Textbook Racism | Commonweal Magazine

Source: Textbook Racism | Commonweal Magazine

While the North “won the Civil War, the white South…won the subsequent peace,” Donald Yacovone notes in Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. That is, America’s only civil war (or its only such conflict so far, it now seems prudent to add) ended slavery and crushed the Confederacy, only to have many generations of Americans taught a version of events that might have pleased Robert E. Lee. The real story was unrecognizably distorted in nearly every aspect—from the nature of slavery to the causes of the war itself. As this exhaustively researched, eye-opening, profoundly sobering new book makes clear, that mangling of history has served to reinforce racism at the most fundamental level: through the stories and ideas we have passed on to our children…

The version of history taught to schoolchildren from the early twentieth century until the Civil Rights Era held that slavery was a benign system.

That was not to last. If democracy came about at the expense of Blacks, at least in Van Evrie’s conception, then so did the much-sought-after national reconciliation. For that to be realized, all had to agree on a version of events in which neither side of the American Civil War was wholly at fault. Thus, as reproduced in countless books, the version of history taught to schoolchildren from the early twentieth century until the Civil Rights Era held that slavery was a benign system, in which the enslaved worked a bit each day and then enjoyed music and dance come sundown; that slave masters treated their human property well, housing them and providing “health care”; that the enslaved, who otherwise would have been godless, benefited from an institution that introduced religion into their lives; that Blacks (sometimes referred to collectively as “Sambo”) were inferior to whites in just about every measurable way (an idea backed up by the “science” of the era); that the Civil War had been sparked by uncompromising, fanatical abolitionist “agitators” such as William Lloyd Garrison; that after graciously accepting defeat, the South had been punished under a corrupt system that included rule by incompetent, subhuman Blacks; and that the Ku Klux Klan, while its actions sometimes went too far, were in the main heroic, doing what had to be done to restore order. Not mentioned in these textbooks were the heroism of the 179,000 Black troops who fought for the Union Army, the violence visited upon African Americans, particularly in the South, after the war (“In one Louisiana parish a state authority stumbled across a pile of twenty-five dead Black Republicans,” Yacovone notes), or anything at all about such African American icons of the freedom struggle as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Consolidating this approach was James Shepherd Pike’s 1874 volume The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, a work that, according to Yacovone, “proved essential to the interpretation of Reconstruction that Americans would obtain from textbooks for the next eighty years.” Pike’s work constituted “the single most influential assault on the Emancipationist goals of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”