Advice Column: Yo, Is This Racist?

I have several younger siblings who are still in grade school, one of whom is a freshman in high school currently taking US History. He called me over several days ago to show me a passage that he found to be a little odd. He – confined to online schooling like most of us during this pandemic, for him in the form of a southern-US based curriculum – was currently reading through a section regarding the American Civil War, and the content was not exactly lining up with what he had previously learned.

My own brief skimming of the material came to the same conclusion: the curriculum was providing a very different outlook on the underlying causes of the Civil War. Within that chapter section, the online textbook pointed to uneven political representation, an oppressive northern government, and unjust taxation as being the primary causes behind the War; very much playing up the “taxation without representation” mantra of the Revolutionary War. Some small mention was indeed given to the slavery dispute of the time, but that role was severely diminished.

Yo, Is This Racist?

To really answer this, we must dive a bit deeper. History, as they say, is written by those who prevail to write their story. The Subject has control over the information that is passed down between generations, the Other must put their hope in the Subject to tell their story. So, we end up with a derivation of oppression, one by which the seemingly immutable annals of time can be twisted to suit an agenda.

Let us for a moment assume that American textbooks offer an infallible recounting of history; does that solve all our biases? The short answer is a resounding “no”. As it is taught in American schools, the subject of history is often a highly analytical affair. As any educational expert would agree, the ability to simply regurgitate facts simply is not a measure of academic understanding. Such is the difference between “knowing” and “understanding”; a student who understands the material can take it in context, analyze it, and tell you what it really means. Textbooks and teachers, in an effort to spark student discussion, will often offer their own conclusions; an inherently subjective endeavor. This is the case here, where the provided analysis by the curriculum lead to the false conclusion on the origins of the Civil War.

This is far from being an issue without precedent: in certain countries – China and North Korea being prime examples – the history taught in schools is deliberately altered to paint the respective countries in a better light. Every country has their fair share of past atrocities to atone for, and some choose to let their history forget that, or justify it.

The American Civil War is one of those past atrocities that the South would perhaps rather forget. In the years following the American Civil War, the South’s vocal support for slavery slowly grew to being a point for shame, recognized as the blight upon the nation’s history that it truly was. In the mid-1900s, coinciding with the rise of the Civil Rights movement, Southern school curriculums began to reflect this shame. Sometimes schools would entirely skip over the origins of the Civil War, but more often they would provide a plethora of alternate reasons behind the South’s secession, none of which had to do with the issue of slavery.

Over 50 years later, and the situation is much the same. While it is generally held that the issue of slavery was the primary motivation behind the Civil War, Southern school curriculums will point to tyrannical oppression from the North as the leading cause. It is a narrative that seems to borrow much from the Revolutionary War and cater to a sense of American patriotism to deflect from the pro-slavery origins. Such is the situation that my younger brother found himself in, confronted by an explanation of the Civil War that avoided any mention of the roots in slavery.

This is an insidious, covert type of racism. Not the obnoxious, impossible-to-ignore kind, but the kind that indoctrinates children from a young age into believing that perhaps slavery never really was an issue. And this is exactly what makes this kind of action so dangerous: presenting twisted falsehoods as truth to oft-impressionable youth who have been assured of the veracity of their education.

Discussions on the topic have yielded a number of counterarguments, a prominent one being that de-emphasizing slavery allows for a more “balanced” viewpoint on the War. Balanced, perhaps, in the sense that it weights the contributing factors more equally, but horrendously imbalanced in how it addresses the history and struggles of black people in America. It paints a picture of an America that did not struggle with the lowest form of racism, which simply is not the truth. Sanitizing American history is a blatant disrespect to the thousands that suffered and died both at the hands of slaveowners, and during the subsequent war for freedom.

Naturally, there will be those that disagree with these conclusions, who believe that American historical education is right to provide the South’s current outlook weighted equally with any other perspectives. But this is an outlook predicated on the racism and subsequent shame associated with the Civil War and does not provide any sort of accurate account of the true events and motivations. Instead of providing a factual analysis of events, many Southern schools focus on fitting their education to an agenda. This is a prime example of how the dominant group, the Subject, can create their own reality through the records of history. An example of how easily the story of the Other can be forgotten.

This case is a far-too-common instance, indicative of the racism that is endemic in the United States education system. In recent years, more attention has been brought to the way diversity is taught in American schools, and equally importantly, to the way the struggles for equality are taught in American schools. A recent controversial example was the realization that the photos taken during the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and -60s were not black-and-white originally, but were processed that way for textbooks in order to give the illusion that the racism addressed in those incidents was far behind us. This is a fairly horrifying realization that many can corroborate, and to this day there has been little done by publishers to address it.

There are sadly many more examples like this, many of which are every bit as present and current as the black-and-white photo modification. Despite the massive attention garnered by the Black Lives Matter movement over the last 12 months, this is an issue that has remained out of the spotlight and has yet to gain the attention it deserves. Perhaps curiously so, the issue is not too far different from the much-maligned and dangerous “all lives matter” rhetoric that has pervaded the Conservative side of America recently; both are crafted to diminish the issues and struggles of black people while attempting to take on some insubstantial mirage of moral high ground.

Much like the “all lives matter” rhetoric, the best response to this issue is to raise awareness. Awareness of how damaging it is to clean America’s hands of this history, and awareness of how important it is to remember and learn from these past experiences. As long as people are deflecting from and skating around the topics in play, it becomes exponentially more difficult to combat that ignorance. Particularly in this case, to subject ideologically-malleable children to such misleading ideas in the supposed safety of a public school, is racist madness at its very worst.

Progress is being made though, as the events of the last year can testify to. While there is still much to be done, the way so many have banded together against America’s racism issue gives hope that, in time, the education system will also receive the makeover it so desperately requires.