With fifty men we could subjugate them all
The Washington Post on taboo teachings:
Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on New York police’s use of force, analyzed by race.
These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, facing pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination, administrators wary of controversy, and a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.
The “TQ” issues of course complicate things.
The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation.
Notice what’s missing. Sexism/misogyny didn’t make the cut. Mary Wollstonecraft leads the article but her subject matter gets lost again. It always gets lost these days.
The Washington Post asked teachers across the country about how and why they are changing the materials, concepts and lessons they use in the classroom, garnering responses from dozens of educators in 20 different states.
…
Greg Wickenkamp began reevaluating how he teaches eighth-grade social studies in June 2021, when a new Iowa law barred educators from teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”
Return of sexism! But only for the purpose of forbidding mention of it.
Wickenkamp did not understand what this legislation, which he felt was vaguely worded, meant for his pedagogy. Could he still use the youth edition of “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”? Should he stay away from Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You,” especially as Kendi came under attack from conservative politicians?
Well, yes, I think he should steer clear of Kendi, but on grounds of quality, not content. He’s just not a very good writer or thinker; there are other, better ones. Anyway that’s what I think but I wouldn’t demand a law enforcing it.
Wickenkamp was fielding unhappy emails and social media posts from parents who disliked his enforcement of the district’s masking policy and his use of Reynolds and Kendi’s text. A local politician alleged Wickenkamp was teaching children critical race theory, an academic framework that explores systemic racism in the United States and a term that has become conservatives’ catchall for instruction about race they view as politically motivated.
Yes! We have to talk about race without any political motivation!
For 14 years, a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident. The point was to show how Columbus’s marriage of enslavement with his quest for profit helped shape the world we live in today.
The teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment, directed children to the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” titled “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress.” Throughout the chapter, students encountered paragraphs taken from the explorer’s journal in which Columbus delineated his views of, and interactions with, the Native peoples of America.
“As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force,” Columbus wrote in October 1492, in a slice of the journal quoted by Zinn. “They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” he also wrote.
But last year a parent complained, so that was the end of that.
And those same people would have us believe that not talking about race is being done without any political motivation.
I remember at the time that the rape allegations against Bill Cosby, his colleague Phylicia Rashad decried the “trashing” of Cosby’s reputation and legacy. I recalled thinking that Cosby did this to himself by doing what he did. Reporting rape allegations was ruining Cosby’s legacy while having committed the rapes did not? (I know there’s the whole presumption of innocence thing going on as well, but you see what I’m getting at. Someone who’s innocent is unlikely to have dozens of women come forward to make accusations like this, unless there’s some big conspiracy at work. Not impossible, but how likely?)
So telling the truth about what happened in America’s past is bad? Yes. Worse in fact than the actual genocide, slavery, sexism, etc. It’s interesting the desire to sanitize Columbus’s reputation, given that he was a Genoese navigator working for the Spanish crown, and wasn’t (and couldn’t have been) American. Also, he never made landfall on any shore that would eventually become a part of the United States. So why the upset over Columbus particularly? The long arm of the Knights of Columbus, I suppose? But that he enslaved and murdered people in the lands he “discovered” and governed is on him. Strange that those trying to hide these facts must feel some sort of guilt by association five centuries later. Uneasiness that they (like all settlers in North and South America) have benefited by the legacy of pillage, conquest, dispossession, slavery, and genocide (not to mention environmental degradation) that Columbus helped to establish? Nothing political in hiding that, right?
YNnB?
As I always like to say, if you really want to know a person’s political or ideological bias, look at what they’re trying to pass off as the “unpolitical”, “non-ideological” position.
Well add to that he was given the nickname “Pharaoh” and proved too nasty for the Spanish crown. His contemporaries didn’t have a particularly high opinion of him.
As said, doesn’t seem like the state of Florida needs to placate Italian-Americans and those that do need placated ought to have a Fermi Day instead…
“Well add to that he was given the nickname “Pharaoh” and proved too nasty for the Spanish crown. His contemporaries didn’t have a particularly high opinion of him.”
You don’t need to use the Howard Zinn book to teach people how unpleasant Columbus’ behaviour was. Just look at the Columbus’ own journal and letters, like this “Sanchez letter” he wrote:
“To sum up the whole, and state briefly the great profits of this voyage, I am able to promise the acquisition, by a trifling assistance from their Majesties, of any quantity of gold, drugs, cotton, and mastick, which last article is found only in the island of Scio; also any quantity of aloe, and as many slaves for the service of the marine as their Majesties may stand in need of.”
How ironic that this excerpt is reprinted in the 1957 book “A Treasury of Catholic Reading”.
https://books.google.ie/books?id=NkC47Phshs8C&q=%22as+many+slaves+for+the+service+of+the+marine%22&dq=%22as+many+slaves+for+the+service+of+the+marine%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTmKj09sn9AhVGhlwKHX2NCSgQ6AF6BAgMEAI
But quoting someone’s words verbatim is LIBEL! The editors of “A Treasury of Catholic Reading” should be expecting a letter (on behalf of Columbus) from the firm of distinguished solicitors who, recently, did such sterling service for David Paisley.
Mostly Cloudy, that is so true. I remember my “Great Books” class the last year in high school. My teacher planned for us to read The Communist Manifesto, but parents howled. She substituted the book of Matthew, and they were placated. They wouldn’t have been if they discovered how she taught it. We read it, we discussed it, we picked it into pieces…what didn’t work…what didn’t make sense…what contradicted…and so forth. Most of us came away from that class with a new, critical view of the Bible that served us well.
She would have taught the manifesto the same way; she did with all the books. She was encouraging us to think, not just spit back comments we read somewhere (must have been Cliff’s Notes then; it was pre-Internet).
Sometimes reading a document, really reading it, can make all the difference.