About a “woke” curriculum

Why are people so worried that teaching certain things in US history will “make white students feel bad?” Why do the same people who insist teaching about Jim Crow or Civil Rights will make students feel bad also insist that removing Confederate statues or eliminating “Lee Jackson Day” would “erase history?” And if those things make black people feel intimidated? NO, they don ‘t. Or they shouldn’t.  The statues just honor two great men. They’re history.  We need to remember it.

So what’s up? Are white kids so uniquely weak that they need protections we’d never dream of offering anyone else? Or could it be, white kids are the only ones whose feelings matter?

And, besides, why would stories about some white people oppressing blacks bother YOUR kids? Who says they’ll identify with the slaveowners? Or the KKK? Or the angry people waving Confederate flags, shouting at Ruby Bridges? Who’s to say they won’t identify with the abolitionists? Or with Lincoln? Or the white civil rights workers who came south and allied with King and Lewis and the rest? Unless . . . Oh, wait . . . No kid of yours . . . Well, that certainly paints a different picture.

Or to take another objection, why should reading about slavery or Jim Crow or Massive Resistance or redlining make a child “hate America?” Those things are wrong and we’re trying to move beyond them, aren’t we? Doesn’t that make US History a story of making mistakes and trying to learn from them and do better?

In US/VA history, which I taught from 2008-2015, we taught that three things critical to the future of the colonies’ growth and eventual independence all happened in Jamestown in 1619, and that the future development of America was incomprehensible without any of the three. They were: John Rolfe’s discovery/domestication of a mild brand of tobacco that would soon sweep European markets and for the first time make English colonies economically viable; the arrival of the first shipload of African slaves, which led to the workforce that allowed the cultivation, finance, transportation, and sale of staple export cash crops (first tobacco, then rice in some areas and, then sugar in the Caribbean and southwards, then, most lucrative of all, cotton). Finally, and by far the least important of the three for a long time, the first representative assembly in the New World, the Virginia House of Burgesses.

People who try to argue that chattel slavery was anything but THE essential ingredient for colonial growth, NORTH AND SOUTH, AND for creation of the privileged aristocratic class of gentlemen of leisure who had time to create a revolution and new country are just showing their ignorance of US history. Without slavery, it’s doubtful Jamestown would have survived past 1625 and there is no possibility of settling Carolina, possibly no Georgia, and certainly no demand in the 1830s for all that good cotton and sugar land in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. And there’s no rich New York shipper/merchant class, nothing for New York banking houses to invest in, and no cotton for all those New England manufacturers to loom. To argue that slavery was an aberration from America’s pattern of freedom, as Texas does, is as silly as arguing that water patterns and shortages are just a minor thing in the development of the West.

And without the free labor of hundreds, where does James Madison find the time to read every treatise on politics ever written up to that time? In short, without slavery there’s no United States Constitution and no United States.

Once before in our lifetimes, America experimented with a “patriotic” history curriculum. In the 1950s. You remember. The era when we added “in God we trust” to the currency and “under God” to the Pledge. When being a “possible communist sympathizer” could get you blacklisted. And our history. Well, US history started with brave explorers, setting out to bring civilization and Christianity to the Savages. When the English came, the Indians were nice at first but then turned out to be brutal murderous savages. But then we moved west, bringing Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper and civilization with us. And our brave explorers and scouts and generals like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and Kit Carson brought even more civilization to the Indians and those backward Mexicans. Sure, slavery was bad but the real abuse came with Reconstruction when corrupt carpetbaggers and angry former slaves ganged up to mistreat the defeated southerners. Oh yeah, Booker T. Washington was a good Negro. And George Washington Carver as well. That peanut. Boy, did we hear a lot about peanuts! We fought the Spanish American War to bring freedom. And sent troops to places like Mexico. Same reason. Freedom. And World War I. And now we’re defending freedom from communism with help from our friends, the military in countries like Greece and Argentina and Vietnam. And so on.

We know how that turned out. We got to college and found out our teachers had been lying. Patriotic history created the most cynical generation ever. And those Florida high school kids (and Texas, and Oklahoma, and Indiana, and so many other places), unless they wind up at a neo-right echo chamber college like Liberty or Patrick Henry, will discover how woefully unprepared they are when they get to college – unless DeSantis manages to destroy college curricula as well.

There’s one thing that happens to those who forget history. The result for those who twist and distort it is even more unsightly.