This commentary is by George Longenecker of Middlesex, a writer and retired professor.
There’s been a lot of discussion in recent months about what United States history should teach. I thought about some of the furor — which is nothing new — and about what’s actually taught in most classrooms. I taught U.S. history many times over the course of my career.
Perhaps the critics are right. I was critical. However, criticism and critique are what education — and democracy — are all about. To critique is to look at both sides of an issue.
U.S. history is full of contradictions, the dualities in our history. Duality means having different or opposite parts. Two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time. We have seen this throughout our nation’s history.
Critical race theory is an oft-used bogeyman or dog whistle, but it’s not what’s taught in public schools or college survey classes. It looks specifically at the legal system and how it has not always advanced civil rights.
What some people try to restrict is a history curriculum that looks openly and critically at the United States, including its history of civil rights.
The United States of America is founded on a Constitution that has strong civil liberties protections and a process for change through amendments. It’s been a model for other constitutions.
Yet, in the original Constitution, slavery was sanctioned, with the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause.
Slavery was huge business, both North and South. Slaves were worth $3 billion, around $91 billion in today’s dollars. To say that slavery was good or that it was not the cause of the Civil War is fallacious. Perhaps a few slaves were treated decently, but for most slavery was a backbreaking hell ending in early death.
The South was a beautiful place, and still is, yet it was built on the backs of 4 million people who had no more rights than horses and were treated worse than most dogs.
Reconstruction and the 13th Amendment ended slavery in 1865. The South was destroyed economically. Millions of former slaves were on their own. However, without land and education, former slaves were desperately poor. Reconstruction began to help former slaves as well as poor whites, and the South had Black elected officials, as everyone could vote.
Jim Crow laws and lynchings put an end to Reconstruction. As immigration to the U.S. increased, its own Black citizens’ rights were taken back.
Immigration to the U.S. has given many people new lives and opportunities. Far more people have immigrated to the U.S. than have emigrated out. My grandparents were immigrants, as were many of our ancestors. While sometimes homesick, my grandparents were glad to live here.
However, the U.S. had made room for new settlers by pushing its Native population off their lands and exterminating them. On the other side of the family, my great-grandparents homesteaded in Kansas on a free farm through the Homestead Act. That farm allowed them to put several children through college. Yet, the contradiction in U.S. history is that prosperity for immigrant families and their descendants was gained at the expense of Kiowa and other Native Americans.
The United States’ treatment of refugees and immigrants has been contradictory. Some groups were welcomed. Others were used for cheap labor. Some have been harassed, like the Haitian refugees trampled by Border Patrol agents on horses in the past month.
The United States provided work, yet at a cost. The 19th and 20th centuries were marked by labor strikes at steel mills, coal mines and railroads. These were backbreaking jobs that moved the U.S. into the industrial age.
This country has provided housing for its citizens and immigrants. Yet, due to systemic discrimination in real estate sales and financing, Black Americans’ net worth is far less than others. It’s a legacy of discrimination that can be traced back to slavery.
I reminded my students that health care has improved greatly in the last century. If it were the beginning of the 20th century, probably I’d have died by age 60, many of them would not have made it to their teens, and many of the women would die in childbirth. Thanks to modern preventive health care, better diet and vaccines we live longer. Yet in Mississippi the Black infant mortality rate is double that of whites, the same as Albania. Disparities in health care make us far less healthy as a nation than Canada or the UK.
The United States is a beautiful country, from Maine’s Acadia to California’s Channel Islands. Yet the industrial age has come with environmental degradation, including climate change with its storms and fires.
We are a nation of dualities, of contradictions. As a nation, we are a conundrum. We are a nation of disparities. Asking teachers to never critique our problems will not make us a better nation. Only by teaching history critically can we understand ourselves.
