There are complex answers that deserve interrogation through all their interwoven facets — and there are complex answers that converge toward a simple response. The cause of the American Civil War is the latter.
Unfortunately, former governor and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley quickly found the nuance out the hard way when, in response to a question about the cause of the Civil War, she answered, “Well, it was basically about how government was gonna run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
Over the past few days, she’s done everything from alleging that the questioner was a Biden plant to doubling down on the “freedoms” answer to finally acquiescing that it was about slavery. Her opponents have blasted her for not being able to answer such a simple question, while other conservatives have reveled in the idea that it was Republicans who freed the slaves while Democrats sought to keep Black people enslaved.
Of course, this all muddles the moment we’re in now and the reason why, for many, the word “slavery” is difficult to say for some political leaders. Part of that starts in our classrooms.
Describing enslaved people as ‘workers’ is an obfuscation of the highest order.
The recently departed Roni Dean-Burren (RIP, Dr. Roni) set off a firestorm less than a decade ago when she took a picture of her son’s social studies textbook and pointed out an egregious mistake within the text.
In it, the writers of the textbook captioned one of their maps with “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”
Describing enslaved people as “workers” is an obfuscation of the highest order. While McGraw-Hill issued an apology after Dean-Burren’s video went viral, it bears reiterating that so many writers and editors pored over the texts and saw nothing wrong until a Black woman scholar who happened to be a parent in the district found it printed in her son’s textbook. She goes on to point to several other errors about marginalized people throughout the textbook, in case readers thought the atrocities just stopped at Black people.
Given the distribution of these textbooks, thousands — if not millions — of children will have read “workers from Africa” as fact. In the same article, writer Laura Moser describes the Texas State Board of Education as favoring the Lost Cause, a movement that seeks to depict the Confederate cause in the American Civil War in a noble light, has only picked up steam in the last two decades.
I bring all this up because the recent wave of censorship laws is a multipronged, protracted strategy based on fear with the ultimate goal of revenge against a perceived loss of social order.
While I could explore all the facets of that “order,” the one that I haven’t seen explored enough is the chilling effect it has on teachers and schools.
The deprofessionalization of teaching compounds teachers’ inability to push back against wayward teaching of deep history.
For years, I’ve advanced the idea of teachers as vanguards and stewards of any well-functioning society. First, when I use the vanguard, I mean that educators are usually the first adults that we meet to explicitly teach us written and unwritten rules of society.
Second, we’re still wrestling with the idea of education as a gateway to social advancement and schools as sites for social reproduction with all the problems embedded in that.
Third, it’s important to name expertise as a complicated yet vital pillar for teacher work. The deprofessionalization of teaching compounds teachers’ inability to push back against wayward teaching of deep history.
The Lost Cause movement — and those seeking to profit from that movement — have known this better than most, and have planned accordingly. For educators (principals, teachers, etc.), it means our work is that much more difficult. Whatever you mean by difficult.
It’s no coincidence that a few years after Dean-Burren named the insidious wording of “workers from Africa,” school boards and state houses have pummeled schools and communities with censorship laws subverting truth and all its complications. The mere mention of slavery might blacklist a teacher from a school district.
It means book bans, scripted lessons, and social targeting via on- and offline harassment. Dismissing the horror of slavery is not only an intentional erasure of accurate history but also an immoral rebuke to reconcile and repair institutional harms done over centuries. When teachers can’t teach the breadth of history with the gravity the topic deserves, we get a set of students — and whole communities/societies — who dilute those horrors.
Generations have grown up with textbooks that diminished the impacts of oppression and marginalization. It doesn’t mean we have to let them win.
In thinking about Haley’s comments, some strategists have suggested her equivocation was a way to please voters who would otherwise align with former President Trump’s agenda.
The obvious question is, why would a presidential candidate who wants to be president in 2024 want to align themselves with a former president stuck in the results of 2020? But the less obvious question is, why would a society that (mostly) abolished slavery make slavery apologists and Lost Cause crusaders a core constituency to lead the nation? To many of us, this points to America’s inability to rectify its wrongs and prove itself the democracy so many have fought for since the country’s founding.
Teachers, as agents of the state, have either been coerced or are willing participants in this project.
In the efforts to synthesize efforts to include racially and ethnically marginalized people’s humanity into CRT, think tanks didn’t magically create a new tool. It took advantage of a pervasive sentiment that has been waiting a century to take back power.
Teachers, as agents of the state, have either been coerced or are willing participants in this project through laws and community/social pressures. Our textbooks and curricula have been mitigating the truth about slavery for decades, thereby socializing us toward compliance for generations now. When a small yet vocal set of pundits yell, “Keep politics out of the classroom,” they’re signaling that they’d only like their politics advanced upon everyone else’s imagination, a set of politics that this country has favored since its inception.
If we really wanted to advance professionalism, as so many teachers do despite the nonsense, they’d be given license to say, “I hear you, but slavery was the main cause of the U.S. Civil War. Here are a few ways students have imagined building a better country, but I can’t water that down for you.” Anything less is wrong, but also in alignment with what we’ve seen for too long.
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José Luis Vilson is a veteran educator, writer, speaker, and activist in New York City. He is the author of “This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education.” He has spoken about education, math, and race for a number of organizations and publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, TED, El Diario / La Prensa, and The Atlantic.
