Writing About Racism in History Textbooks
Cleaning and decluttering my house, I found my old notes from my bias review of a world history textbook (this is some seriously old clutter — these notes are from the year 2000 or 2001, I think!). I may treat you to a selection of issues from these notes over the next few weeks. It’s called recycling. Bear with me…so here is issue #1, one of the things that bothered me the most when I reviewed this particular history book.
Why is it that mainstream publishers of world history textbooks refuse to teach students about the role of racism in history? When I reviewed World History, I decided that it might be interesting to count the number of times the word “racism” was used in the book. I found references to racism on eight pages. Racism was referred to in discussions of social Darwinism, imperialism in Africa, British colonialism in India, and World War II and the holocaust. The words racism and racist did not come up during discussions of Native American history, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, Reconstruction after the Civil War. The word racism was not even used during the text’s discussion of apartheid in South Africa! I have to ask myself, why?
And I answer myself: There are two reasons. First, as American educators we have made a collective decision not to upset children with any historical content that might be considered disturbing. Second, publishers view a discussion of racism in America as potentially controversial and not worth the risk that a book might not be adopted by certain states or school districts. It’s considered safe and uncontroversial to label Hitler as racist. But American slavery? lynchings? the assassination of Martin Luther King? While you or I might think it was safe to use the “R” word in these contexts, I can tell you that American educational publishers are just not ready yet. In fact, in my review of this particular textbook, I discovered that high school students are not even supposed to know about (for example) violence and lynchings during Reconstruction. It’s not just that we can’t label it racist, it’s that we can’t talk about it, period. WH’s discussion of the post-Reconstruction south consisted of exactly two sentences: “After federal troops left the South, white Southerners passed laws that limited African Americans’ rights and made it difficult for them to vote. African Americans continued to face discrimination in Northern states as well.” So we’ve done our duty by the South in pointing out that the same problem existed in the North too. What problem? Not racism, surely. Nope — just discrimination. And you can bet the editors agonized over the choice to use even that fairly benign word! WHY? It’s not as if editors were a bunch of white supremacists. On the contrary, most, if not all, textbook editors are fairly left of center politically and practically sagging with white liberal guilt. But most textbook editors (and certainly the editors at this particular publishing house which shall remain nameless) live in the Midwest or the Northeast. We have our own biases…and one of them is the belief that the South has yet to grow up. We just know that sitting on textbook adoption committees in Texas and Florida there have to be a few rednecks who won’t let the book pass if it contains any implicit criticism of the South or Southerners. Needless to say I disagree with the spineless decision to cater to this point of view, which we don’t even know for sure is really all that prevalent in the South. If Texas has a problem with teaching kids about slavery and Reconstruction, if Louisiana has a problem, if Florida has a problem, I have a solution — let them write their own fucking books. If New York, Boston, and Chicago publishing houses all band together and decide to present this part of American history — and I’m not talking about rewriting entire books, by the way, I’m just talking about adding a word here and a sentence there — Louisiana and Mississippi will just have to accept it or publish their own books.
There is also a pedagogical issue. We can’t continue to write and edit books based on the premise, “let’s not disturb the children.” In the first place, world history books are marketed to high schools, so these children won’t be children much longer. In the second place, we are losing our audience. We lost them a long time ago. Kids are bored with history. They’re bored because we don’t make it relevant. They’re bored because we skip the interesting parts, because we think the interesting parts are too disturbing for kids and because we back away from anything we think might be too controversial. But — students know more than we give them credit for. They already know that the United States has a legacy of racism that stems from slavery days. They know racism still exists. They have heard of racial profiling. We could be using students’ knowledge of current affairs as a hook to get them interested in learning about history. But it won’t work if we insist on filtering out the scary stuff.
Finally. Among textbook editors, the point of view I am advocating will probably seem a little radical. But I would just like to point out, for the sake of perspective, that we don’t live in the 19th century, when some of the first history texts that publishers began using as models, were written. Because textbooks change so slowly — a word here, a sentence there — our textbooks are generations behind our culture. Our textbooks present an artificially out-of-date, obsolete perspective on history. We don’t write history textbooks — we update them. But when we update them — by adding a paragraph at the end of a section or a few sidebars on current events — we leave the basic text intact. And the basic text of most of these books has been sitting there, intact and unchanged (gathering dust, quite frankly) for decades. Even such a monolith as Encyclopedia Britannica is more current than our textbooks are. Consulting EB on apartheid, back when I was reviewing World History, I found that EB calls apartheid “the most stringent system of racial segregation and discrimination that the world has known.” EB goes so far as to say that the purpose of apartheid was white lawmakers’ wish to maintain “white supremacy” (two words that you will never find in any textbook!) during the industrialization of the South African economy. WH, the textbook I reviewed, on the other hand, blamed the South African constitution (a piece of paper!) rather than white legislators (“the constitution gave whites power and denied the black majority its rights”).
Do we really want textbooks to be known as more conservative than EB? Or do we want our textbooks to be cutting edge, up-to-date, in step with American culture? That’s the question I will leave you with. And if you want to write to me and tell me that American history textbooks have changed dramatically in the nearly ten years since I reviewed WH, I’d love to know about it!
About The Author
Regarding this quote that Bonnie found in a history textbook:
“After federal troops left the South, white Southerners passed laws that limited African Americans’ rights and made it difficult for them to vote. African Americans continued to face discrimination in Northern states as well.”
Textbook publishers, this gross mischaracterization of the extent to which masses of people were made to suffer horrendous indignities is inexcusable.