Black History is American History

I have wanted to visit the Smithsonian Museum of African American history since it first opened in 2015.  When my nephew and his girlfriend came East for a visit and wanted to see D.C., I seized on the opportunity and it was the very first thing I saw on my visit to the city.      

The museum has 7 floors —— 3 underground and 3 above ground, divided by an expansive lobby on the ground floor.  Though entrance is free, tickers are required because the museum is so popular with visitors.  There is something very heartening about this and as I waited in line I felt like I was surrounded by a host of fellow Americans who get it.  These days, that’s no small thing.        

The floors below the lobby depict the years from slavery’s arrival in North America to the election of Barack Obama and beyond.  Visitors descend three levels to begin and the space is dark this far below.  It took me a minute to realize that the walls are covered in a substance that looks like wood.  We are in the hull of a ship making the journey of the Middle Passage.        

There are some artifacts, though few relative to the fact that we are in a Smithsonian museum of history.  Most of what we view are the words of people - Oloudah Equiano especially - describing the reality of enslavement.  The displays are offered in a tone of matter-of-factness and it is in these descriptions and maps of the journey across the Atlantic and portrayals of the slave ships’ holds that the horror takes shape for museum visitors.

The visitor winds around, slowly ascending toward the 19th century.  There is a statue of Thomas Jefferson and his words in the Declaration of Independence, plus descriptions of the enslaved population at Monticello, including the stories of the Hemmings family.  The history is presented precisely in order for the visitor to draw her own conclusions about both Jefferson and the nation he helped found.  As I walk through the history, of the 1800s the abolition movement comes into view.  The words and actions of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and William Lloyd Garrison take command of the narrative.  At every juncture, the experiences and lives of Black Americans are at the core of the story.        

Notably, there are few artifacts, a fact that underscores the reality of being enslaved and held as property.  People denied the power to own their very bodies leave few possessions to be cherished.  Those artifacts that are displayed - a lace handkerchief that belonged to Harriet Tubman; a copy of Frederick Douglass’ North Star newspaper - are more powerful because of the rarity.        

As I continue to walk the path upward, the historical record winds from the hopes of Reconstruction to the discouragement and terror of Jim Crow.  Military service by Black Americans, segregation, and the Great Migration sit alongside one another, telling the story of our nation.  Now there are more pictures and artifacts to show the story, including a powerful and emotional display of the story of Emmet Till’s trip to Mississippi. 

The museum tells the story of our collective past with space left open for us to make a better future, no small task in this nation.  It celebrates Black lives, community, and culture without shirking the harder truths lived by those lives.  The museum is a monument to our collective history.  For much of my walk through this story of the United States,  my emotions were at the surface, as they often are when I teach this history, which I take pains to keep alive.  I want everyone in this nation to visit the museum and to spend time wrestling with the truth of our collective past.  It is the only way to a better future for us all.

July 4

I love my country with a depth that has fostered a career spent teaching about its history and politics.  I am a patriot who named her only child after the man whose words we celebrate on this 4th of July day.  

But I am no “Love my country right or wrong” patriot.  I am an “I love my country enough to right the wrongs” patriot.  This year, a year determined to teach us some very important lessons, it seems appropriate to pause and think again abut the patriot I am.

I’ve taught it so much that I know the preamble to the Declaration of Independence by heart.  I read it several times a year; I think about it often.  I teach the Declaration in terms of that preamble and I never fail to be stirred by the claim that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I think of the power of such a claim when it was made in 1776 and as we try to live by it now.  I teach my students that every right Americans subsequently demanded to have recognized, be it the right to be free from slavery, to vote, to marry whomever we please, was recognized in those words and was there all along.  

That’s not all that I teach because I know how often we fell short of that stirring claim; I know how often we still fall short of it.  I teach my students about both of those truths.  I teach Frederick Douglass’s words about the 4th of July.  I teach them about the racism baked into our founding and built into our firmament.

Then I remind them that we must be patriots who seek a better nation for all of us.  I remind them that all we need do is return to the words of the Declaration and let that truth guide our way.  

Juneteenth

In 2014, writing for The Atlantic, author Ta-Nehisi Coates made the argument for reparations as recompense for our nation’s history of racism and slavery.  His argument was powerful and, for many, myself included, persuasive.  A wave  of pro-reparations discussions followed in the wake of Coates’ article, but no policy (or even policy proposals) materialized.  It was 2014 and many white Americans were happily living in the hazy fantasy bubble of a post-racial America.  

Between the activism of Black Lives Matter and the election of 2016, it would be fair to say that the 2014 bubble has decisively burst.  That we are having real conversations on the color of our national divide and the history (and current reality) of racial inequality in this nation is a good thing for all parties, even if it’s been driven by a resurgence of some very ugly racism.   And while reparations payments are still not on the bi-partisan policy table, the idea and arguments for it have become significantly more mainstream.  Elizabeth Warren is running for the presidency and she has a very real proposal on the issue.  Another presidential candidate for 2020, Cory Booker, is also talking about reparations in a serious and thoughtful fashion.  

Today, the House of Representatives is holding hearings about the prospect of reparations payments.  Coates and Booker will be among the supporters testifying before Congress.  That these conversations happen in the midst of a nation no longer under the illusion that we are a post-racial America is a sign of progress.  In 2014, Coates wrote that “reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”   His words are a reminder that our past is no distant memory.  I am glad that the conversation about reparations is gaining traction.  I’ve no notion that reparations payments or policies are around the corner.  But on this Juneteenth, we can at least be hopeful.  

American History

As Black History Month comes to a close, my students and I are taking up the story of slavery in antebellum America.  We started talking about the stories of Africans in America when we studied Jamestown; this group knows why the date 1619 matters.  We talk a lot about black history in my class, which covers the period from 1609 to 1850.  We don’t only speak of enslaved Africans in America, though the stories are obviously prominent.  My goal is to ensure that these 7th graders always know that black history is American history. 

Though we’d prefer to ignore it, slavery is a prominent part of the American story.  When I teach my students about the history of slavery, I show them that damage can be inflicted more quickly than a cure can correct it.  So I point out that the North American English colonies began enslaving people in 1619, protected the continuation of slavery when the Constitution was adopted, and didn’t officially make slavery illegal until 1865.  Those years were followed by systemic racism in the form of segregation and denial of rights; a condition that lasted until at least 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  Even that date is a generous “end” date for the legal practice of slavery and segregation of blacks in America.  But if we use it, we’re talking about more than 350 years of time spent inflicting a wound.  

In this generous definition, we’ve only “officially”ended legalized racism for 55 years.  And I note that this is generous.  The Black Lives Matter movement of the last decade didn’t occur in a vacuum; it’s a response to the systemic racism that continues to exist in the United States.  From the incarceration rate of African Americans to the modern segregation of American schools and the maternal and infant mortality rates of African Americans mamas and their babies, the inequality that first came to our shores in 1619 persists today.

It will take much more work for us to recover from it.  We can only make progress if we are truthful with ourselves.  As Bryan Stevenson reminds us, “The great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude: It was the ideology of white supremacy, in which people persuaded themselves that black people aren’t fully human.” We would do well to remember it every time we consider our nation’s history.  

August 14 in My America

It’s Monday, the day I usually post a few pictures of my garden and reflect upon the growing season to date.  But today, a garden post can wait in favor of a more serious discussion about race in America.  I have been teaching U.S. history for more than 20 years, so it’s fair to say I have spent a good deal of time thinking about racism in this nation.  It’s part of the very fabric of our founding and cannot be ignored if you wish to understand who were were in 1607, let alone 2017.

As any historian can tell you, this nation has made progress on inclusion and equality, but not so much progress that racism is gone.  Our progress is well short of perfection.  We may have elected an African-American president in 2008, but we’re not in post-racial America.  There can be no such animal in a country founded upon the original sin of slavery.   Which is not to say that we can’t get better, that we can’t work to fulfill Martin Luther King’s dream.  We can and we must.  But neither can we pretend that more than 250 years of legal slavery founded upon racist principles can be wiped out in a century and half.  Some problems take longer to correct than they took to create.  And this is one hell of a problem.

Since the events in Charlottesville over the weekend, I’ve seen plenty of people of color reject the sentiment of well-meaning whites who saw the weekend’s white supremacist rally and claim, “This isn’t America.”  In fact, this is very much America.  We are a place that incarcerates blacks at a greater rate than whites.  We are a place that memorializes Confederate history as if it is a benign story of disagreements instead of an ugly tale of gross racial inequality and injustice.  The North may have won the Civil War but the South won Reconstruction.  We can’t even acknowledge that fact.  We are a place where opportunities are not equally available.  We are a nation founded in slavery, often unwilling to own up to all that implies about the truth of our origins.

That is our America.  

But it needn’t continue to be our America.  It’s not mine; not the country I want for my fellow Americans; not the country I think we can be.  Martin Luther King told us that the arc of history is long but that it always bends toward justice.  I would add that the bend toward justice happens more rapidly when we push it in that direction.  That means speaking out, especially when it is uncomfortable to do so. That means acknowledging the ways in which privileges for some of us has meant exclusion for others.  That means demanding that we live up to the promises of equality and justice in our founding documents.  We didn’t do it at our founding.  We don’t do it now. 

But this is our America and we can be better than we are.  In point of fact, we must be better.  We must make this the nation we want it to be; an America for everyone.

Martin Luther King Day 2016

The other day, I was looking at the the central calendar in my home, checking on the wrestling schedule.  Looking at February, I remembered the time when we had Lincoln and Washington’s birthdays as separate holidays.  In 1983, Martin Luther King Junior’s birthday replaced the separate presidential birthdays on the list of federal holidays and we swapped two 3-day weekends in February for one to celebrate MLK in January and another to mark Lincoln and Washington in February.  I remember the controversy and complaining that followed.  You can learn some of those details here. 

Looking back, the progression of states agreeing to eventually honor the federal holiday seems rather churlish.  There was Arizona, where the state’s governors when back and forth about honoring the holiday.  Or take Arkansas, which honored the holiday by permitting state employees to take either a January three-day week and Martin Luther King day or Robert E. Lee’s birthday instead.  That’s the sort of decision that would be bitterly funny if it weren’t for our nation’s horrifying history of slavery and racial animosity.

In 2009, the year Barack Obama took office as our nation’s first African American president, a friend and I took our sons to a church service for Martin Luther King Day.  The next day, I kept JT home from school to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office.  That momentous day seemed so important —— a real step forward in the struggle for racial equality in a nation that has sometimes gone kicking and screaming toward the promise of liberty and equality laid out in our founding documents.

Fast forward to 2016, and it seems to me that the promise I felt in 2009 has stalled.  Yes, we have an African-American president in the White House and yes, he has taken the time to speak articulately about race.  But enduring inequality is all around us in 2016.  The racism evident in some critics of President Obama is disappointing in a nation that should be better than this.  It’s a victory of sorts that we are more aware than ever before of the racial and economic inequalities that persist in our nation.  For this, I expect Martin Luther King would be glad.  But in so many other ways, we’ve yet to live up to the dream.   There is hard work ahead and we must all do our part.  Today is a good day to acknowledge that reality.

Teaching Slavery: Grade 7 edition

In the New York Times magazine’s yearly edition on college education there was an essay by Edward F. Baptist entitled, “Teaching Slavery.”  I keep coming back to it, reflecting on my own teaching experiences these days.  In his essay, Baptist discusses the challenges of teaching slavery to today’s college students.  He characterizes his teaching experience in the last 25 years as the challenge to overcome “….a bubbling bowl of white resentment.”  

Baptist identifies the schools where he has taught undergraduates and allows that the passage of time and diversity of the classrooms makes a difference.  Things were better at the University of Miami than they were at the University of Pennsylvania.  These days, now teaching at Cornell University, Baptist writes that things are better than they were at Penn but still notes that, “Resentment of the topic of slavery hums at a relatively low volume…”

In one respect, I teach at the opposite end of the spectrum from Baptist.  He has college students and I teach 7th grade.  In another respect, our demographic is similar.  In terms of privilege, the students at my independent college prep school are likely as well off as the undergrads at a place like Cornell, perhaps even more so.  In terms of diversity, however, my classes are distinct from Cornell and look a great deal more like the nation as a whole.  In most of my diverse 7th grade classes, whites are not the majority.

Baptist’s lessons on slavery are likely building on the previous knowledge of the institution that his history students have acquired.  I’m at the other end of the spectrum, laying the foundation for that knowledge.  My 7th graders care a great deal about fairness and in this respect slavery is at first quite easy to introduce:  it’s so clearly unfair.  Of course, it’s more than that, and I don’t neglect the complexities.

I teach my 7th grade history students that studying history is the process of discovering more complete truths of the human experience.  When I introduce slavery to a room full of diverse faces I make very clear that none of us are slaves and none of us own slaves.  We know that such a thing is deeply wrong.  I explain that none of us are personally responsible for slavery in the United States, but that we are all living with its inheritance and as citizens are therefore responsible for understanding its complexities.  I emphasize that this is a collective enterprise.  I explain the introduction of slavery in the American colonies as a racist solution to the desire for cheap labor.  My students and I never forget that slavery was driven by racism.

Talking about such a horrifying topic with 12 and 13 year olds is sometimes a challenge.  The pain and discomfort of understanding slavery sometimes shows on their faces; I can be overwhelmed by that horror.   So I tell them this as well: there are moments of greatness in our history; there are moments of great disappointments.  Together, they make up who we are.  Our history is imperfect because people are flawed.  From this foundation, our self-knowledge moves forward.  We can work as a class to understand our nation.  Instead of resentment, we have community and the sense that it is our world to both understand and repair.

In Continued Pursuit of the Dream

This past year has brought much-needed public attention to the ways in which our society remains enormously unequal.  It’s not as if this was my first realization of the ways in which our nation is stratified by race.  I grew up in California, raised by parents who were comfortable with diversity.  They were the kind of people who encouraged hard conversations about inequality.  I’ve long been aware of the privileges accorded to me because of my skin color.  One of the reasons I came to New Jersey thirteen years ago was so that JT would grow up in a world that was as diverse as my own childhood had been.   I wanted him to look around at the faces in his life that were slightly different from his own and know in his heart that we are all made of the same humanity.  

In that respect, JT’s world is a successful example of the ways in which diversity enriches our lives.  His educational environment ensures his confidence in the equality at the heart of our superficial differences.  To me, this is a reminder of the way in which history and time has its own way of re-shaping our nation’s perceptions.  It’s a rich irony in this world that a child named after a founding father has a default image of the president as Barack Obama.

I don’t wish to be overly-optimistic about our nation’s further ability to manage its racial divides, but my son and the children with whom I work every day ensure that Reverend King’s dream is as alive as ever.  This generation has a very different set of expectations.  The racism and ignorance of their elders is not just rejected; it isn’t tolerated.  That reality gives my dreams of the future a powerful sense of hope. 

The Things We Don't Discuss

In my work with young women, I spend a lot of time treating their minds as equal to the minds of the young men in my classroom.  In other words, I hold boys and girls to the same standards, as well I should.  However, this Mother Jones graphic representation of gender equality in the social world drawn from a recent UN Report conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media suggests that I am living in a dream world.

In conducting my classroom as an egalitarian place, I may be doing the girls in my care a disservice.  I am certainly not preparing them for the real world.  Because the real world is a place where young women will be judged by the quality of their backsides and not their ideas, where they will find that their minds are sometimes not as valuable as their cleavage, a place where they will be required to work twice as hard for half the professional rewards that will more easily accrue to their male peers.  Those are the hard and real facts of life in 2012.

As a feminist of long-standing, I've been thinking about this for quite some time.  My largely unsuccessful campaign against "you guys" is part of my effort to combat stereotypes of girls.  But my careful decision to never gender my expectations of leadership or status seems almost quaint in light of the UN report.  And I find myself feeling disheartened and less willing to think in terms of how far we've come but more in terms of how far we must still travel.

Sigh.

Envy

The release of Mitt Romney's tax returns and the consequent discussions of how much tax he pays on his millions has me thinking fondly of Huey Long and his Share the Wealth campaign.

Romney would no doubt accuse Senator Long of "envy" and "class warfare." And for his part, Long wouldn't bother to deny it, which is why I still have a soft spot for his populist proposals.

I've got no similar soft spot for Romney's nonsense…every time he opens his audio-animatronic mouth I am reminded why I am not a Republican.