In recent years when I was teaching AP U.S. history, students often challenged the common narrative about the Founding Fathers as liberty-loving, enlightened thinkers who were dedicated to democracy and free will. Inevitably, students couldn’t fit the square that is their glorified image into the circle of slave ownership.
How can men who championed liberty also keep other human beings in perpetual bondage, complete with cruel torture, families being torn apart, rape and murder? This is not just the struggle of an AP classroom. This is the struggle of America.
There are many ways we as Americans try to circle that square. Sometimes we pretend that the whole slave-owning thing was not who they were. This method often attacks individuals as unpatriotic or mistaken, if they bring up the fact that owning slaves was a form of racism.
On July 6th, former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “The haters never take a day off from hating. That is clear. And they never take a day off from getting the facts wrong. We know most of our forefathers, all of our main Founding Fathers were against slavery, recognized the evils of it.”
Sometimes we justify slave-owning Founding Fathers as products of their time when slavery was not only legal but commonplace around the world. This often goes hand-in-hand with the notion that Washington, Jefferson, Madison and others did far more good than bad, so we should forgive them for this minor fault.
Traditionally, American history was written by apologists. The 1941 Jefferson biography, “The Way of an Eagle,” written for the classroom, contains the following passage, “In this beehive of industry no discord or revilings found entrance: there were no signs of discontent on the black shining faces as they worked under the direction of their master….The women sang at their tasks and the children old enough to work made nails leisurely, not too overworked for a prank now and then.”
It is little wonder that many Americans grew up thinking that the Founding Fathers had nothing to apologize for.
Today’s AP students, like most young people, are usually not as tethered to the hero-worshipping of our past as the older generations are. To them, it’s crazy to think that the guy revered enough to be on the one dollar bill would be the same person who offered his own money as a reward to return an escaped slave when she fled to Portsmouth.
They find it astounding that the man who wrote “all men are created equal” owned over 600 human beings during his lifetime. In the end, they circle the square by landing on the idea that America is a collection of ideals, such as liberty, equality, justice, but also a long struggle to reach those ideals driven by complicated people.
Recently, the issue of teaching America’s long and complicated racial history has been, like everything else it seems these days, turned into a political football. State houses all over, including in Concord, are passing laws restricting what can and cannot be taught about race in the classroom. Teachers all over America are grappling with often very confusing language in these bills that sometimes contradicts itself, making it hard to know what they can or cannot say to students. But once again, how did this issue get political? I think the answer lies in some of the clauses of NH HB 544, which outlaws teaching “divisive concepts.”
The bill identifies ten of these “divisive concepts.” Most of them, almost anyone of any political persuasion, can agree on. For example, the law says that students cannot be taught that “[o]ne race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex” or “[m]embers of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex.”
The fault lines though can be seen in the clause that prohibits teaching that “[t]he state of New Hampshire or the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist.” Usually, both conservatives and liberals can agree that there was racism in America in the past, and most would agree that racism exists today. The difference is that in general many conservatives believe that racism is practiced by individuals while many liberals believe that racism is more systemic.
Think of it like this. If an African-American child cannot afford to go to college, who is at fault? On the one hand, student loans are not handed out based on race, so there is no discrimination in the process today. No individual loan officer acted with discrimination.
On the other hand, generations of Black families were denied the right to buy their own homes, thus preventing them from building equity and wealth. This lack of collateral today is why the student cannot get the loan. But according to HB 544, we cannot fix this because recognizing this historical inequity and taking steps to solve it is to treat the African American student differently because of her race, which is considered in the bill a ‘divisive concept.’ This is what makes these ideas so tricky, and is causing teachers all over New Hampshire concern.
So how do we teach race in New Hampshire? For one thing, let the facts speak for themselves. George Washington’s courage and determination were major factors in winning the Revolutionary War. George Washington also owned other human beings as chattel slaves. Both are true. Both are history.
For another, we need to be careful how we use our terms. By saying America “freed the slaves” or America “fought the Indians,” we place both African Americans and Native Americans outside of our history. This encourages an us-against-them attitude when people of different races discuss the issue.
Finally, recognize that the passing of these bills, these conversations we are having on race today, are in themselves part of our story, our history, and need to be treated as such and added to the long line that includes Brown v. Board, Selma and birtherism. We have been grappling with race for 400 years. Why stop now?
(Aaron Blais teaches Social Studies at Exeter High School.)