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This question was asked in a group I belong to. It's been asked many times.
So let's skip over the part where we discuss the fact that there isn't one true history. This question is not about differing perspectives anyway. The question is really about making an attempt to stop telling blatant lies, deliberately leaving out the deadliest parts of racism, and minimizing genocide into something called "manifest destiny" within children's history books in the United States.
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I don't know how it would get done, as dedicated as people are to seeing "me and mine" in the best possible light and white people have too much power as compared to others for now. But if it could get done, there's no doubt in my mind that there would be a positive difference.
I don't know what form that positive difference would take. However, I see so clearly the link between...
1) not knowing your own history and the survival white supremacy
2) not knowing your own history and thriving of male supremacy
...that it seems obvious that breaking those links would necessarily have an effect.
Most people would agree that an individual person's history and knowledge of that history makes that individual person who they are. All your experiences create who you are, create your personality. What's in a person's memory, what an individual chooses to remember and chooses to repress (pieces of their personal history) also shapes a person into who they are because what you choose to hold in your memory and choose to erase enhances or limits the effect of your experiences.
And I don't think the basic principles of this changes much when you move from talking about individuals to talking about groups.
A group's history and retained knowledge of that history makes a group who they are. White people, and many other Americans, like to believe in a kind of individuality that isn't real. We are social. We do have group habits formed by our shared history.
For example, the white individual has a racial identity and acts out race just like everybody else that's not white. White people have white experience. But white individuals collectively, their group, tends to think of their own raced experience as "normal" with everybody else too focused on their skin color/ethnicity -- which is why (history-less) colorblind ideology was only ever popular with this group now called "white people." (You can only believe you are blind to race when it never really existed for you in the first place. )
Individuals honest about who they are, good or bad, are often decent human beings if they make efforts in that direction. Let's assume for now that this describes a kind of personal transparency that breeds integrity. It follows then that groups of individuals like this, who are honest about who they are, good or bad, will be comprised of decent human beings.
On the flip side...
--if you lie to yourself about how good your group is then there's no effort that needs to be made; We're the good people. --if lie to yourself about how good your group is then the individuals within that group have to lie and cover up in order to fit in.
--If you lie to yourself about how good your group is then you have to lie for your ancestors as well--- ala Ben Affleck
These truths are most evident when you look at the current behavior or white people and compare it to the accuracy of white history as taught in school history books. Yet, the more I read black history written by black people, especially black history as written by black women, the more I'm realizing that black people have the very same tendency to mistake hero lessons for history lessons.
Black women writers seem to write more intimately than black male writers, probably due to gender expectations. They have taught me so many things about Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Josephine Baker, Walter White, Booker T Washington, and Ida B Wells that made me sad and sometimes angry.
These historical figures had their flaws, motives, and personal interactions revealed and examined by the women writers I've been reading lately. It's crystal clear to me that the books that I've read on black history before were more dedicated to making heroes out of these flawed human beings than creating an accurate picture of these human beings. That means the writers of these black history books of mine aren't so very different in mindset from Ben Affleck.
Again, if you lie to yourself about how good your group is then the individuals within that group have to lie and cover up in order to fit in. If you lie to yourself about how good your group is then you have to lie for your ancestors as well. And once you start lying collectively about your ancestors you have dishonest history books in school.
It's a simple fact that people like to paint pretty pictures of me and mine. But this damages us long into adulthood and damages the collective us for multiple generations.
Recently I read a black history book that was in part about Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955, a black man who wasn't just light-skinned but looked completely white. In fact, he use to pass for white while spying on KKK meetings -- then get run out of town by white people trying to kill him when they found out. Not more than a few weeks had passed before I read an article about how White married a white woman then announced in "Look" magazine that he thought some sort of skin bleaching system was going to be the end of racism -- a fact completely omitted when talking about Walter White by most magazines and black history book writers ala Affleck.
When you choose having history over having heroes you might wind up having discussions about the gap between Walter White's obviously heroic decision to be black instead of deciding to pass, even putting his life in danger then Walter White's apparent desire to want blacks to be able to pass into whiteness like he could/did(?) nearer the end of his life.
Colorism, class, and light-skin were very much connected long before Walter White and the NAACP's birth through the height of the NAACP's influence in the 1950s and 60s. And what was going on in the NAACP was a reflection of what was going on throughout most sections of that smallish section of middle-class black America in the early 20th century. If we, as black people knew our black history and especially black female history that involves colorism and class, we wouldn't have been surprised by the multiple black attempts to absolve Rachel Dolezal.
There are many discussions black people don't have due to our dedication to having hero lessons instead of history lessons.
For example, I've seen discussions of Booker T Washington's accomplishments and influence, the building of Tuskegee being one of the most significant. I've read some discussion of his accommodationist attitudes toward white people. But there is virtually no discussion of how his accommodationist and classist attitudes may have manifested itself years after his death in the black doctors of the Tuskegee Institute, the ones who knowingly participating in the Tuskegee Experiment for years after they knew rural black men had been infected with syphilis while being denied treatment just to study how they suffered and died.
Black people want hero lessons instead of history lessons as badly as white people do, if not more so.
Some of us have become so ashamed of poverty and the outcomes of poverty and want shining examples of black worthiness. We have become so dedicated to this craving for heroes that Bill Cosby can say the vilest things about the poorest and weakest of us and we continue to worship him because of the positive things he images he presented of us in a sitcom. But the worship of Cosby is probably less about his accomplishments and twice as much about the fact that he is high up, shiny gold, rich, and black. Long before it became clear that he's very, very likely a rapist, we did let go of his achievements. Collectively, we could no more easily give Cosby up than white feminists want to give up Margaret Sanger.
 |
from Charles Blow's 2010
"Let's Rescue The Race Debate"
|
If we mistake hero lessons for history lessons, we will surely repeat our mistakes. And we cannot afford to repeat mistakes. White people repeat their mistakes too. However, socially, they are sitting on top. They can afford to make the same mistakes to a certain extent (The 1%, mostly white, may destroy the planet with fracking...but other than that and maybe serial killing, whites are sitting prettier than we are)
All this is why I conclude that telling the truth about our collective history isn't just about reducing oppressiveness of white people or the oppressiveness of men, it's about building our own self-awareness, individually and collectively. Building that self-awareness may reduce oppressiveness but it stops a large segment of the oppressed from agreeing with the oppressor be the majority of white people or the majority of male people.
If we are HONEST about those we claim
as "us" and as heroes both
we can be honest about ourselves.
If we can see heroes as people
just like us
we can be braver.
That is,
if I can accept that Ida B Wells
was imperfect just like I am fairly imperfect
then my ability to do heroic things
just like Ida B Wells
won't seem so far fetched, right?
We'll be more willing to step out, take
chances, and take action
in anti-sexism and anti-racism struggles, both
If we are honest about heroes having flaws
then we can be honestly decide
that someone we thought of as a hero
really doesn't deserve to be called "hero"
Achievements or no acheivement
some things don't allow a person
to be called "hero" anymore.
We may still see and still talk
about an ex-hero's contributions as contributions
even if those contributions came from an ugly soul
OR
we can talk about the contributions
while not speaking of the person at all
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| Booker T Washington |
If you don't know your individual history, you don't know who you are. If you don't know your collective history, you still don't know who you are. Some people read more history after they are grown, but that reading list is selective. In school you are supposed to be getting the big picture painted for you. And most of us should have the same base in addition to the oral histories we are taught at home.
We, as Americans, need a common history to work from if we're going to be a less fragmented society. If we're going to be a pluralistic society where groups respect one another's differences, we have to know what the differences are and how those differences came to be despite our having a shared history.
That means the shameful parts of our history will have to be discussed. People, including children, should feel bad on and off during the process of learning our history. History is a mixed bag. The history of humans is not predominantly filled with glory unless you lie about it a lot.
When I was in school, I felt bad when hearing about black history, which consisted of slavery and suffering for civil rights. I think white kids felt slightly embarrassed until that fifteen minutes in 12 years of schooling was over. The white kids might have felt equally embarrassed or awkward for another 15 minutes when discussing Native Americans. If history in school is taught more honestly, white children will join the rest of us in that what white kids hear about **them and theirs** will go from 90% glory and triumph down to 50% or less glory and triumph.
Racial/ethnic history isn't the only adjustment that needs to be made in school history books though.
Reading the same black history written by black women has made me realize how much black men write about themselves to the exclusion of all else too, just like white people do.
Oppressors need push back. If they don't get it, they erase you. You have to push to get your share of the space that's available. Oppressors are taking up too much space, that's what "oppressor" kinda means. One of the most important forms of push back, one of the most important ways of claiming ~a space that should always have been yours~ is by getting accurate history books into schools.
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