{"id":308078,"date":"2020-09-04T10:57:49","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T14:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=308078"},"modified":"2024-01-11T12:47:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-11T17:47:26","slug":"harvard-historian-examines-how-textbooks-taught-white-supremacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2020\/09\/harvard-historian-examines-how-textbooks-taught-white-supremacy\/","title":{"rendered":"How textbooks taught white supremacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\n\t
\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tCampus & Community\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tHow textbooks taught white supremacy\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tA historian steps back to the 1700s and shares what's changed and what needs to change\t\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t\n\t

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\n\t\tLiz Mineo\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

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Photo by Mary E. Yacovone<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n

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Historian Donald Yacovone<\/a>, an associate at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research<\/a> and a 2013 winner of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, was researching a book on the legacy of the antislavery movement when he came across some old history school textbooks that stopped him cold \u2014 and led him to write a different book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yacovone, who co-authored \u201cThe African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross\u201d with Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2013, is now writing \u201cTeaching White Supremacy: The Textbook Battle Over Race in American History.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Gazette interviewed Yacovone about the origins of his research, his findings, and why he thinks it\u2019s necessary to teach the difficult story of slavery and white supremacy and their legacies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q&A<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Donald Yacovone<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong>  <\/strong>How did you start examining history textbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YACOVONE: <\/strong> <\/strong>I had begun a different book about the legacy of the antislavery movement and the rise of the Civil Rights era. I had spent several months at the Houghton Library before it closed down. When I was nearly finished with one particularly large collection, I wanted to take a break and find out how abolitionism had been taught in school textbooks. I thought this was going to be a quick enterprise: I\u2019d go over to Gutman Library at the Graduate School of Education, take a look at a few textbooks, and keep going. Imagine my shock when I was confronted by a collection of about 3,000 textbooks. I started reviewing them, and I came across one 1832 book, \u201cHistory of the United States\u201d by Noah Webster, the gentleman who\u2019s responsible for our dictionary. I was astonished by what I was reading so I just kept reading some more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Webster\u2019s book there was next to nothing about the institution of slavery, despite the fact that it was a central American institution. There were no African Americans ever mentioned. When Webster wrote about Africans, it was extremely derogatory, which was shocking because those comments were in a textbook. What I realized from his book, and from the subsequent ones, was how they defined \u201cAmerican\u201d as white and only as white. Anything that was less than an Anglo Saxon was not a true American. The further along I got in this process, the more intensely this sentiment came out, I realized that I was looking at, there\u2019s no other word for it, white supremacy. I came across one textbook that declared on its first page, \u201cThis is the White Man\u2019s History.\u201d At that point, you had to be a dunce not to see what these books were teaching. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Americans tend to see racism as a result of Southern slavery, and this thinking has all kinds of problems.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>What are the roots of white supremacy? How is white supremacy connected to the history of slavery?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YACOVONE: <\/strong><\/strong>White supremacy precedes the origins of the United States. Every aspect of social interaction, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, was dominated by white identity, and white supremacy became an expression of American identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans tend to see racism as a result of Southern slavery, and this thinking has all kinds of problems. First of all, slavery was in the North as well as in the South, and the people who formed the idea of American identity were not Southern slave owners, they were Northerners. The father of white supremacy was not a Southerner; it was John H. Van Evrie, a Canadian who ended up settling in New York City. Van Evrie argued that if no slaves existed, the class-based structure of Europe would have been transferred, kept, and developed in the American colonies. But with the African presence, Van Evrie said, the descendants of white Europeans saw that the difference among white people was virtually insignificant compared to what they perceived as differences between themselves and African Americans. This allowed democracy, which was an unpopular idea in the 17th and 18th century, to flourish and develop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We always forget that democracy was not an idealized form of government back then. In fact, it was considered an evil. Van Evrie\u2019s argument was that Americans had to reimagine a new kind of government and social order and they could do so because of the African presence. This can also explain why white supremacy has persisted for so long, because it is an identity of oneself in contrast to others, a sort of a self-fulfilling, reinforcing thought about one\u2019s self-perceived superiority. Even people who opposed slavery believed that African Americans could never be absorbed by white society. Samuel Sewall, who wrote the first antislavery pamphlet in 1700, condemned slavery, but he also characterized people of African descent as \u201ca kind of extravasate Blood,\u201d always alien. His idea remained central to the American mind for the next 200 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>Some historians say that white supremacy ideology served to justify the enslavement of African Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YACOVONE: <\/strong><\/strong>The main feature of white supremacy is the assumption that people with Anglo Saxon backgrounds are the primacy, the first order of humanity. Van Evrie, however, saw people of African descent as essential to do \u201cthe white man\u2019s work,\u201d and were designed to do so \u201cby nature and god.\u201d He wrote about six different books on the subject, and he used a racial hierarchy in which Caucasians were at the top and Africans at the bottom. You\u2019d think that white supremacists were driven mostly by hate, but at the core they were driven by their ideas of racial superiority, which of course were pure fiction and had nothing to do with reality. White supremacy wasn\u2019t developed to defend the institution of slavery, but in reaction to it, and it preceded the birth of the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of the white supremacists in the North didn\u2019t even want an African American presence there. Many Northerners advocated the American Colonization Society, which would export African Americans to Liberia. But there was no unanimity of ideas about white supremacy; the only thing they all agreed upon was the \u201csuperiority of the white race.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“White supremacy is a toxin. The older history textbooks were like syringes that injected the toxin of white supremacy into the mind of many generations of Americans.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong><\/strong> I once heard a Harvard historian say that the Founding Fathers were white supremacists. Is that a fair characterization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YACOVONE: <\/strong><\/strong>Of course. Thomas Jefferson is the classic example. He is the individual responsible for giving us the phrase that embodies the democratic promise \u2014 \u201cAll men are created equal\u201d \u2014 and set the trend to exclude slavery from newly acquired territory. Yet, he refused to free his own slaves, considered people of African descent inherently inferior, and when he wrote those famous words in the Declaration of Independence he thought only of white men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>What did the textbooks published in the 20th century teach about slavery in comparison to those written in the 19th century?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YACOVONE: <\/strong><\/strong>For the most part, the textbooks from the pre-Civil War period through the end of the century followed a basic format: They would go from exploration to colonization to revolution to creation of the American republic, and then every succeeding presidential administration. Anything outside of the political narrative was not considered history and was not taught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the brief period of Reconstruction (1863-1877), the story emphasized the fulfillment of democracy, and the ideology of freedom suffused many books. This was a dramatic change. I even came across a couple of books that contained pictures of African Americans, and I was flabbergasted when I discovered one that had a picture of Frederick Douglass \u2014 that was unheard of. Prior to Reconstruction, textbooks had a few pictures, some engravings. But they disappear pretty quick once we get into the 20th century, because the \u201cLost Cause\u201d mythology takes over academia and white supremacy reappears with full force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“We\u2019re not teaching students the true American history because African American history is American history.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

During the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s, it was astonishing to see positive assessments of slavery in American history textbooks, which taught that the African American\u2019s natural environment was the institution of slavery, where they were cared for from cradle to grave. There was a legacy of African American writing about freedom, but the white power structure simply wouldn\u2019t accept it as legitimate. They dismissed the slave narratives as propaganda, downplayed the history of Africans before slavery, and ignored the work of African American scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>A report<\/a> by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that schools failed to teach the \u201chard history\u201d of African enslavement. What role have the textbooks played in the miseducation of many generations of Americans?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YACOVONE: <\/strong><\/strong> This is the problem. We\u2019re not teaching students the true American history because African American history is American history. I\u2019ve been lecturing about this project, and every time I ask students what they learn about the history of slavery, they all said, \u201cNot much.\u201d But even if there are textbooks that deal with those issues in a more accurate way, white teachers are so intimidated that they won\u2019t teach it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>You mentioned in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> that while doing your research, you found the history book you read when you were a fifth grader. What did that book teach you about the history of slavery?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YACOVONE: <\/strong><\/strong>That was one of the great revelations of this research. Like so many of these books, \u201cExploring the New World\u201d by O. Stuart Hamer and others, which was published repeatedly between 1953 and 1965, said almost nothing. All these books, particularly from 1840 for the next 25 years, go out of their way to not discuss slavery. Some would say that slavery began in 1619, but most said it began in 1620 because those who are writing this narrative are New Englanders, and 1620 is when the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower. Half the books from this early period got the date wrong. If the textbooks wrote about slavery, it was only one sentence and would never discuss the nature of slavery or include any descriptions. When American politics became absorbed by the debate over slavery, they could not avoid that, and would mention the 1820 Compromise [that admitted Maine to the union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state] and the 1850 Compromise [that abolished the slave trade -but not slavery- in Washington, D.C.]. None of the textbooks published prior to the Civil War would ever talk about the abolitionist movement, which began in the late 1820s. It wasn\u2019t until 1853, when the educator Emma Willard published her massive history of the United States, that she mentioned the abolitionists, but she didn\u2019t say who they were or what they were about, except that they were tools of Great Britain dedicated to destroying the republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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