Both race in the classroom and the New York Times’s 1619 Project have been the subject of recent state legislative efforts, heated debate, and extensive press coverage, both at Education Next (see, for example, “Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law,” legal beat, Fall 2021, and “The 1619 Project Enters American Classrooms,” features, Fall 2020) and elsewhere. The post-George Floyd racial reckoning and the new Juneteenth federal holiday have roused attention toward teaching the history of slavery in America. As part of our continuing coverage of these issues, we asked some of the nation’s foremost scholars and practitioners to respond to the prompt, “How should K–12 schools teach about slavery in America? What pitfalls should teachers and textbooks avoid? What facts and concepts should they stress? Are schools generally doing a good or bad job of this now?”
The forum contributors are:
Allen C. Guelzo, who is director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Daina Ramey Berry, who is Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
David W. Blight, who is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and who wrote the introductory essay for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2019 report Teaching Hard History: Slavery, which he draws upon here.
Ian V. Rowe, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center.
Adrienne Stang, who is director of social studies for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools, and Danielle Allen, who is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and a candidate for governor of Massachusetts.
Robert Maranto, who is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and who from 2015–20 served on the Fayetteville School Board.
“Wake Up the Sleeper”
By David W. Blight, Yale University
In his longform masterpiece of an autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned internationally famed orator and writer, draws his reader in with a remembrance of a child’s question: “Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters?”
“Why am I a slave?” is an existential question that anticipates many others in human history. Why am I poor? Why is he so rich, and she only his servant or chattel? Why am I feared or hated for my religion, my race, my sexuality, the accident of my birth in this valley or on that side of the river or this side of the railroad tracks? Why am I a refugee with no home? Why does my neighborhood seem to determine my life chances? Or, indeed, why did those people write a constitution in the 1780s, or forge such a model higher-education system, or a reform movement for women’s equality? Douglass’s immortal story of his slave youth represents so many others, universally, over the ages. And don’t we want youth to ask this question why, and then provide them with knowledge out of which to forge answers?
Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all. We teach this subject because it is there, and it is so important. How can we not teach about this deeply human and American story and so many others like it? We do so not to forge a negative cast of mind in young people, but to introduce them to the human condition, the drama, the travail of love and hate, and of exploitation and survival in history. We teach them about American slavery because we have learned that this story helped shape the United States in fundamental ways, as personal experience and in the formation of the American nation, as well as its reformation in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation. Listening to Douglass ask, “Why am I a slave?” is similar to how we, nationally, are now asking, “Why is it that Reconstruction seems never to be over?” Out of conflict—“divisive issues” as some have branded it—comes great historical change, as we have learned over and again.
Slavery is not an aberration in the American past; it is at the heart of our history, a main event, a central foundational story. Slavery is also ancient; it has existed in all cultures and in all times. Slavery has always tended to evolve in circumstances of an abundance of land or resources along with a scarcity and demand for labor. It still exists today in myriad forms the world struggles to fight. The difference in the 21st century is that, in most countries, virtually all forms of trafficking and enslavement are illegal. For the two and a half centuries in which American slavery evolved, slavery operated largely as a thoroughly legal practice, buttressed by local law and in degrees by the U.S. Constitution.
In America, our preferred, deep national narratives tend to teach our young that, despite our problems in the past, we have been a nation of freedom-loving, inclusive people, accepting the immigrant into a land of multiethnic diversity. Our diversity has made us strong; that cannot be denied. But that “composite nation,” as Frederick Douglass called it in the 1870s—a dream and sometimes a reality—emerged from generations of what can best be called tyranny. When one studies slavery long enough, in the words of the great scholar David Brion Davis, “we come to realize that tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.” Freedom and tyranny, wrapped in the same historical bundle, feeding upon and making one another, had by the late 18th century created a remarkably original nation dedicated to Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the “truths” of natural rights, popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, and human equality, but also built as an edifice designed to protect and expand chattel slavery. Americans do not always like to face the contradictions in their past, but in so many ways, we are our contradictions, and we have to face them.
The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as “progress,” as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all. While there are many real threads to this story—about immigration, about our creeds and ideologies, and about race and emancipation and civil rights, there is also the broad, untidy underside.
The point is not to teach American history as a chronicle of shame and oppression. Far from it. The point is to tell American history as a story of real human beings, of power, of vast economic and geographical expansion, of great achievements as well as great dispossession, of human brutality and human reform. That goal can never be achieved without understanding the meanings and legacies of slavery.
The American writer James Baldwin was determined in season and out to make Americans face the pasts they preferred to ignore. In a 1962 essay, he said that the problem with the way Americans generally approach their past is that “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.” Exploding such complacency and teaching a real and informed history is the essential function of education. And we are always interested in keeping our students awake.
For the entire forum: https://www.educationnext.org/teaching-about-slavery-forum-guelzo-berry-blight-rowe-stang-allen-maranto/