Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History

by James W. Loewen

  Discussion follows. “The public would recognize ‘Sally’ faster than ‘Hemings.’” “That’s a good point,” I reply. “Editors do want to sell magazines. They have but a moment to convince the public in an airport to buy their magazine, rather than a competitor’s. But in turn, that just drives the question back one step: Why does the public recognize ‘Jefferson and Sally’?” If there is a pause, I interject this comment:

  Let’s suppose someone in this class gets sick tonight after supper. Has to go to the emergency room. In the emergency room work two health care professionals—a doctor and a nurse. One of them keeps getting referred to by her first name. Who gets called by her first name—the doctor or the nurse?

  Students chorus “the nurse,” of course. Then they can give other examples of this phenomenon: a partner in a law firm and his secretary. The CFO of a corporation and the cleaning person who comes in to empty his waste-basket. Soon they generalize: the use of first versus last names encodes social status. Throughout this discussion, I deliberately use male pronouns for the higher positions. At some point, I ask who has noticed anything about my pronoun choice. I count out loud the number of students with hands up. It’s worth noting how many people didn’t notice, perhaps because we’re still used to the doctor or executive being a male.

  It’s important to get students to volunteer the three dimensions on which Jefferson outranked Hemings. These are race, of course; sex or gender; and social class. To be blunt, Jefferson was in the highest status occupation of his day, large-scale plantation owner. As the Illinois 6th-grade teacher noted in Chapter 1, most presidents before Lincoln were of this occupation. Hemings, on the other hand, was in the lowest status position, slave, although the case could be made that as a house servant, she was higher than a field hand.

  To this day, most Americans are far more likely to use first names for women and for African Americans than for men or for other racial groups. Compare “Oprah” and “Seinfeld,” for example. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and many women and African Americans play along—Winfrey certainly does. More importantly, to this day, as a result of slavery, most Americans still find it appropriate for white men to be on top of our institutions, while people of color are at the bottom. Like “Jefferson and Sally,” this pattern just seems “natural.” (That is why Obama’s election is so important.) By “natural” we mean we’re so accustomed to it that it’s not something we think about. The faculty at Catholic University, for example, where I have a courtesy appointment, is profoundly white. Except one Chinese American sociologist, now deceased, I have yet to meet a single professor who is not white. I have also yet to meet a janitor or groundskeeper at the university who is not black or Latino. I have never heard anyone remark upon these starkly different ratios, however. They’re just taken for granted.

  If not for slavery, race would not make such a difference today. More professors would be nonwhite; more janitors would be white. The distance in social status and pay between professor and janitor might also be a bit narrower. If not for slavery, Americans would never take such different racial ratios for granted, either.

  The foregoing example is anecdotal, of course. Stark, but anecdotal. The 2000 census showed that African American families made about two-thirds the median income of white families: $30,439, compared to $44,226. This alarming difference—not anecdotal in the least—summarizes the anecdotal realities of thousands of employers like Catholic University across the United States. Even worse is the wealth gap. While the income ratio is about two to three, the wealth ratio is far more severe, about one to eleven. That is, the median white family has 11 times as much wealth as the median black family. To some degree, this enormous wealth gap derives from the smaller income gap. A family making $30,000 can find it hard to save a dime. Meanwhile, a family making $44,000 can save $10,000 and still live better than the median black family.

  According to sociologist Dalton Conley, however, “The wealth gap cannot be explained by income differences alone.” Within any given income category, white families own much more than black families. For example, at the bottom of the spectrum (incomes less than $15,000 a year), the median African American family has a net worth of zero, while the median white family has $10,000 worth of equity. Intergenerational transfers provide the reason, Conley points out: “50% to 80% of lifetime wealth accumulation results from gifts from past generations of relatives: a down payment on a first home, a free college education, a bequest from a parent.” In turn, by far the biggest single component of net worth for all families below the upper class is the equity they have built up in their homes over time.2

  What role does slavery play in the wealth gap today? As Chapter 10 tells, between 1890 and 1940 racism increased in the United States. In the South, neo-Confederates were now securely back in the saddle, and they reimposed a racial hierarchy that was almost as rigid as slavery. If not for slavery, whites never would have done this. In the North, white Americans had acquiesced in the Southern removal of African Americans from citizenship, notwithstanding the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Partly to rationalize this complicity, they, too, explicitly embraced white supremacy and defined African Americans as a pariah people to be avoided when possible. By 1940, even federal policy held that the races should be residentially separate.

  Overlapping this era, beginning around 1900 and continuing to the present, suburbs grew. Keeping African Americans (and sometimes Jews and other groups) out of suburbs became the rule, not the exception. In such metropolitan areas as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit, most suburbs did not allow black residents, except perhaps as live-in servants in white-owned homes. Even today, many whites think it “natural” for African Americans to live in the inner city, whites in the outer suburbs. The whiteness of our suburbs is neither natural nor due to social class.3 Only in the 1990s did many suburbs, such as Hemet, California; Cicero, Illinois; and Livonia, Michigan, begin to allow black residents. Excluded from suburbs of all social classes throughout most of the twentieth century and from the programs that financed home ownership in them, black families paid rent in the city. Meanwhile, white families paid off mortgages in the suburbs. Between 1949 and 1969, according to research by John Kain, suburban homes saw huge appreciation, providing the source of much of the wealth that many white families still have today. Since 1969, houses have continued to appreciate much faster than the consumer price index. Shut out not only from home ownership but also from the equity resulting from this appreciation, black families have had less to pass on to their children. In turn, this makes it harder for them to amass down payments. Today, 70% of nonblack families own their own homes, compared to just 47% among black families. Exclusion from suburbs in the past keeps African Americans from purchasing houses in the present. Indeed, today’s residential segregation will still be affecting us in 2050, even if we end all exclusion tomorrow.4 Again, if not for slavery, race would not make such a difference today.

  For that matter, if not for slavery, people from Africa would not have been identified as a race in the first place. Nor would they have been stigmatized as an inferior race. Race as a social concept, along with the claim that the white race is superior to other groups, came about as a rationale for slavery. (Chapter 10 treats race as a social construct.) As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas famously put it in 1968, racism is a vestige of “slavery unwilling to die.”5

  Slavery’s twin legacies for the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it spread throughout our culture. Slavery ended in 1863–65, depending upon where one lived. Unfortunately, racism, slavery’s handmaiden, did not. It lives on, afflicting all of us today.

  HOLD A META-CONVERSATION

  Showing its relevance to the present is the first step in introducing a unit on slavery. The second step might be to hold a meta-conversation on the subject—a conversation about the conversations that the unit will generate. Such a meta-conversation is especially useful for teachers
who have not given slavery much attention before. They can begin with an admission:

  Until this year, my U.S. history classes did not give slavery enough attention. To some extent, this was not my fault. The textbook doesn’t give slavery enough attention either, especially as a continuing problem in American life. Yet we have just seen that its effects are still a continuing problem in American life.

  Or, without the admission:

  My research in U.S. history—as well as things like this magazine cover (the U.S. News and World Report cover)—convince me that we have to cover slavery and its impact better than the textbook does.

  Either way, students can be challenged to go beyond the textbook and learn more about slavery—and the racism that derived from it—on their own. “You will have to join me in going beyond the book to learn more about slavery. It’s important. It might be interesting. Can you do that?”

  One reason teachers give for avoiding much focus on slavery is concern about how their students will handle the subject. It is not a “feel-good” subject. Teachers of majority black classes may worry that all they will accomplish is making their students mad. Teachers of classes with only a handful of African Americans do not want these students to feel singled out. Teachers of all-white classes don’t want parental complaints from students who think they are supposed to feel guilty.

  Again, a meta-conversation can help. “Some people tell me that an all-black class cannot handle the subject of slavery because it will get too angry to do good history.” After a pause, the teacher continues, “Is that accurate?” In the ensuing discussion, few students will agree. In the process of disagreeing with the premise, they are signing on to be other than angry, to study slavery and its impact seriously. Teachers can also ask, if anger is a reasonable response to learning the truth about slavery, what action should that anger lead to in the present? Surely the answer is, Students can identify and then counter vestiges of slavery that still linger in our society.

  If the class is majority black while the teacher is not, that difference has to be acknowledged in the meta-conversation. “If I promise to be open to learning from your reactions—and from the information you bring in—can you learn from me on this topic? Even though I’m white? Are we in this together?” If the class is mostly white while the teacher is black, the meta-conversation will be different but still needs to be held.

  Depending on class composition, teachers might introduce the meta-conversation with, “Some people tell me that an all-white class does not have enough variety of experience to handle the subject of slavery.” Better still might be a line I came up with when I was teaching an early morning 5th-grade class in Stamford, Connecticut. That middle school is very diverse, with European Americans, African Americans, Haitian immigrants, millionaire parents, and students on the free lunch program. My assignment was to teach every social studies section in turn, until at the day’s end I had reached the entire 5th grade. Before that first class, the assistant principal, who had engaged me, asked me, “Now, Jim, what do you plan to do with these students?” I replied with enthusiasm, showing her some of the images I was going to use, including some of the illustrations in this book.6 “Oh, Jim, do you have to?” was her immediate response. I did have to, especially after that response, but I had never taught 5th graders before. So before I showed the first class a thing, I said to them, “You know, some people tell me that 5th graders are not mature enough to handle the images I’m about to show you.” They rose to the occasion and handled the discussion just fine. So I repeated the ploy throughout the day. Teachers can similarly challenge their classes: “Some people say that 9th graders are not mature enough to handle the subject of slavery.” They, too, will rise to the occasion.

  The introduction to a unit on slavery needs to cover at least one other topic. I call it “racial nationalism.” Simply put, none of us is responsible for anything that went on before we were born. That’s a simple enough idea, and uncontestable. Nevertheless, there is a tendency for white Americans to take pride of ownership in, say, American democracy, or perhaps the music of J. S. Bach, or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Conversely, whites can feel guilty or defensive about the injuries and inequities of slavery, especially whites who can trace their U.S. lineage back to before the Civil War. Positive or negative, these feelings are examples of racial nationalism.

  African Americans are not immune to this kind of thinking. Years ago, before there was Black History Month, there was Negro History Week, the week in February that included Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. At the black college where I then worked, posters went up in celebration, typically saying:

  NEGRO HISTORY WEEK

  We ain’t what we oughta be

  We ain’t what we’re gonna be

  But thank God almighty

  We ain’t what we was

  An uplifting slogan, I suppose. Yet what “we was” was slaves, of course. So the poster incorporated a bit of shame, as well. Elements of that thinking are embodied in the color gradations that still linger to some degree within the black community. The black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar supplied another example of this kind of thinking in his poem “The Colored Soldiers,” which ends:

  And their deeds shall find record

  In the registry of Fame,

  For their blood has cleansed completely

  Every blot of Slavery’s shame.7

  Dunbar was right: the actions of United States Colored Troops during the Civil War were often heroic. The “registry of fame” that he describes, however, shows racial nationalism. So does the “blot of Slavery’s shame.”

  I find it hard to get rid of racial nationalism in my own mind. I still take an “in-group” kind of pleasure in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, as if his excellence somehow implies something good about me as a white person. So I am quick to excuse it among students—but I still point it out to them and ask them to examine it at arm’s length.

  Students need to understand that to hold anyone responsible, today, for having been a slave, a slaveowner, or for slavery in general, is anachronistic.8 A unit on slavery isn’t about proving a group bad. A white person is not bad because some other whites, many decades ago, enslaved people. A black person is not bad because some other blacks, many decades ago, were slaves. Indeed, if a white student teases a black student today—“Your people used to serve my people”—or if a black student rages at a white student today—“You people have always been racist”—they themselves are displaying vestiges of slavery unwilling to die. At the end of the introductory metaconversation, students should know to chorus “no” when asked, “Is anyone in this classroom responsible for enslaving?” “Is anyone in this classroom responsible for being enslaved?” Finally, they should have useful ideas about slavery’s impact on our past and present in response to the question, “Why, then, must we learn about slavery?”

  SLAVERY AND RACISM

  The main reason why it can still be hard to discuss slavery is that the nation still struggles with its legacy today. That legacy, already noted, is racism. Students must make this connection. They need to see that racism began as a rationale for slavery. If this is not clear, then all kinds of dangerous misinformation can fill this void. I have heard serious adults—teachers, social scientists, historians—say that whites are racist by nature—that is, genetically. Nonsense. No one is born with the notion that the human race is subdivided by skin color, let alone that one group is or should be dominant over the others. Racism is a product of history, particularly of the history of slavery.

  Slavery had not always been caught up with race. Europeans had enslaved one another for centuries. The word itself derives from “Slav,” the group most often enslaved by other Europeans before 1400. Native Americans and Africans likewise enslaved their neighbors long before Europeans arrived. Ethnocentrism has long existed among human groups. Many—perhaps all—societies have been ethnocentric. Saying “we’re better than they” can rationalize enslaving “the
m.” But then the enslaved grow more like us, intermarry with us, have children, and speak our language. Now ethnocentrism can no longer rationalize enslaving them. Neither can ethnocentrism unify people from different societies across cultural differences. Indeed, Europeans did not think of themselves as a group before the slow increase of racially based slavery beginning around 1400.

  As Europeans sailed down the west coast of Africa, however, they traded with coastal tribes for captives from the interior. Slaves came to be more and more identified as dark-skinned Africans, and vice versa. Increasingly, whites viewed enslavement of whites, especially Christian whites, as illegitimate, while enslavement of Africans was acceptable, maybe even “good for them.” Unlike in earlier slaveries, children of African American slaves would be slaves forever. They could never achieve upward mobility through intermarriage with the owning class. The rationale for this differential treatment was racism. Racism arose around 1400 to justify this permanent form of slavery.9 As Montesquieu ironically observed in 1748: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.”10 Therefore, racism gradually increased in Western culture. At first, Europeans considered Africans exotic but not necessarily inferior. Shakespeare’s 1604 depiction of Othello, derived from a story written in 1565 by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, still fits this description.11 As more and more European nations joined the slave trade, followed by the United States, whites came to characterize Africans as stupid, backward, and un-civilized. Concurrently, they came to see themselves as “white,” as well as civilized and intelligent.

  The slave system in America changed over time. We have already noted a tendency in American popular culture and history textbooks to assume that things always progress. Slavery was not getting easier or nicer as decades passed in the nineteenth century. In the Upper South—especially Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky—owners were increasingly finding that their biggest source of profit was people. So they split up families and sent children and young adults hundreds of miles away, to slave markets in Natchez, New Orleans, and Mobile. In the Deep South, these young slaves would clear land and grow cotton or cane sugar, destined never to see their parents or friends again. Meanwhile, cotton was becoming so profitable that Natchez claims to have had more millionaires per capita in 1860 than anywhere else in America. Of course, “King Cotton,” as it was called, was planted, cultivated, and picked by unpaid labor. Egypt and India could not compete.