Preparation
I need to apologize – to twenty-eight years of students. I taught you: government and economics, sociology and current affairs, world and American history. And I used all of the knowledge I gained through my own education – twelve years of some of the best public schools in Ohio, four years at Denison University, a Masters Degree in Education from Ashland College, and lots of independent learning and study. I had confidence that my body of knowledge prepared me to teach you. But I was wrong.
I knew that there were biases in textbooks. Our eighth grade history book had more pages on the Texas War of Independence than it did World War I. It took a while to find out that Texas bought their textbooks state-wide, so publishers wanting to sell thousands of books in Texas made a much bigger deal about the Alamo than the Second Battle of the Marne. It was about money, not about historic impact.
Coverup
I did “fight” my own battles against historic “coverups”. When I was teaching history in the 1980’s, there was a movement to deny the Holocaust. I sought out even more information about the what happened, determined to make sure MY STUDENTS knew the truth, and not the revisionist ignorance. And I made the choice to deal with the causes of the Civil War with truth. It was about slavery. That’s a reality that still creates controversy in public education today. Here’s how the Ohio Curriculum for Eighth Grade American History defines the causes of the Civil War:
“Disputes over the nature of federalism, complicated by economic developments in the United States, resulted in sectional issues, including slavery, which led to the American Civil War.”
In the media business – that’s called burying the lead.
The Prism
I did try to research the history of Black people in America. But I did it through the prism of American individualism. I looked to individuals: Benjamin Banneker, a Black intellect and contemporary of Benjamin Franklin; Charles Richard Drew the inventor of blood transfusions; Frederick Douglass and the other pioneering civil rights leaders, and of course, Martin Luther King Jr. I saw history as the “story” of individuals and how they impacted on the nation around them for folks of all races – from Washington and Jefferson to John Lewis and Malcolm X.
And I did teach about actions against Black Americans. I taught about the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, putting the Freedmen “back in their place”. I used my personal experience with Jesse Owens to contrast Nazi racism to American segregation – but only as a difference in quality instead of just quantity. My historical bias towards individualism missed a whole section of the American story – and not a pleasant one.
Critical Race Theory
It is somehow considered “Un-American” to teach “race”. For my generation, we grew up on the “Schoolhouse Rock” concept of the “Melting Pot”, where we all blend into “American”. But folks of color weren’t allowed to “melt”, and that kept them from sharing in the American Dream.
There is a new movement in education; to teach how race has been institutionalized into our society, laws and government. That isn’t really new, and it isn’t particularly surprising. But the reaction of many white Americans to teaching “race” is extreme.
It’s called Critical Race Theory – defined by Education Week as:
“Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.”
Instinctively I think most Americans recognize that the core concept of Critical Race Theory is true. We know all about economic “red lining”, when banks and even government agencies refuse to give home loans for folks of color to live in “white” communities. We know that legal segregation separated our schools, and now “de-facto” segregation keeps races apart. The “dirty little secret” of the suburbs around Columbus is that much of their original growth is as a result of Columbus Schools’ busing for desegregation.
All of that was supposed to be “overcome” by American Individualism. But it’s not.
The Gap
So we don’t talk about the ongoing racism in our lives – from employment to education, law enforcement to healthcare. And by not teaching that – by sticking to the “truth” we learned fifty years ago – we perpetuate racism in our society.
And I participated in that. I left generations of students with a gap in their knowledge. And worse, I left them with the “feeling” that they had “all the answers”. That gives them “the out” of denying our societal reality, allowing some to claim that reality is “just politics”.
And for that – to all my students, some now in their sixties – I apologize.
