a history as old as the sun
The first people that a dictator puts in jail are the writers and the teachers because these are the people who have vocabulary, who can see injustice and can express what they feel about it. Artists are dangerous people because they are called to work with human clay, with the heart and the soul. So to protect itself, society has had to pretend that either art is unimportant or that it is simple.
The other way of disposing of the artist is to assume that art is wicked and all artists are notorious sinners. We are told that story is a lie, that theater and acting are pretending, so they are not real and therefore sinful. But it is in art that we look for reality. It is the artist who dared to help us try to be a human—to be, though many artists might not put it so—to be saints. We have been given a model in Jesus and we must be brave enough not to kill the Christ in ourselves or to let it be killed as people tried to kill Christ 2000 years ago. It is not the secular humanists who are doing the killing of Christ, but we who call ourselves Christians.
Madeleine L’Engle, Herself: Reflections on the Writing Life
The worst thing about the 1776 Report is that it’s all dust, a relic without good bones or a lingering soul.
This manifesto (I honestly can’t think of another way to name it) was one of President Trump’s last statements before the final curtain was drawn. Using far more words than needed—45 pages of words—the former president shouts, “Let them eat cake, “ as Americans writhe in confused pain inflicted by the rising number of Covid deaths and the recent insurrection of the Capitol. Here, in his final days, Trump had one last chance to make clear his truest intention as our Head of State—one last chance to set the record straight—but instead he grinds his heels into the ground and in 45 pages let’s us know, in no uncertain terms, that he regrets nothing. He regrets nothing and commissioned 18 people to write a report to make that known.
Initially, I’d planned to take the whole report apart like a house flipper demoing an outdated and malfunctioning kitchen. It took me three days to read the whole dang thing because of all the asbestos and mold lingering behind its walls. I didn’t want to release its lethal spores into my atmosphere and poison my body. I have rarely said this out loud, but my greatest fear is that all of this living in my black female body is killing me, and there’s nothing much I can do to save myself if I intend to spend my life sparing the next generation the need to work so hard putting out dragon fires.
So, I planned to list right here everything that the 1776 Report misses. By the time I read the very last page, I had six pages and over 4,000 words of notes—all grievances. Four thousand tiny cuts and scratches all over my exhausted soul – and for what? An unthinking man’s temper tantrum? An unthinking man’s manifesto in which he needed to commission eighteen other people to write? An unthinking man’s demands of history, who only four years ago didn’t know that Frederick Douglass was dead and gone? Why bother?
This morning, I went to reference the report and discovered that it was gone. President Biden, not even two days in office, had the report removed from the White House website and the advisory commission who wrote it disbanded. I also learned this morning that the American Historical Association condemned the report, stating it was, “…written hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious hearings. Without any consultation with professional historians of the United States, the report fails to engage a rich and vibrant body of scholarship that has evolved over the last seven decades.”
And I guess that should be the end of it.
But of course, it’s not.
For two days, a manifesto of how U.S. history should be taught in schools, and a code to govern whether or not a teacher was coloring outside the very clear lines that the report had drawn, lived and breathed within our governments walls, festering like a boil beneath the surface of our democracy. And then it was gone. But believe me, the stories that we weave about our history are not so easily eradicated, most especially the more pernicious and insidiously written ones.
When I was a kid, history was one of my least favorite subjects. I was the lone black child in a sea of white faces, and no matter what history we were covering—American, European, or Ancient—I was part of the denigrated group that either needed to be saved or needed to be controlled. From first grade straight through 12th, I’d been called a slave, colored, mammy, spade, savage, warrior, pharaoh, negro, darkie, sambo, ni**er, Afro-American, monkey, ape, welfare recipient, fugitive, crow, pickaninny, jungle bunny, porch monkey, tar baby, primate, uncle tom, and various combinations of all of these, directly or indirectly by teachers and classmates as a result of some new lesson in history. For me, a history classroom was nothing more than a masterclass meant to teach me self-hatred. And as far as I could tell, for my white classmates, those masterclasses were welcomed vocabulary lessons that fed the corners of their darkest imaginations.
As an adult who is relearning history, no matter how well it’s taught, it’s always painful—even the good and heroic stories of survival, or even love. But I press on, excavating the site of the wounds like an anthropologist on a dig. Who knows what I might find? Who knows what artifacts of our humanity I might unearth that could make us whole again? As much as I am able, I try to explore wide and deep.
In his personal essay Thrive, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Jericho Brown writes, “In all the years I’ve watched television, in all the time it took me to get degree after degree, I’ve never heard anyone say slavery was a bad idea.” In all my history classes, even in college, I never heard anyone admit it either. I’ve heard that it was a necessary evil, an unfortunate mistake of history, the price of human error and a gross lack of judgement, but never did I hear that it was just a very bad idea.
Today, I’m wondering what would it look like to teach American History from this very true nugget: slavery was a very bad idea… as were the Fugitive Slave Acts, as was the Chinese Exclusion Act, as was the Indian Removal Act, as was the Dred Scott decision, as were the Japanese Interment Camps, as was the Prohibition Act, as was eugenics and forced sterilizations, as were Jim Crow Laws and countless other terrible ideas in our history. If we were to be so honest as to call them what they really were—horrible ideas, some of the worst ideas ever in all of humanity—what current atrocities could we correct, and what future sorrows could we prevent?
If we were to teach history, not as if our country depended on its teaching, but as if our compassions and passions depended on it in order to create everything essential to being human—art, music, friendships, food, romances and stories—what unimaginable thing would that look like?
And what if I’d ever had a single teacher who began a class like this…
“Slavery was a terrible idea. Let’s imagine what our country could have looked like without it. Students, close your eyes and imagine if when Europeans reached the shores of Africa they’d asked permission to disembark. Or even imagine what the world would be like if they’d never arrived on those shores at all. Imagine if the Mayflower had never voyaged to the New England coastline. There would be no New England as we know it. Imagine a world without colonists. Imagine unchartered countries, each filled with indigenous beings. Imagine if there were no black or white but Wampanoag, Aztec, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, English, Basque, Catalan, Canadian, Pakistani, Armenian, Breton, Taiwanese, Ukrainian, Manchu, Palestinian, German, French, Han, Yamato, Italian, Filipino, Palestinian, Tibetan, Indian, Korean, Flemish, Caribbean, Tasmanian, Kurnai, Bardi, Zulu, Maasai. We would have so much more. What if the transatlantic trade only dealt in goods and not humans? What riches would each country produce? What would the world be if the Ivory Coast had never been plundered and there was never a Door of No Return, but just an open door leading to a wider world? What if the Middle Passage never existed and the word “trade” in and of itself always meant “fair”? Who do you think your people would be? What do you suppose would have been their greatest contribution to the world?”
What might it have meant to me as a kid to sit in a class that probed the past like a psychologist might psychoanalyze a dream? Maybe it would have given my teachers and classmates a better vocabulary to speak of our diaspora—one of choice and meaning rather the one bled from force and absurdity. Maybe they would have labeled me more accurately, and I most certainly wouldn’t have been the only one. Maybe the teacher would have even looked like me, or not. But everyone would have related to everyone else’s story because each of us would have belonged to a tribe with an unbound ancestral history. Who knows? Maybe our classroom lay in the Congo, or in Egypt, or Greenland. Maybe there’s no classroom at all, but just our stories to teach us how to be more human and how being human is the most precious commodity of all.
The problem with the 1776 Report wasn’t that it was riddled with lies, be they gross exaggerations, blatant omissions, or plain errors, it was that it valued the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and its writers more than it valued any of the stories of the native people who’d already lived here long before 1776. It didn’t value a tapestry of stories but preferred a white, marble, patriotic monolith that crumbles like the Tower of Babel. Its writers cared nothing abut the ancestors of this land that go back at least 15,000 years. They only heard the not-so-distant voices of a mere 245 years ago, and even then ever so faintly. They tried to feed us an abridged history as if it were the definitive story while calling anyone whom they offended a slew of labels: communist, liberal, shameful, destructive, dishonorable, immoral, step-children, petty tyrant and liar. The report is a silencer meant to muzzle us. Its goal is to distort the sound of our voices narrating our own stories. It tells us that the right to define our country solely belongs to, and is the sole duty of, the writers of the Constitution, who somehow divinely knew what would be best for the rest of us, from their time through eternity. It loves the words “all men are created equal,” but it never wonders why the need for equality was so necessary. It never asks, “From whom did these wealthy writers of our constitution seek equality, and with what ruler were they measuring, and under who’s authority? And what about everyone else?”
In The Handy English Grammar Answer Book, Toni Morrison wrote, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” In her Nobel Prize speech, she said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
In my Mockingbird History lessons, I am writing the “book” my dispirited inner child from history classes past needs to read in order to heal. In doing so, I have read history books that seem as if they were masterclasses taught by the dead for classrooms filled with the living, using language that does more than label. They are the stuff of fairytales, filled with heroes brimming with moral courage slaying villainous dragons that breathe fire and swish their tails shingled with poisonous scales. They are stories of the grotesque and the romantic, horror and beauty, demons and angels, because they are so varied, speckled with the very human characteristic of being multi-dimensional. No person is only their county, their race, their sexual identity, their ethnicity. Each person is all those things and one of a wide range: mother, father, son, daughter, orphan, widow, butcher, baker, candlestick maker.
My ancestors were more than black, more than enslaved, and more than three-fifths a person, and carried stories from much further back than 1776 or even 1619. How far back? I’ll never know. But I have thrown all my windows open. I wait and listen for its whispers to cross the ages on even the frailest whistles of wind and the thinnest rays of light, as old as the sun.
