Varying Viewpoints About Slavery

Information taught in schools

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Episode 27

From: Chance
re: The True Nature of Slavery
To: Kerry sent - Gmail at 4:32 PM

Hi Kerry—

You are not off-base. I took the textbook to school today. Three of us looked at it during lunch. We all agree with you.

We looked carefully at the 70 negative words that appear in Varying Viewpoints. We saw that the first really negative thing said about slavery comes about 28 lines into the section.

Even then, the paragraph starts with these words:

“No such definitive conclusion has yet been reached in the disputes over slave treatments.”

Don’t those words leave open the possibility that slavery was an acceptable practice? Why start with that message?

The next sentence is also very revealing:

“Beginning in the 1950s, historians came increasingly to emphasize the harshness of the slave system.”

Could that be true? Did no one talk about the harshness of the slavery system until 1950? If that is true, it is no wonder that we are still arguing about race today. That means that the brutality of the slavery economy wasn’t talked about for 331 years, and we only started talking about it 75 years ago.

The next sentence is revealing as well:

“One study, went so far as to compare the ‘peculiar institution’ to the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Both were ‘total institutions’ which ‘infantilized’ their victims.”

That’s it for that paragraph. I am shocked that the first truly negative words and phrases, only talked about infantilizing the victims of the horrible brutality of taking freedom away from people and treating them as property. There will not be a single student reading those words who could even imagine living without freedom.

Wouldn’t a textbook be an excellent time to say something about humans living without freedom and liberty? Shouldn’t a textbook encourage the reader to imagine the horror of living under the control of a slaveowner who is allowed to inflict cruelty and indignities on his property? Wouldn’t it be the time to mention that people who are considered property are bought and sold at the will of the owner? Wouldn’t it underscore the cruelty of the institution of slavery to inform the student that families were often broken up to earn money for the owner? It would be important to include that very young children were taken away from their mother and sold for profit. Wouldn’t it be the time to state unequivocally that chattel slavery was inhumane?

At lunch today, we were outraged that the Nazis were even brought into the discussion of legal slavery, and at that, there was absolutely no mention of Nazi death camps. There was no mention of the almost 20 million people who died during the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis.

Also, can a high school junior even add those important facts about Nazi Germany to the complicated discussion about slavery in the United States? Have those students even gotten to 20th Century World History?

Unfortunately, this topic has been at the top of my mind all day. It has been hard to think about anything else.

I have realized that the discussion about how slavery is portrayed in high school history textbooks is obviously more important than my need to make some personal decisions about my professional journey in life.

What do I do? Stay in education to help children learn the truth about history or leave for a job in business that will make my life easier?

Chance