10 XP on why we won't discuss slavery

A rather long time ago, I read and copied these remarks on the Atlantic Monthly about why so little teaching is done about slavery in American public schools.  The man who made them is, or was, a trained lawyer from a white Southern farm background who made his home in Utah. 

He had this to say: 10 XP to 😎: "I actually didn't state that one was the consequence of the other. I said we don't discuss slavery as an institution, because if we did discuss questions like how slavery worked under the law, who benefited from slavery, how integrated at every level slavery was into the antebellum economic system, and how people of the time rationalized slavery to themselves, they'd see uncanny similarities to today. And that makes adults, who benefit from the system and therefore don't want to destroy it, uncomfortable.

"So we just agree not to discuss it at all. And if it does come up, we agree to talk about something else instead. We don't really have a good explanation for why, for instance, when the government provides a small stipend to use specifically for food, that's a "handout", but when the army depopulates an entire region of Native Americans, and the government then offers secure legal title to the first person that can find, fence and develop that land, that isn't a "handout". We just know that one is always described as a "handout", while the other is never described as such. And because we have no good answers for why that's the case, we've all just agreed that the way to handle topics like "racism" and "slavery" is to treat them as the social equivalent of picking one's nose in public and eating it. It's a sign of gaucheness in many circles to openly discuss these things.

"I mean, if you're looking for solutions, the solution is . . . let's agree to be uncomfortable sometimes? It's not a topic that invites "solutions" in the general sense, because it's really just a social norm that we are consciously choosing not to honor any more. We are choosing to look at the stuff that the government hands "Americans" as a default, and allowing ourselves to recognize how outraged we'd be if those same policies were designed to primarily benefit people of color. When it benefits PoC, it's denigrated as "40 acres and mule." But when it benefits people who look like us, we make Broadway musicals out of it. And we kind of need to be willing to sit with, and understand, just how easy it is for every one of us to miss that the only real difference between those two things is the beneficiary."

10 XP to 👨: "And here we have the primary reason why our schoolchildren have such an issue with learning about slavery: because very early on, they learn that the adults are completely unwilling to discuss the matter save in trying to deflect away from it, and are only too happy to change the subject to anything else, no matter how irrelevant, so that we don't actually discuss slavery.

"The Cherokee also owned slaves. So what? Native Americans, just like most other cultures, practiced a form of slavery that was radically distinct from the version practiced in America. So what?  No, really, so what? This is relevant to the discussion about how slavery was an institutionalized practice that led to huge accumulations of wealth and political power at the expense of the slaves . . . how?

"All they really learn from their teachers is that slavery is a verboten topic of discussion, for some reason. And that "some reason" is primarily because if we actually discussed how deeply embedded slavery was in the culture, and the law, and the root assumptions of who was entitled to the blessings of liberty, and who was truly "equal" under the law, in 1860, they'd see rather uncanny and disturbing similarities to how we perceive African-Americans today."

Posted by Jennifer A. Nolan