I happened upon this article from The New Yorker by floating around Twitter today. It really shook me up, though not necessarily because of what it described, but the process that I've been (inadvertently) a part of. I teach history, but I focus on European civilization more than anything else. I fold in some additional aspects of world history--a sprinkling of Africa, Meso-America, and Asia creep in, but mostly as they intersected with European movements. This is a traditional approach to history; its biggest shortcoming, I fear, is that it's assumed as being the history of the world, rather than a history of the world. That is, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with having a Eurocentric version of history, provided that it's understood that it's one of many, equally valid ways of appreciating the past.
In the course of teaching history this way, I know that there are gaps and assumptions. This is the nature of teaching: Anything I teach is at the sacrifice of everything else I could have taught. It is not a perfect reading of the world. It's flawed, messy, and as human as that which we study, namely, humanity.
I've only taught one course on American history, and though I suppose it went well (it was my second year teaching, so...y'know, about as well as you could hope), I often think about how American history is approached. Though this has nothing to do with the school I teach at, I believe there is a paucity of honesty when it comes to describing the American experiment. Aside from the obvious axiom that history is kindest to the victors, and as the inheritors of that tradition, I wish to treat the country kindly, I've come to see that there are multitudinous versions of history of which I'm totally ignorant. And these textures, angles, and attitudes paint a richer, more diverse, and clearer picture than the few colors of my experience and study can replicate.
It is this sense of missing color that the New Yorker article stirred in me. I've lamented before that I'm not as intellectually proficient as I have been in the past. I believe I know more and think less than I have before, and that is something that is very chilling to me. Part of the reason for my frequent essays is to try to remedy that problem. The thing that cuts into my core is the idea that I'm missing something. It's the feeling of walking into a room and promptly forgetting why you went in there in the first place, but you know it's important. There's a gap there, like a well inside of your mind, that you know is actually filled with something vital, but it's dark, deep, and inaccessible.
That's what the well of ignorance is. Not that it's filled with ignorance; instead, it's the place I turn to in order to slake my thirst of intellectual dearth.
Yet every time I pull up the bucket, I realize that the well goes deeper than I expected. My access to it has not much changed--my finite mind, patience, attention, and retention all prevent me from drinking more than I can drink--but my desire to find its depths has.
So when I read the very well written article, I was struck by some of the passages. It's likely that you haven't taken the time to read the article, "The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad," but I encourage you to do so. It helps show how historical truths become narratives become appropriated and then metamorphose into the legends and assumptions that we take to be reality. There were a couple of lines that frightened me (emphasis mine):
The other quote that I can't forget is this one:
Germany has decided--and must continue to decide--to remember the atrocities done in the name of their Nazi ideology.
Where, in Washington, D.C., to we see the miles of chains--twelve million links at least--that would represent the lives of the enslaved? What would it mean to create that? To pay for it, not through private donations and crowdfunding, but through taxpayer dollars? What would it mean to apologize for slavery? To whom would we apologize?
This is why it's probably for the best that I don't teach American history. I have learned to loved flawed things: my country, my language, my family, my church, and sometimes even myself. I love England, which is also guilty of immense atrocities (and beauty). So I know that a thing needn't be perfect to be loved, respected, and honored.
But...well, there's so much I'm ignorant of, it can be frustrating how deeply, profoundly incapable of understanding the world I am.
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* Having her replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 is clearly a great move in the sense of acknowledging her accomplishments. Whether or not she would appreciate being a visual component of the capitalistic system that was both built upon the enslavement of her and her people, as well as the system that was invoked to justify that enslavement, is less clear.
In the course of teaching history this way, I know that there are gaps and assumptions. This is the nature of teaching: Anything I teach is at the sacrifice of everything else I could have taught. It is not a perfect reading of the world. It's flawed, messy, and as human as that which we study, namely, humanity.
I've only taught one course on American history, and though I suppose it went well (it was my second year teaching, so...y'know, about as well as you could hope), I often think about how American history is approached. Though this has nothing to do with the school I teach at, I believe there is a paucity of honesty when it comes to describing the American experiment. Aside from the obvious axiom that history is kindest to the victors, and as the inheritors of that tradition, I wish to treat the country kindly, I've come to see that there are multitudinous versions of history of which I'm totally ignorant. And these textures, angles, and attitudes paint a richer, more diverse, and clearer picture than the few colors of my experience and study can replicate.
It is this sense of missing color that the New Yorker article stirred in me. I've lamented before that I'm not as intellectually proficient as I have been in the past. I believe I know more and think less than I have before, and that is something that is very chilling to me. Part of the reason for my frequent essays is to try to remedy that problem. The thing that cuts into my core is the idea that I'm missing something. It's the feeling of walking into a room and promptly forgetting why you went in there in the first place, but you know it's important. There's a gap there, like a well inside of your mind, that you know is actually filled with something vital, but it's dark, deep, and inaccessible.
That's what the well of ignorance is. Not that it's filled with ignorance; instead, it's the place I turn to in order to slake my thirst of intellectual dearth.
Yet every time I pull up the bucket, I realize that the well goes deeper than I expected. My access to it has not much changed--my finite mind, patience, attention, and retention all prevent me from drinking more than I can drink--but my desire to find its depths has.
So when I read the very well written article, I was struck by some of the passages. It's likely that you haven't taken the time to read the article, "The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad," but I encourage you to do so. It helps show how historical truths become narratives become appropriated and then metamorphose into the legends and assumptions that we take to be reality. There were a couple of lines that frightened me (emphasis mine):
[I]n 1860, the number of people in bondage in the United States was nearly four million. By then, slavery in this country was more than two hundred years old, and although estimates are hard to come by, perhaps twice that many million African-Americans had lived their lives in chains. Most accounts of fugitive slaves do not invoke those numbers, and most Americans do not know them. The Underground Railroad is a numerator without a denominator.What are we supposed to make of that? Kathryn Shulz talks later that, based upon the best research we have little reason to assume that even 100,000 people utilized the Underground Railroad. The bravery of those heroic African-Americans who attempted escape, and those who helped them, ought not to be forgotten or ignored...yet they are. With the exception of Harriet Tubman, there is none from that important part of our country's history that we can recognize. And Harriet Tubman is not appreciated deeply enough.* But there is something beyond what I can understand that is teasing me--the vague hints of color in a black and white photograph, more elusive the longer I look for it.
The other quote that I can't forget is this one:
Yet, more than a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, you still will not find, anywhere in our country, a federal monument to the millions of people whom we, as a nation, kept in bondage. To put that omission in perspective, there are more than eighty national parks and monuments and countless other federal memorials commemorating the Civil War. That war lasted four years. Slavery lasted two and a half centuries.Not even a mile from the Reichstag in Berlin, you can find the Holocaust Memorial. It's out doors. It's large, gray, uniform--concrete coffins that commemorate and condemn what had happened in those dark days of the mid-twentieth century.
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| I took this picture myself. |
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| I took this picture, too. |
Where, in Washington, D.C., to we see the miles of chains--twelve million links at least--that would represent the lives of the enslaved? What would it mean to create that? To pay for it, not through private donations and crowdfunding, but through taxpayer dollars? What would it mean to apologize for slavery? To whom would we apologize?
This is why it's probably for the best that I don't teach American history. I have learned to loved flawed things: my country, my language, my family, my church, and sometimes even myself. I love England, which is also guilty of immense atrocities (and beauty). So I know that a thing needn't be perfect to be loved, respected, and honored.
But...well, there's so much I'm ignorant of, it can be frustrating how deeply, profoundly incapable of understanding the world I am.
---
* Having her replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 is clearly a great move in the sense of acknowledging her accomplishments. Whether or not she would appreciate being a visual component of the capitalistic system that was both built upon the enslavement of her and her people, as well as the system that was invoked to justify that enslavement, is less clear.