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Teaching the Truth [1]

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Date: 2023-05-24

California Teachers Association

Have you heard of the Civics Alliance? They call themselves education reformers. Do not believe them. They claim as their mission wresting American civics education from the grasp of those who promote diversity, equity and inclusion and who seek social justice, as they threaten to further polarize the nation and undermine national pride. This progressive framework, they insist, poses a grave danger to what they label the three pillars of American history: 1) that America can boast of an exceptional heritage of freedom; 2) that the nation was formed as a republic with liberty as a fundamental principle; and 3) that love of country comes from extolling the accomplishments of a common national culture. The Civics Alliance aims to “unite those who want to preserve civics education that teaches students to take pride in what they share as Americans.” The goal is to ensure that history and civics instruction be restricted to the promotion of patriotism and conformity. On that point Alliance members seem willfully ignorant of the fact that it is diversity itself that has made American culture singular and contributed to its many accomplishments.

The Civics Alliance’s proposed social studies standards, entitled American Birthright, purports to offer a crucial corrective to the nation’s history and civics curriculum by stripping it of its “wokeness.” Hence their opposition to any program that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion or addresses social justice. The Civics Alliance charges that American educators “have forgotten that facts come first.” But the plain truth is that American Birthright sets out to obscure facts and crucial details that counter the narrative its promoters insist is the only acceptable one, a sanitized tale of America’s quest for liberty promoted by rugged individualism, ardent patriotism and commitment to Christian principles exuberantly resulting in its exceptionalism. They demand that in teaching American history educators must hold to a version that excludes any elements that reflect unfavorably on our past. Across the country educators are being restricted by law from addressing topics that might be discomforting to students. But the totality of the facts that contribute to our national narrative present a much fuller, more nuanced, truer picture than what American Birthright and conservative politicians would allow. American history, told honestly, is a story of separate and unequal. Racism and white supremacy were foundational elements of our history. Racism was baked into our narrative from the very beginning. That is not my opinion, it is our truth. Ours is a very messy past, and we are often reluctant, even aggressively resistant, to face it in all its complexity. But failure to tell ourselves the truth, to reconcile with the harsh realities found in much of our history, renders us incapable of moving forward, of realizing the dream of a truly equitable society.

We stand frozen in this place of myths and half-truths and obfuscations. There are those who consider “revisionist history” a grave insult, an erasure of our “sacred” national narrative. But the reality is that much of the story we have long told about our past is itself a revision, an excision of all the messy elements, those facts that render us imperfect and human rather than exceptional. We all have a stake in correcting the flawed version of American history to which many have clung tenaciously and to which American Birthright is committed. It is right and just and honorable that we do so.

When I hear the phrase “all lives matter” what I hear is a tragic untruth. It is a tantalizing fiction. The fact is that the lives of Black people and people of color have never truly mattered. American Birthright’s proposed curriculum promises that “the reality that many Americans at some point were denied liberty and equality will be given due attention and placed in the appropriate historical context.” In what context would slavery and genocide be made more palatable? Noting that slavery was practiced by many cultures throughout human history? How does that exonerate those who implemented it, profited mightily from it and enshrined it in law in the American colonies? If we are to laud them as intellectual giants supposedly influenced by Christian principles shouldn’t we rightfully condemn them for their embrace of a practice so utterly horrific? And if, as the Civics Alliance insists, the bedrock of American history is the quest for liberty, how does the fact that 10 of the first 12 presidents were slave owners, for example, provide context in support of that concept?

Fact: from our very beginning Black bodies have been brutalized and commodified and objectified, all in service to the self-interest of wealthy white men. Poor white people were exploited too, but they were mollified by the alluring promise of some future equality to be gained simply by virtue of their whiteness. They were co-opted in support of the self-interest of wealthy men with the promise of equality – not of condition necessarily, but at least of opportunity – made available to them specifically because they were white. They were sold the fiction that whiteness meant superiority and conveyed supremacy over all of those who were not white. A poor man could take comfort in the fact that, no matter the degree of his poverty, in American society he was superior to every Black man simply by virtue of the color of his skin. That “truth” was told from the very beginning.

The story of America’s founding is therefore also a tale of the creation and implementation of a fictional white racial superiority. That falsehood has had profound consequences over the course of 400 years and remains a stumbling block in the way of forming that “more perfect union” to which we as a nation claim to have always aspired. To revise the narrative of our past, and to talk honestly about white supremacy, is simply to set the historical record straight.

Among the pedagogical tools promoted by American Birthright is something called “Charitable Interpretation.” It would work like this: Educators would “teach students to interpret the beliefs of historical subjects in the most rational way possible, and to learn the strongest possible arguments that support those beliefs.” So, apparently, students would be called upon to be charitable towards the wealthy, white, male authors of the Constitution for denying a political voice to women and people of color because they may truly have believed that only said wealthy, white males had the intellectual capacity to make informed decisions when casting their ballots or drafting legislation. The strongest arguments those men made in support of that belief were that Black people were somehow less fully human than white people, so therefore logically not equal and entitled to the same rights, and that women, governed by their reproductive organs, lacked the capacity for rational thought. (They would vote their hearts, not their minds.) Using this pedagogical tool, students are to be charitable in considering the racism and misogyny of those who declared themselves superior to all others and accept that they were sincere in that belief. Because they were simply “men of their time,” we have no right now to condemn them for their moral failures and intellectual duplicity? We must excuse the southern politician who wrote of African Americans that it was their enslavement that allowed for their moral and intellectual improvement, and thus he knew slavery to be a positive good? Or grant a moral pass to the Jamestown colonist who called for the annihilation of Indigenous peoples – he observed that it would be easier to exterminate them than to civilize them – because, if we are being charitable, perhaps he truly believed that to be the case?

The quest for real equality has been hindered for too long by our collective refusal to accept the painful truths about our past. Though the Civics Alliance decries “revisionism” as the enemy of patriotism, revising how our history has been told is a crucial, essential first step towards addressing that reality. We must be willing to acknowledge that racism did not develop as something that was organic, natural or inevitable. Discrimination was not merely accidental, or incidental. Inequality didn’t just happen. People made it happen. Deliberately. Self-consciously. In service to their own self-interest. It is well within our reach, as a society, to realize true equity and inclusion, ensuring that all voices are heard as vital parts of our national story, but we must start with telling ourselves the truth.

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