History gets a Makeover
Figuring out what statues should be torn down, which movies should be removed, and which books should be banned is not as simple as it sounds.
If there’s an actual school year this upcoming fall, it will mark my 31st year as a social studies teacher in the state of New York. I’ve taught every grade 7–12 which includes mandated classes as well as multiple electives. I’ve also taught classes where students receive college credit, and classes in the distance learning room where not only do I teach the students from my own school, but students from other schools who “beam in” to our classroom. I’ve taught a curriculum that was based on the Eurocentric viewpoint, curriculum based on the concept of multiculturalism, and one that demands history be taught in a fashion that provides a multi-perspective. (Lest I forget, the past four months I’ve taught from the viewpoint of my kitchen table, and calling the experience underwhelming would be the equivalent of calling the events of 2020 slightly disruptive.)
In my many decades in the classroom, one of the things I’ve attempted to convince students of is the idea that people have to be judged within the time period in which they lived. I’ve always tried to make the case to them that calling a white individual from the 17th, 18th, 19th or early 20th centuries racist is an oversimplification of what is always a complex issue. Many white Europeans and Americans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries adhered to the idea of white superiority based the concept of “scientific racism.” In other words, whites rationalized the commonly held perception that stated that whites were superior to people of color by leaning on alleged scientific fact. Skulls from people of color were compared with European skulls, and by looking at and comparing the size and shapes, it was determined in Europe and the United States that the white race was superior, and as such, colonizing and enslaving people of color was viewed as necessary acts in order to help civilize these inferior beings. Rudyard Kipling, the great British writer and poet described it as the “White Man’s Burden.” In his famous poem of the same name, Kipling referred to the people of India as half-devil/half-child. Kipling wasn’t an outlier, his views were pretty much on a par with most Americans and Europeans of that time period in history. As such, I would explain to my students that it would take a pretty special individual to rise above all of this and proclaim that the status quo regarding the superiority of the white race was based on falsehoods.
Well, if we’re going to start tearing down the multitudes of books, movies, and statues that denote racism, we might as well start with the author of the “White Man’s Burden,” old “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” himself, Rudyard Kipling. (Getty Images)
Certainly, I would explain to my classes, there were some individuals who rose above the evils of their time. John and Abigail Adams were anti-slavery, as was Alexander Hamilton. So was Abe Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, from good old Auburn, New York. Abe Lincoln was a man ahead of his time, although it took the Civil War to truly awaken his abolitionist leanings. Lincoln was seen as a moderate amongst Republican leaders of the 1850s, opposing the expansion of slavery, but not necessarily calling for it to be abolished. A cautious road for a typically cautious politician who understood that unpopular stances can be a deathblow to one’s political ambitions as he learned the hard way when he opposed the Mexican-American War, and it cost him his seat in the House of Representatives. (He didn’t run for reelection after one term knowing his stance on the war would have seen him defeated easily.)
As for our founding fathers such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, well, that’s a tough one. They were wealthy aristocrats of the Antebellum South, and as such, much of their wealth was made up from their greatest commodity, free African labor. Both Madison and Jefferson spoke and wrote often about their desires to eliminate their own slaves, but as farmers, they often found themselves in debt, and the fastest way out of debt was to sell a slave or two. Therefore, for financial reasons, they held onto their slaves. Were they heinous and cruel racists? Was Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote “All men are created equal,” a racist monster? How about James Madison? He only wrote the Bill of Rights, most of which are aimed at protecting the accused, should we simply cast him aside as just another white supremacist? Is it right to lump them in with a bunch of traitorous, racist Confederate generals who waged war to support and defend slavery while seeking to illegally secede from the Union?
Again, my advice to my students was to compare them to the ways and means of their time period. Historically, many of the founding fathers were pretty average when it came to being racist for their time. There were certainly some individuals who were more enlightened, and of course, there’s always somebody whose racial attitudes were far more barbaric. Washington’s slaves were freed in his will, however Jefferson only freed a couple. Madison helped start the “American Colonization Society,” an organization that was instituted to help resettle freed slaves into the new American territory of Liberia, located in West Africa. Certainly through our modern lens all of these men were horrid racists, but were they for their time period? However, in light of recent racially charged events and tragedies, we as a society seem to be asking if that even matters? Wrong is wrong no matter when the wrong was committed, isn’t that the lesson?
Often considered the greatest political document written in the past 300 years, and penned by slave owner extrordinaire Thomas Jefferson, its words were of such power and gravity that the great Martin Luther King in his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech quoted it as he attempted to justify to white America exactly what it was that African-Americans were fighting for. Do we now toss Jefferson aside? Do his sins outweigh his contributions? I mean, it’s not “Gone with the Wind,” but it’s still a hell of a document. (Getty Images)
While I always believed that I was steering my students on a sensible and thought-provoking path, in light of recent events, I’m not so sure. Can we really give Washington and Jefferson a pass? Are we now to tear down any and all contributors made to our society once we have judged them to be guilty of a sin that simply doesn’t wash with modern expectations? Is racism the only sin that we should consider? How about those who were guilty of misogyny? JFK heroically looked past his bad back and enjoyed sexual relations with literally an endless parade of women, some whom I believe were not his wife. Do we tear down his presidential library? Should we yank out the bust of every player in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown who by not speaking out against the status quo were thereby complicit in barring African-American players from participating in Major League Baseball? Is there a more racist individual enshrined anywhere in a museum than Ty Cobb, the “Georgia Peach?”
Should the Crimson Tide of Alabama be made to forfeit all of their National Championships in football due to the fact that the school was segregated up until the late 1960s? Certainly we can agree to vacate every championship won by Adolph Rupp, the legendary coach of the men’s basketball team at Kentucky who used his considerable influence to keep UK as white as Mitch McConnell’s uvula. I suppose what I’m asking is, where do we stop? When do we get to the point where we say, alright, that’s silly. If we use my explanation (Not defense by the way, I’m not advocating a defense of historical racism, just providing perspective) that we have to judge people in the time that they lived, when do we get to the year where that’s no longer a valid excuse? 1947? Jackie Robinson’s first year perhaps? How about December 7th, 1941 when we were attacked by the Empire of Japan, one of the most racist societies ever conceived. How about when the Civil War ended? A lot of people died so slavery could finally be put to bed, why not change the expectations right then and there?
Look, if you looked like that in the South in the 1950s and ’60s and your name was “Adolph,” and you couldn’t find a single African-American in the United States good enough to play on your basketball team, well you might as well be a racist, after all, you’re wasting a lot of good stereotypes. (Getty Images)
In the wake of the compelling case made by Black Lives Matter after the George Floyd murder that was committed in broad daylight by Derrick Chauvin and the Minneapolis Police Department, many groups have begun to reach for the lowest hanging fruit in order to make a symbolic statement in the face of what appears to be systemic racism when it comes to our system of justice in our society. Down goes the statues dedicated to the leaders and military heroes of the Confederacy, and down goes the Confederate flag at NASCAR events. Even the most ardent supporters of the thinner than paper argument that the statues and the old “Stars and Bars” are not racist, they’re simply part of the heritage of the South, have found themselves overwhelmed into silence, and guess what, good! While these changes won’t balance out our justice system, or prevent the profiling of a single person of color by law enforcement, it’s a healthy and welcome symbolic step.
However, as I mentioned earlier, where does one stop once a society has decided that anything and everything that can be linked in some way, shape, or form to slavery, segregation, discrimination, imperialism, and cultural insensitivity is now as unwelcome as a Gestapo agent at Katz’s Delicatessen located in New York City’s lower East Side. Recently in Albany, a city I live near, a statue of Philip Schuyler, a general and senator who not only had much to do with the development of our fair state capital, as well as being a leader in the effort to liberate our colonized selves form the yoke of British control, and an advisor and father-in-law to the father of our economy who happened to be an early advocate of ending slavery, Alexander Hamilton, was ordered taken down by the current mayor of Albany, Kathy Sheehan. What was Schuyler’s sin? Apparently it was the sin of slave owning. As much as we may not like to draw attention to this fact, the Northern colonies had slaves as well as both the Middle and Southern colonies, and in Albany, nobody owned more slaves than Schuyler.
Slavery’s retreat in the North had less to do with the woken ideals of equality, and more to do with economic realities. It simply wasn’t financially prudent to run the factories that were popping up all over the northern cities of the United States, when there was plentiful cheap paid labor to be had. Hence two different economies bred two different cultures, and that meant that slave owning was to going to stay a fixture in the South until it was ended by the brutal beat down the Confederacy suffered at the hands of the North in the Civil War. However, even as the Revolutionary War raged on, slave owning still existed in the northern colonies, and Schuyler owned slaves. The legacies left behind by our founding fathers is a complex one, do we give them a pass due to their accomplishments, or do we attempt to explain their complexities to modern students of history? At Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, there is an extensive exhibit that discusses slavery as it was practiced at Washington’s plantation, giving background and context to our nation’s first president. Perhaps that is a fair compromise. However for many, it is time to “whitewash,” (Pun intended) our founding fathers who practiced slavery from American historical relevance.
He was a man of great accomplishments, and a hell of a father-in-law, but apparently his sins outweigh his contributions, and so his statue at the state capital is apparently not worth the pigeon droppings that adorn it. (Times Union)
Of course the United States is not the only democracy that is currently reflecting on its past trespasses, as well as some of their supposed heroes and champions. For example recently in London, a statue of Winston Churchill, a man who by some historians accounts literally saved democracy in the 20th century was found boarded up. Have we now reached a time in our culture where statues of individuals who did many great things not only for their countrymen, but for the world have to be shipped off to a museum with all sorts of caveats warning onlookers of the person’s failures and negative attributes? Perhaps, recent events seem to say that the status quo is not, will not, and never should have been acceptable. The one billion inhabitants of India certainly have quite a different take on the accomplishments of Winston Churchill, than the way Western historians see Churchill.
For example, Churchill’s view of Mohandas Gandhi, a man generally regarded as a deity in his homeland, and held up as the greatest practitioner of nonviolent civil disobedience the world has ever seen, wasn’t held in very high regard by Sir Winston. In fact, Churchill, when discussing whether Gandhi should be released from prison during one of his many stays in jail stated, “Gandhi should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting,” Churchill told the cabinet on another occasion. “We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.” (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29701767#:~:text=Statements%20about%20Gandhi&text) Obviously Churchill’s take on Gandhi comes off as barbaric and imperialistic. Imperialism as practiced was by definition racist, and Churchill was one of the greatest defenders of England’s imperialistic ambitions, so do the math. On the other hand, was Gandhi the saint he is typically held up to be by history? Apparently as a young man, Gandhi’s racial attitudes could be construed as intolerant to say the least. According npr.org, when Gandhi was living in South Africa as a lawyer, he wrote in 1903 that the white people there should be “the predominating race.” He also also stated that the black people “are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.” (https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766083651/gandhi-is-deeply-revered-but-his-attitudes-on-race-and-sex-are-under-scrutiny) In Ghana they’ve even demanded the removal of one of his statues. Where my friends do we draw the line?
It’s hard to know where to draw the line on which statues and symbols can remain in public view for the purpose of honoring versus those that belong in a museum with historical context. However, I’m thinking that a statue that honors a Confederate General, who was also the man who literally started the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, would seem to those of us who aren’t white supremacists to be an easy call on whether that statue should be taken down or not. (Getty Images)
Sadly, racism has historically permeated its way throughout much of our culture, including of course the entertainment industry. Only somebody completely lacking in intellectual honesty would deny that Hollywood mirrored much of the racist attitudes that were prevalent throughout the 20th century, and is still at times called out for being slow to recognize the contributions of people of color, while continuing to honor works and individuals that helped perpetuate racism. For example, the classic Hollywood blockbuster for all times, Gone with the Wind, is now literally gone with the wind from HBO Max. The network has decided to remove the multiple Academy Award winning film based on the classic novel by Margaret Mitchell from its schedule citing its absurd perspective on slavery and race during the 19th century in the southern part of the United States.
Nobody is arguing that Gone with the Wind presents a perverted take on slavery as well as American history, however it is a perspective shared by many southerners at that time, and presented with proper context could actually serve as a teachable moment. It’s the same with works of classic literature. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the “N-word” is used shamelessly and repeatedly throughout the book. Some schools don’t want it taught, while others try to do it with a version that censors the word. Again, nobody is arguing that the word isn’t heinous, but to understand the time and the message of the author, Mark Twain no less, it amounts to censorship and constitutes a kind of over-correction that we seem to be embracing as a society. Taught by a skilled educator, there’s much to be learned about Mark Twain, American history, and culture by reading “Huck Finn,” and it’s a shame that erring on the side of caution comes at the cost of educating students to think.
We can’t hide from our past, but yanking down statues of Confederate “heroes,” (a.k.a., Traitors!!!!) seems like a pretty good idea at this point in our nation’s history. However, making determinations of all works of art, literature, cinema, television, sports, and every other area of our nation’s culture by trying to play the “Racist vs. Non-Racist” game I believe might not only create a backlash against this mission to root out all historical ties to our racist past, but could lead to a loss of historical context that would go a long way in explaining why the world is the way it is today. This is the purpose of education and information. We need to arm our citizenry with facts so we can understand the feelings of those who feel disenfranchised. Simply hiding the bad, and eliminating the contributions of all who were guilty of the sins of their time might not accomplish the goals that the good people who are protesting and trying to bring about real structural change in our society are hoping to accomplish.