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Teaching Hard History | Southern Poverty Law Center
Schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and — as a result — students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America.
Teachers can access resources on teaching American slavery at: www. The resources are offered to educators at no cost. In the Preamble to the U. Constitution, the Founding Fathers enumerated the lofty goals of their radical experiment in democracy; racial justice, however, was not included in that list. Instead, they embedded protections for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade into the founding document, guaranteeing inequality for generations to come.
But we cannot do that until we come to terms with racial injustice in our past, beginning with slavery, do hard things book report. It was responsible for the growth of the American colonies, transforming them from far-flung, forgotten outposts of the British Empire to glimmering jewels in the crown of England. When the southern states seceded, do hard things book report, they did so expressly to preserve slavery.
So wholly dependent were white Southerners on the institution that they took up arms against their own to keep African Americans in bondage. They simply could not allow a world in which they did not have absolute authority to control black labor—and to regulate black behavior.
The central role that slavery played in the development of the United States is beyond dispute. And yet, we the people do not like to talk about slavery, or even think about it, much less teach it or learn it.
The implications of doing so unnerve us. If the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery, then what does that say about those who revere the people who took up arms to keep African Americans in chains? About our nation itself? Slavery is hard history. It is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it.
We the people have a deep-seated aversion to hard history because we are uncomfortable with the implications it raises about the past as well as the present. We the people would much rather have the Disney version of history, in which villains are easily spotted, suffering never lasts long, heroes invariably prevail and life always gets better. We prefer to pick and choose what aspects of the past to hold on to, gladly jettisoning that which makes us uneasy, do hard things book report.
What we love is nostalgia. But our antipathy for hard history is only partly responsible for do hard things book report sentimental longing for a fictitious past. It is also propelled by political considerations. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white Southerners looking to bolster white supremacy and justify Jim Crow reimagined the Confederacy as a defender of democracy and protector of white womanhood. To perpetuate this falsehood, they littered the country with monuments to the Lost Cause.
Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence. We miseducate students because of it. Although we teach them that slavery happened, we fail to provide the detail or historical context they need to make sense of its origin, evolution, demise and legacy.
As a result, students lack a basic knowledge and understanding of the institution, evidenced most glaringly by their widespread inability to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. This is profoundly troubling because American slavery is the key to understanding the complexity of our past. How can we fully do hard things book report the original intent of the Bill of Rights without acknowledging that its author, James Madison, enslaved other people?
Our discomfort with hard history and our fondness for historical fiction also lead us to make bad public policy. We choose to ignore the fact that when slavery ended, white Southerners carried the mindsets of enslavers with them into the post-emancipation period, creating new exploitative labor arrangements such as sharecropping, new disenfranchisement mechanisms including literacy tests and new discriminatory social systems, do hard things book report, namely Jim Crow.
It took African Americans more than a century to eliminate these legal barriers to equality, but that has not been enough to erase race-based disparities in every aspect of American life, from education and employment to wealth and well-being.
Public policies tend to treat this racial inequality as a product of poor personal decision-making, rather than acknowledging it as the result of racialized systems and structures that restrict choice and limit opportunity.
Understanding American slavery is vital to understanding racial inequality today, do hard things book report. The formal and informal barriers to equal rights erected after emancipation, which defined the do hard things book report of the color line for more than a century, were built on a foundation constructed during slavery. Our narrow understanding of the institution, however, prevents us from seeing this long legacy and leads policymakers to try to fix people instead of addressing the historically rooted causes of their problems.
The intractable nature of racial inequality is a part of the tragedy that is American slavery. But the saga of slavery is not exclusively a story of despair; hard history is not hopeless history. Finding the promise and possibility within this history requires us to consider the lives of the enslaved on their own terms. Trapped in an unimaginable hell, enslaved people forged unbreakable bonds with one another. Indeed, no one knew better the meaning and importance of family and community than the enslaved.
They fought back too, in the field and in the house, pushing back against enslavers in ways that ranged from feigned ignorance to flight and armed rebellion. The Founding Fathers were visionaries, but their vision was limited. Slavery blinded them, preventing them from seeing black people as equals.
But we can no longer avoid the most troubling aspects of our past. We have to have the courage to teach hard history, beginning with slavery. A graduate of Morehouse College and Duke University, Jeffries holds a Ph. in American history with a specialization in African-American history. He is an Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University and chair of the Teaching Hard History Advisory Board.
And they must digest do hard things book report through study and learning. They provide a wonderful guide for teachers, as they will also stimulate do hard things book report. I also admire the remarkable surveys conducted here; this is a data-driven report and set of prescriptions. It invites new learning and new pedagogy as it also prompts open discussion of how to face this past and gladly, not timidly, teach it. Many of the results are depressing; such surveys almost always are a testimony of ignorance.
But therein lies the challenge. Such ignorance of American history is hardly confined to students and American classrooms; it is vividly on display in high offices today in our government.
From directing summer teacher institutes on the history of slavery and abolition for more than 20 years, and from more than 40 years of teaching, do hard things book report, first as a public school teacher in Flint, Michigan, for seven years, and then at four different colleges and universities since the s, do hard things book report, I can attest to how hungry and needy so many teachers are do hard things book report knowledge and guidance in this field. We have to feed that hunger, as we also educate both students and teachers.
When it comes to issues of race and the legacies of slavery in America, we are frequently reminded of these truths. Slavery is not an aberration in American history; it is at the heart of our history, a main event, a central foundational story.
Slavery is also ancient; it has existed in all cultures and in all times. Slavery has always tended to evolve in circumstances of an abundance of land or resources, and a scarcity and, therefore, demand for labor. It still do hard things book report today in myriad forms the world struggles to fight. The difference in the 21st century is that virtually all forms of trafficking and enslavement today exist in a world where they are illegal, do hard things book report.
For the two and a half centuries in which American slavery evolved, the systems of slavery operated largely as thoroughly legal practice, buttressed by local law and by the United States Constitution. In America, our preferred, deep national narratives tend to teach our young that despite our problems in the past, we have been a nation of freedom-loving, inclusive people, accepting the immigrant into the country of multi-ethnic diversity, do hard things book report.
Our diversity has made us strong; that cannot be denied. Americans do not always like to face the contradictions in their past, but in so many ways, we are our contradictions. Of all the reasons or justifications used to enslave other human beings, race was late to the long story. Racial slavery came out of the epoch of the slave trade, which of course lasted four centuries in the Atlantic, and likely longer in the Indian Ocean.
That said, teachers need to know more of how to tell that story do hard things book report why slavery became racial in the Americas, and then in the United States.
Slavery was not born racial as some kind of original sin; it was made so by people in historical time, do hard things book report. Slavery has many roots—economic, social, moral, religious, do hard things book report and, yes, racial.
All can be taught to young people because they can see similar impulses today. This report calls on all involved to learn and teach the history of white supremacist ideology, which provides one of the deep roots of slavery. While there are many real threads to this story—about immigration, about our creeds and ideologies, and about race and emancipation and civil rights, there is also the broad, untidy underside. The point is not to teach American history as a chronicle of shame and oppression.
Far from it. The point is to tell American history as a story of real human beings, of power, of vast economic and geographical expansion, of great achievements as well as great dispossession, of human brutality and human reform. The point is also not to merely seek the story of what we are not, but of what we are—a land and a nation built in great part out of the economic and political systems forged in or because of slavery and its expansion. Slavery has much to do with the making of the United States.
This do hard things book report and should be told as a story about human nature generally, and about this place in time specifically, do hard things book report. Americans were not and are not inherently racist or slaveholding. We have a history that made our circumstances, as it also at times unmade them.
Enslaved Americans were by no means only the brutalized victims of two and a half centuries of oppression; they were a people, of many cultures, who survived, created, do hard things book report, imagined and built their worlds.
And through the Civil War and emancipation, they had much to do with remaking the United States at its refounding in the s and s, do hard things book report. For young people it is essential that, in learning about this difficult subject, we help them understand that very little about history is determined, do hard things book report. History does not happen because of prescriptions etched into our lives and behavior.
As humans, we do have many disturbing habits and tendencies. But history is also full of great change. Change comes because we make it come. The history of slavery is not merely a depressing subject about exploiters and victims, racists and heroic survivors. Slavery helped make America—to build it—and through cataclysms, its destruction made possible remaking America.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things Summary (Ben Horowitz)
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