I teach U.S. History to 7th graders. My course starts with the settlement at Jamestown and aims to close out at the Emancipation Proclamation, which is a story of hope. I end with hope because a whole lot of my course is helping a diverse group of 21st century 12 and 13 year olds to unpack a story that features the original sin of slavery. I respect the power of the American promise and I believe in it. I also realize the ways in which we have fallen short of that promise. In 8th grade, my students will pick up U.S. history at the Civil War and they will study into the 20th century. I want them to be well-prepared to understand segregation, the Great Migration, and the promise of Martin Luther King, Junior. I also want them to ask questions.
The greatest challenge in my class is to help the students to identify and understand the promise of the Declaration of Independence, specifically Jefferson’s claim, “that all men are created equal” and then to make sense of that promise in light of the many ways our nation fell short of it.
Slavery and the exclusion of women from the promise of the Declaration absorbs a great deal of our time; it has to. Because as thrilling as Jefferson’s words are, our nation fell far short of them for many years. We fall short today, as even a cursory listen to Donald Trump’s words reveals. There are days when I listen to the news and shake my head; there are days when I listen to the news and rage, as I did when the president took up against Mexican immigrants this week, calling some of them animals.
When it comes to slavery, it’s remarkably easy for 12 and 13-year olds to fall into the trap of believing that slavery was introduced into North America because the colonial settlers needed workers. We separate these issues and identify the reality that labor was needed and that enslaved labor was chosen to meet that need. This distinction helps the students to identify the racism at the core of slavery. And make no mistake, slavery was a racist institution. While its easy enough to understand their co-existence, it’s often a disappointment for the students to realize that the end of slavery did not bring an end to the racism at the heart of the institution.
I am careful when I introduce the language of the positive-good pro-slavery crowd. The rhetoric of John C. Calhoun is my first vehicle. In my classroom of racially diverse students, we are precise when we look at Calhoun and his crowd; we never lose sight of the ways that he sought to dehumanize the enslaved people; to treat them as other. We recognize that the tools Calhoun used to characterize the slave, calling the enslaved people animals instead of people, can easily become the ugly racism of our time.
And indeed it has, thanks to Donald Trump, whose words are damaging and dangerous. I’m a woman who is often unrealistically optimistic and this default position of hope has always served me well. When I taught 7th graders in the atmosphere created by the presidency and leadership of Barack Obama, we all soaked in the language of hope. We felt proud of an African-American president living in the nation’s White House.
Donald Trump is not a man who brings hope. In his small meanness, I feel dirty and ugly. Hope feels elusive and rare, a fading commodity in the bitter stew that is Trump’s version of America. I tell myself that reason will triumph; that my little group of thoughtful and tolerant 7th graders will win out. But some weeks that feels like an investment in optimism that is not born out by the reality of daily life in Donald Trump’s mad, mad world and I grow weary. But I will not give up the fight. I will live in hope.
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