Jelani Cobb’s recent essay about Martin Luther King, Jr. in the New Yorker highlights “the extent to which '[King’s] thought had always been informed by a study of American history…. To an underappreciated extent, he related the nation’s contemporary concerns to a genealogy of past ones” (January 17, 2022). Cobb celebrates King for his attentiveness to history, his insistence that transforming the present was only possible if we had a richer sense of ‘our’ history. (And that ethic has been carried on so wonderfully by shows like United States of Anxiety and Throughline.)
Cobb uses King’s historical sensibility as a way of throwing into sharp relief recent efforts to legislate the teaching of history around the country (this legislation has been summarized at FutureEd). He worries that “historical continuities stand to be lost” because of legislation.
The legislation takes different forms in different places, but Arizona’s HB 2898 (link to the legislation here) provides one model. It opens by first explicitly linking ‘public monies’ with the instruction of history:
A. A TEACHER, ADMINISTRATOR OR OTHER EMPLOYEE OF A SCHOOL DISTRICT, CHARTER SCHOOL OR STATE AGENCY WHO IS INVOLVED WITH STUDENTS AND TEACHERS IN GRADES PRESCHOOL THROUGH THE TWELFTH GRADE MAY NOT USE PUBLIC MONIES FOR INSTRUCTION THAT PRESENTS ANY FORM OF BLAME OR JUDGMENT ON THE BASIS OF RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX.
It then continues by listing what teachers are not able to bring into their lessons:
B. A TEACHER, ADMINISTRATOR OR OTHER EMPLOYEE OF A SCHOOL DISTRICT, CHARTER SCHOOL OR STATE AGENCY WHO IS INVOLVED WITH STUDENTS AND TEACHERS IN GRADES PRESCHOOL THROUGH THE TWELFTH GRADE MAY NOT ALLOW INSTRUCTION IN OR MAKE PART OF A COURSE THE FOLLOWING CONCEPTS:
1. ONE RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX IS INHERENTLY MORALLY OR INTELLECTUALLY SUPERIOR TO ANOTHER RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX.
So far, so good? Its opening ban seems to suggest that the legislation is designed to prevent discriminatory or racist instruction. But it continues:
2. AN INDIVIDUAL, BY VIRTUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX, IS INHERENTLY RACIST, SEXIST OR OPPRESSIVE, WHETHER CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY.
3. AN INDIVIDUAL SHOULD BE INVIDIOUSLY DISCRIMINATED AGAINST OR RECEIVE ADVERSE TREATMENT SOLELY OR PARTLY BECAUSE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX.
5. AN INDIVIDUAL, BY VIRTUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX, BEARS RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACTIONS COMMITTED BY OTHER MEMBERS OF THE SAME RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX.
6. AN INDIVIDUAL SHOULD FEEL DISCOMFORT, GUILT, ANGUISH OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS BECAUSE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX.
7. ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, MERITOCRACY OR TRAITS SUCH AS A HARD WORK ETHIC ARE RACIST OR SEXIST OR WERE CREATED BY MEMBERS OF A PARTICULAR RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX TO OPPRESS MEMBERS OF ANOTHER RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX.
The section closes by listing all the possible consequences (including prosecution by the attorney general, suspension or revocation of teacher’s certificate, and financial penalties imposed on the school district). I haven’t read enough about the bill’s history, but it’s interesting to read an earlier version of the legislation (available here).
What runs through the earlier draft is this stress on “the principles of freedom and democracy” that are held to be essential, central, and fundamental to the United States. Anything that contradicts that origin story - say, discussions of racism, dispossession, genocide, or economic exploitation - is pushed outside the limits of the ‘public.’ But there’s a second dimension involved, raised most clearly in points 5 and 6: Students cannot be taught that “individual[s]… [bear] responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race, ethnic group, or sex” nor should they be made to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.”
So three urgent questions:
How should the past be mobilized to create a common definition of ‘us’? In other words, where and how should it be transmitted from one generation to the next?
How should that past be defined, bordered, categorized, and otherwise marked into realms of the ‘appropriate’ and the ‘inappropriate’?
What kinds of relationships - responsibility, obligation, emotion - should and should not exist between the present and the past?
These questions remind me of Sean Wilentz’s recent critical review of Woody Holton and Alan Taylor’s new books (respectively, Liberty is Sweet and American Republics). Wilentz opens by placing these books as part of a recent shift in public histories of America that “advance claims in accord with interpretations of white supremacy as the driving force of American history.”
The publisher blurb for Holton’s book:
Liberty Is Sweet gives us our most complete account of the American Revolution, from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew. (Emphasis on origins added.)
And the blurb for American Republics:
In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. (Emphasis on traditional story added.)
Wilentz is - based on my reading of this review - skeptical about any argument that places white supremacy as the driving force in American history. He closes the review saying as much:
Less open to debate, though, are weak but attention-getting arguments based on glaring inaccuracies or gross distortion…. Lacking stronger arguments and actual evidence, they amount to fables constructed in search of a past tailored to the issues and causes of the present. (Emphasis added.)
Two threads run through all of these conversations. The first has to do with the juxtaposition of ‘history’ and ‘story’ and ‘fable.’ The former, we’re told to believe, is true, based on evidence and objective fact. The latter are, to quote Wilentz, merely “tailored to the issues and causes of the present.” But is that a problem? If telling better stories provides a way to imagine a more just and equitable society, couldn’t our project be re-framed as one of coming to tell better stories?
The second involves the ‘shape of stories’ themselves, and particularly stories that are framed as ‘origin stories’ (see Lauren Michele Jackson’s discussion of the 1619 Project). Origin stories are powerful precisely because they explain the present in terms of a single core truth: Because the past was __, the present must be __. But the problem of that shape, its danger, is something it assigns to ‘origins’ too much explanatory power. Thus Edward Said’s suggestion that we think instead in terms of beginnings:
I use beginning as having the more active meaning, and origin the more passive one: thus ‘X is the origin of Y,’ while ‘The beginning A leads to B.’ In due course I hope to show, however, how ideas about origins, because of their passivity, are put to uses I believe ought to be avoided. (Edward Said, Beginnings, p. 6)
I also keep returning to Eddie Glaude Jr.’s reading of James Baldwin because it brings together this discussion of responsibility, story, and beginning so effectively:
Baldwin insisted, until he died, that we reach for a different story. We should tell the truth about ourselves, he maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility. [And quoting Baldwin’s Just Above My Head directly:] Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again. (Glaude Jr., Begin Again, p. xxix)
To come back to HB 2898: One of the deeply wrong parts of that bill is the way that it legislates a particular model of responsibility (and even though it’s been erased from the final version, a model of freedom). It’s a model of responsibility in which individuals are encouraged to abdicate any sort of obligation toward the past and amounts to its form of story-telling, tailored to the issues and causes of the present. Tell better, different stories.
A few other notes: Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed! And thank you for sharing with other people who may be interested. Reflecting on the year so far, I think that I’ll probably begin to try writing on a bi-weekly basis. My next post is going to turn in a different direction, in line with the pleasure reading that I’ve been doing (this and these): What’s up with all the djinn? What imaginative possibilities do djinn provide for imagining the world differently?