To all the fearful bleating about how to teach our history, I offer the following approach. Remember, the favorite tactic of the Right, at this point in history, is to run down the clock with blather, then declare righteous victory (cousin of the Gish Gallop, I believe). So my approach may seem controlling, and it only works if the other party allows it. The way to pressure them to allow it, is for each step to be so obvious that arguing it is idiotic, even from their point of view.
- Was there an institution of slavery at the Founding? Well, sure AND WE ARE AGAINST IT.
- You may get into a Whole Thing about Lincoln here. The point, as I said, is to waste time while shouting “Lincoln!” over and over. You could say, Yes, but the Founders. May work, may not.
- Okay, good. What percentage of our population was enslaved? (this is a number question, so answering it righteously is hard) About 20%. In Virginia, in 1790, about 40% of the population was enslaved Black people (see here). About 2% were free Blacks. (NOTE — you’ll find that talking about numbers at any length, say three numbers, throws some sand in the gears of righteousness).
- Were slaves granted freedom to worship however they chose? No. Could they pick whichever job they liked? No. Could they speak out or publish? No. Could they freely assemble? No. Could they pick whom they married? No. What do we call this kind of society? It still exists, in North Korea. Soviet Russia even resembled this. We have a name for it: Totalitarian Dictatorship. 20% of the population was being subject to Totalitarian Dictatorship. Not so cute when you put it that way.
- You could compare slaves lots with Soviet Russians. Worse off? Insufficient data… My Old Friend would try to steer this by comparing. An effective counterargument is, Compared to What? Slaves were badly off… compared to what? Soviets were badly off… compared to what? And he would say that comparing them to each other is somehow Not Fair.
- What were the anti-colonialists fighting for? Um… taxes? That’s the usual answer. But also ideals! Lofty ideals. That certainly helps the image of what might otherwise seem kind of mercenary. I mean, colonists had every freedom granted British citizens, except they did not have a vote for Parliament. Arguably, they had more freedom than a British citizen in England, in that the Crown was months away by sea. My non-historian’s impression is that they were fighting for not a whole lot. Look at Canada — they did, and are doing, just fine
So, what we get is that people running, or profiting from others’ running, a Totalitarian Dictatorship were fighting a war to keep from paying taxes (if you were rich) and for High Ideals (if you were not rich; the poor always get the High Ideals while the rich get the money).
So that’s the Story of our Founding™. A whole separate and much more difficult question is how to teach this to children. My Old Friend says, correctly, that a nation’s history is supposed to be a binding story for its citizens, starting in childhood. So the question is, how much lying is OK, how much omission is OK, how much distortion of emphasis is OK? I mean, if we can lie in order to make little patriots, why not tell them that their ancestors battled Sauron in Mordor for the freedom of Middle Earth? As a story, it works.
Let’s agree that’s too far. How about a nice little White Lie? Like the rickety structure of lies that eventually led to Gone With the Wind? That has traditionally been considered an acceptable pack of lies, because it doesn’t deny the existence of the institution, it just makes declarations about things that are hard to check, like intent, attitudes, and moods. Since so little documentary evidence exists about slaves’ feelings, and none at all about the internal mental states of, well, anyone really, you can say whatever you like. And if anyone argues, you can always be indignant!
Note that it took Germany 20 years to start teaching about its shameful history. A whole generation of Nazis had to die off before the paradigm could shift, to use Kuhn-speak. To its national credit, they then did teach it, resulting in much gnashing of teeth and the (I suppose) inevitable push-back, resulting in the Alternativ für Deutschland party, a neo-Nazi party wearing an anti-immigrant fig-leaf.
More to come…
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