Teach facts, not myths, of history
Because of an ad in the closely fought Virginia governor’s race, the brilliant novel “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, the late Nobel laureate, is suddenly in the news. With the help of the ad, which features a staunchly Republican mother, GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin castigates his Democratic rival, former Gov. Terry Mcauliffe, for twice vetoing bills that would have allowed Virginia parents to prevent their children from reading certain books assigned by teachers.
Looking earnestly into the camera, Fairfax County mom Laura Murphy says, “When my son showed me his reading assignment, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit material you can imagine.” You’d have thought the teacher assigned the Kama Sutra to her teenage son.
Murphy never names the material that has created such alleged distress, but her campaign against the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved” started back in 2013, according to The Washington Post, and led the state Legislature to write the bills that Mcauliffe correctly vetoed in 2016 and 2017. The novel is challenging, but passages that portray the sexual violence commonly inflicted upon enslaved Black women are just one aspect of its discomfiting plot.
If reading it produces anguish, that’s because it accurately portrays the conditions of slavery, which Morrison researched relentlessly. The novel centers on a historical fact: In 1856, an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, briefly escaped with her husband and children before she was captured; she killed her 2-year-old daughter rather than see her back in slavery.
Although Murphy started her campaign against “Beloved” nearly a decade ago, her crusade has echoes of the war on critical race theory. Most of the Republicans railing against critical race theory don’t know what it is, but right-wing activist Christopher Rufo knew that he could misrepresent its essence and use it as a culture-war rallying cry. He consulted with the Trump White House, appeared countless times on Fox News and advised several Gop-led state legislatures.
As a result, a few legislatures have already passed — and many others are considering — bills to ban books or discussions “about conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination and oppression,” according to the Brookings Institution. Many school boards are following the trend. Because the laws are broadly written, teachers are afraid to assign books or lead talks about the nation’s factual history — its treatment of Black Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans
— as well as any discussion of current discriminatory practices.
Rufo and his allies want schoolchildren to continue learning the nation’s myths: An intrepid Christopher Columbus “discovered” America; slavery had nothing to do with building the nation’s economy or starting the Civil War; brave white settlers conquered the “savage” West. In that sanitized history, common to public school textbooks, there is little mention of genocide against Indigenous peoples or the horrors of slavery. There is little recounting of the century of terrorism against Black people that followed the Civil War: lynchings, massacres, burning and looting of Black businesses and homes. In that telling, Martin Luther King Jr. once gave a speech insisting that all people be judged by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin,” and suddenly Black people were able to vote freely.
In Alabama, state legislator Chris Pringle, R-mobile, has a bill banning critical race theory set for next year. When Alabama newspaper columnist Kyle Whitmire asked Pringle to define the term, Pringle replied: “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad because of the color of their skin, period.” Apparently, actual history would make white children feel bad and must be restricted.
That’s likely the Virginia mother’s real objection to “Beloved.” Based on a true story, the novel portrays slavery’s horrors as so overwhelming that a mother killed her own child rather than see her have to grow up suffering them. For students who have learned a sanitized version of the “peculiar institution,” the book may come as a kick in the teeth.
America’s history is hardly kind and gentle, but keeping our children ignorant has a cost. As a cliched but still-relevant bit of wisdom puts it: Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.