, when all is said and done.
It’s a part of history, and generally speaking, people have been awful to each other for as long as people have existed. All we want is for people to do better, to make progress. It shouldn’t be so controversial, or so hard.
This is what this is actually about:
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1437502340609847296?s=21
Michael Flynn makes me ashamed to be from Newport, Rhode Island—where he lives and surfs.
Human history has been most fundamentally tribal. The tribes have simply gotten larger over time. We’re wired to identify with those who look and think like us and to have little if any empathy for those who seem different. In recent decades, there’s been ever more consciousness that differences between humans are arbitrary and meaningless. Over the centuries certain religions have tried to carry that message as well. It’s a major theme in Islam but inevitably the way a religion is practiced and carried down often has little if any relation to the founding themes. We all know that there are many flavors of Islam that carry intense tribal prejudices.
It’s my hope that the free flow of information will ultimately turn the tide and help to break down tribal differences but it doesn’t help when there’s so much money to be made by major information platforms in exploiting forms of tribal fear and prejudice. If we look back at history, we can only conclude that prejudice is routine and ethnic cleansing has been all but universal.
Outstanding post!
I’m 62 years old, and only in the last 5 years have I begun to discover and explore our real history in this country. And surprise, I find that most of what I was taught and absorbed in my first 57 years has some threads of truth in it, but is largely fiction meant to make me feel good about the creation and evolution of our country over about last 400 years, and the role of my fellow white men in the whole sausage making process that was the creation of these United States. Yes, there have been some stellar moments over these last four centuries. And those are what seem to have made it into our history books and our classrooms, and is brought out of the closet every time a holiday rolls around and we feel this need to go through the motions of national self-congratulation on our unique exceptionalism.
What I have found during this learning period is that it is near impossible to find anyone with whom to discuss this history, as it seems to be the most well kept national secret one could imagine. And if you try to actually talk about it with most any John or Jane Q. American, you are met with vituperative rage at the mere suggestion that so many of the sordid events of our history might be rhyming with events in the present day, or have any correlation.
We have this idea in this country, almost a conventional wisdom, that, “yeah, we did some bad things back in the beginning, but since that time we have constantly improved.” Sure, things have improved in places, but who are those who have seen the most improvement? The seeds of inequity and inequality that were built into our founding documents are still being contested to this very day. In fact, we have seen many periods where the advancements were met with overwhelmingly violent backlash that long outlasted the periods of improvement. See “Reconstruction” for a perfect example. The remnants of that backlash are still rippling through American society today, some 150 years later.
As I’ve studied our history, I would give anything to be able, in 100 years, to see how we view the present times. The things that I read about now, the events, the perspectives I have never heard in the recounting of our history; I wonder if there will be someone like me, in 2121, shaking their head at the shortsightedness of our citizens and our politicians, and how easily we are falling for the trap that is now being laid by one of our major political parties. As Mark Twain observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”, and I am finding that to be a tremendously prescient, and timelessly relevant, viewpoint. The rhymes I am hearing today do not hearken back to particularly flattering or humane times in our history. And that is one of the most troubling things in my mind, and it gnaws at my gut, knowing from history what could be coming soon, given the rhyming nature of our history. It is difficult to hold my cynicism at bay.
My Grandmother was from Germany but back before WW1. She did not bear any guilt for Hitler or the Holocaust and no one in my family ever asked her about it. Her son fought the Nazis all the way to Dachau. And my other Grandma was Irish and she would tell you so young man.
I am happy my family did not carry ancient hatreds here and to us. That’s not to say they didn’t have plenty to say about some ethnicities. So when people like Trump and Flynn speak the big lie there are none of my generation in the family listen to them. Thank the Lord.
No you shouldn’t. We judge you by the content of your character and your blog…