It’s a course offering in law schools
Fair questions.
Or, she concludes, “is it about adding more empty praise to the teaching of history and completing the sanitization of history that already is the case? If so, why?”
Because it’s more cheerful, I suppose.
Is this really most K to 12 students? Certainly possible, but I’m a bit skeptical. Might depend on the state.
Yeah, GW, I think that, too. I never learned any sort of Confederate Race Theory; I was taught about the horrors of slavery, that some of the founders kept slaves, that we tried to wipe out indigenous Americans and that was bad, and that Columbus did some not so nice things to the natives. We also learned that the US had a rather spotty history with rights. And that was in Oklahoma.
Of course, that was in the 1970s, back when Oklahoma still elected only Democrats for governor (but always voted Republican for president; go figure). It was a conservative Christian area, but the GOP hadn’t totally lost its collective marbles yet.
With saints like Richard Nixon running on the Republican presidential ticket, how can you blame them? ;-)
In the 90s we sure as hell got a good dose of slavery, Trail of Tears, etc. Where our history lessons failed was treating each situation as a “here’s the problem, but we fixed it” situation. Muckrakers -> “The Jungle” -> FDA, problem solved.
Inventing a new myth of American exceptionalism, one in which the US is *uniquely* evil isn’t a help, but as Joy-Ann says CRT != 1619 Project.
Fair? Ehhhhhhhh. Seems akin to the distortions from the New Atheist days of “no compulsory prayer in school”->”banning religious kids from school” or “no teaching the Bible as science”->”no teaching the Bible at all”
Like, being against teaching CRT as fact does not mean that one is against teaching that racism is bad, nor does it mean that one is against teaching about CRT.
And saying that CRT isn’t being taught in K-12 because it’s a course offering in law schools is like saying that Queer Theory isn’t being taught in K-12 because it’s a course offering in university humanities departments. Whether the name is used, QT’s ideas are most certainly being taught to schoolchildren. Same thing with CRT.
I don’t know where to wade in, so I’ll tell a story.
I worked in the Washington, DC area with a guy who grew up in Texas. He said there were statues of Confederate generals everywhere, and all the main streets were named after Confederate generals. His public grade schools taught him the history of “The Lost Cause” (where slavery was mutually beneficial) and “The War of Northern Aggression” (nobody called it “The Civil War”).
Years later (probably after college in Texas), he took a business trip to the north (probably Massachusetts), where he saw a statue of a Union general.
It blew his mind!! But… these are the BAD guys!! How can you have a statue for the BAD guys?!
He told me that story as a sane adult who understands what really happened now. He can tell that story and laugh now.
My guess is there’s at least five things happening here, and what Joy-Ann Reid said about Confederate Race Theory might be one of those things (at least in Texas, when the guy in my story grew up).
iknklast & BKSA do you remember what you were taught about Reconstruction? Because that was horrendously badly taught right on up through the sixties – taught from the point of view of the people who defeated it. You’re probably young enough to have escaped that; if so you’re fortunate.
Nullius do you have a good primer on what CRT’s theories are?
I don’t recall learning a darn thing about Reconstruction.
Ophelia: I actually just happened to give some suggestions as a comment on a different post.
That’s another area where I actually was well taught. We got pretty good instruction in Reconstruction; but my son didn’t. He went to high school in the 1990s. Also in Oklahoma, but a different school system. He was in Oklahoma City schools, and in an inner city school with a mix of poor kids, working class kids, and a smattering of middle class kids. My school was in an upper-middle to upper-class neighborhood, with the expectation that more than 80% of the kids would go to college; it was (and last I checked, still is) the best public school in Oklahoma. That might account for at least some of the difference.
There can be benefits to going to a rich school as a poor kid, even though it is hell to navigate through the cruelty of the kids, their parents, and all too often the teachers. I do not remember high school fondly.
@OB #8:
It’s a bit fuzzy, but from what I recall we had a few pages on Radical Republicans, the general conclusion that Johnson done fucked up Reconstruction, then Plessy vs. Ferguson. Couldn’t have occupied more than a chapter in any of the social studies textbooks I had throughout grade school (in the 90s Middle Tennessee). It really just seemed to fade away but if there was a message I think I internalized it was “yep, gotta wait ’til later ’til the failure of Reconstruction can be put right”.
(where slavery was mutually beneficial)
Minor quibble: This was largely true in establishing the fortunes of may northern elites. Boston, for example. Nothin really to export from a freezing cold climate and poor soils situation, so the merchants earned their wealth as middlemen and factors in the transatlantic trade that initially included slavery.
Even given that, it doesn’t negate the horrid reality of the slave trade. Neither does the fact that other cultures practiced horrible slaver, even today (the Emirates, Thailand’s shrimp industry)
Re: mutual benefit. The word slavery can also be used to describe multiple things from subsistence wages to indentured servitude to chattel slavery. Christian apologists exploit this ambiguity when they’re like, “but Bibilical slavery is different.” It isn’t inconceivable that some interpretation of slavery could be mutually beneficial after a fashion. It is utterly inconceivable, except in a philosopher’s thought experiment of the sort that imagines conditions under which A Modest Proposal describes ethically correct action, that chattel slavery could be.