Teaching Jim Crow, Lesson 1: Fall Semester 2023

Why Do We Study African-American History?

• We’re in a state of spiritual warfare.
• The war is spiritual; it’s not theoretical or intellectual theories and intelligence have a lot to do with this war.
• I don’t teach theories; I teach narratives because narratives are what move us. When I was a kid, Alex Haley's book-turned-into TV series Roots made us talk about African-American history during school recess. As a kid, reading biographies of African-American baseball players who lived in Jim Crow possessed my mind with American history. 
• Narratives are what move us. 
• The spiritual war today is about a clash of narratives and what these narratives say about people of color. There are racist trolls who live on various social media platforms. They say that people of color are the blame of all of society's ills--crime, immigration, unemployment, low wages, crumbling education, etc. On the other hand, there are the voices of real history that show people of color in a different light: For examples, we can look to Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and Hercules Posey who represent individual excellence, toughness in the face of brutal obstacles, dignity, and the struggle for justice. This clash of narratives defines the spiritual warfare we live in. 
• You won't find trolls having podcasts or posting on social media about Hercules Posey because he is the antithesis of the trolls' racist propaganda. 
• When it comes to African-American history, there is a clash of narratives, which has intensified since the advent of social media.
• There are authentic AA voices that give their history (Jordan Peele, Isabel Wilkerson, David Pilgrim, Donald Glover, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass) and there are troll voices that spread the misinformation of The Lost Cause ("slavery wasn't so bad"), Replacement Theory (white dominance is withering and must be met with grievance and rage), and Scapegoating (blame people of color for economy, jobs, inflation, immigration, education, and crime).
• We can say the Lost Cause, Replacement Theory, and Racial Scapegoating narratives exist deep on the social media grids. These narratives are sucking people into their rabbit holes at rapid speed and we are losing people to these false narratives. 
• Trolls using the Internet perpetuate these false narratives.
• The false narratives, racist memes, and tropes of today are nothing new to African-Americans. Many of my students have grandparents and great-grandparents who lived in the Jim Crow South. Their lives were immersed in these false narratives day and night. Many of my students’ families packed their bags, left the South, and moved to Los Angeles and other places in what has been called The Great Migration. 
• Like a recurring cancer, these Jim Crow narratives have returned because of trolls working in various social media platforms.
• There are troll voices that give false race narratives, which appeal to people with racist appetites. These trolls include SB, TC, AJ, QAnon, 4Chan, and the Proud Boys. 
• The trolls have normalized racism and false narratives about race. Successful politicians are friendly with these trolls and they are not canceled. Just the opposite is happening. They’re doing well. These politicians have a base hungry for racist narratives and racist dog whistles. 
• The spiritual warfare tends to be college educated on the side of authentic AA voices and the non-college educated on the troll voices.
• The spiritual warfare has gotten worse since social media scaled around 2009. 
• Since 2009, as the business model for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms makes money by sucking people into the rabbit holes of extremism, people’s brains have been hijacked by extremism and conspiracy doctrines while those same people have rejected legacy media and major institutions such as the CDC. These same people refer to the United States government as "the deep state."
• People with an appetite for troll narratives and conspiracy theories probably won't like Frederick Douglass' Narrative, Donald Glover's YouTube video "This Is America," or Jordan Peele's movie Get Out, which they will accuse of being an expressions of "Critical Race Theory."
• America is polarized with college-educated living in their information silos and the non-college educated living in their silos. The latter tend to gravitate toward SB, TC, AJ, QAnon, 4Chan, the Proud Boys, etc. Many of these trolls' followers have been arrested for their role in the January 6 Insurrection at the Capitol. 
• There are politicians, including state governors, who have outlawed the teaching of African-American history because they claim that such a history is part of a false doctrine called “Critical Race Theory” even when these very politicians push the same troll-driven narratives of The Lost Cause, Replacement Theory, and Racial Scapegoating. The Lost Cause rewrites slavery as "good thing"; Replacement Theory says that white people will no longer be the dominant race; Racial Scapegoating blames people of color for everything--the economy, inflation, education, jobs, immigration, crime, etc. 
• By studying African-American history in the context of authentic African-American voices on one hand and racist trolls on the other, we are taking part in today's spiritual warfare.

Essay #2: Why We Study Jim Crow as Part of American History (200 points)

The Assignment:

Addressing Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s essay "Who's Afraid of Black History?" and Dr. David Pilgrim’s video “The New Jim Crow Museum," Childish Gambino’s video “This Is America” and the Netflix documentary 13th, write a 1,200-word essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the argument that teaching about the history of systemic racism, slavery, and Jim Crow is not a radical agenda set forth by some professors to brainwash their students into a Woke ideology. Rather, such teaching is a powerful antidote to historical revisionism and weaponized misinformation designed to oppress the already oppressed, is a powerful part of developing empathy which makes for a better society, prevents us from repeating the mistakes and injustices of the past, addresses the historical connection between American racism and gun violence, and strengthens democracy for all people.  

Be sure to have an MLA Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 sources. 

Suggested Outline

Paragraph 1: Draw from Dr. David Pilgrim's video "The New Jim Crow Museum" and Childish Gambino's video "This Is America" to write an extended definition of Jim Crow.

Paragraph 2: Summarize Henry Louis Gates' essay. 

Paragraph 3: Write your thesis in which you defend, refute, or complicate the argument that teaching about the history of systemic racism, slavery, and Jim Crow is not a radical agenda set forth by some professors to brainwash their students into a Woke ideology. Rather, such teaching is a powerful antidote to historical revisionism and weaponized misinformation designed to oppress the already oppressed, is a powerful part of developing empathy which makes for a better society, prevents us from repeating the mistakes and injustices of the past, addresses the historical connection between American racism and gun violence, and strengthens democracy for all people.  

Paragraphs 4-7 are your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraph 8 is your counterargument-rebuttal. 

Paragraph 9 is your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your claim. 

 

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Building Block Assignment #1 for Jim Crow Essay

25 points

Paragraph 1: Draw from Dr. David Pilgrim's video "The New Jim Crow Museum" and Childish Gambino's video "This Is America" to write an extended definition of Jim Crow.

Paragraph 2: Summarize Henry Louis Gates' essay "Who's Afraid of Black History?"

***

Building Block Assignment #2 for Jim Crow Essay

25 points.

You will submit 2 paragraphs.

Paragraph 1: Submit your thesis paragraph: Write your thesis in which you defend, refute, or complicate the argument that teaching about the history of systemic racism, slavery, and Jim Crow is not a radical agenda set forth by some professors to brainwash their students into a Woke ideology. Rather, such teaching is a powerful antidote to historical revisionism and weaponized misinformation designed to oppress the already oppressed, is a powerful part of developing empathy which makes for a better society, prevents us from repeating the mistakes and injustices of the past, addresses the historical connection between American racism and gun violence, and strengthens democracy for all people.  

Paragraph 2: Submit your counterargument-rebuttal in which you anticipate your opponents' strongest argument against your thesis and you provide a rebuttal to their objection. 

***

CRT Vs. Narratives

Those who object to the teaching of African-American history are lumping this history with "Critical Race Theory." In fact, African-American history and CRT are different.

CRT is a collection of theories. African-American history is a series of true narratives. 

I prefer narratives to theories. People are moved more by narratives. 

When I was a kid in high school, we all talked about the protagonist played by LeVar Burton Kunta Kinte in the 1977 mini-series Roots, based on a book by Alex Haley.  The author based Kunta Kinte on one of his Gambian ancestors. 

As a 10-year-old, I read hundreds of biographies of African-American baseball players who lived through the Jim Crow era, and this was my introduction to American history. 

What is Critical Race Theory?

According to Stephen Sawchuk writing in Education Week:

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

***

Main criticisms of CRT:

 

• Inaccuracies about the Revolutionary War being about slavery
• Extreme picture of systemic racism so that there is a helpless underclass that is always the victim
• Rubbing white kids’ faces in the mud of their “oppressive and privileged ways.”
• Calling all the white kids in school evil for being white.
• Doing slavery re-enactments at school
• Indoctrinating students with "woke" academic clichés such as "systemic racism" over and over

 

Whatever the criticisms of CRT, we can still argue that there is a morally compelling reason to teach African-American history. 

What I wanted to do is show those who want to abolish the teaching of African-American history is that, taking aside CRT for a moment, we have morally compelling reasons to teach African-American history:

With Or Without CRT, African-American History Is Morally Compelling:

 

• To combat slavery deniers or downplayers who rewrite or "whitewash" history; in other words, teaching African-American history has to be looked at in the context of a history of slavery denial, which was expressed through The Lost Cause, a lie that states that "slavery wasn't that bad" and that whites who enslaved others were living a life of nobility. 
• To fight against Replacement Theory Trolls and social influencers who exist on social media platforms
• Too many of us take freedom and democracy for granted. We don’t appreciate them until they’re taken away. Because black people were denied freedom, justice, and democratic rights to the merciless extreme, they were in a position to aspire to these human rights and articulate these rights with greater power than those who take these things for granted. We are hard pressed to find more powerful voices about freedom and justice than from the words of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. 
• To refute the offensive practice of venerating the Lost Cause Trolls and champions of slavery who festoon cities in the form of statues, Confederate flags, and schools named after the founder of the Confederacy and apologist for the evils of slavery, Jefferson Davis. America is the only country that venerates racist figures from its past and has made this practice "normal" when it's not normal. Germany doesn't have "Hitler College."
• To understand that the African-American heroes who struggled in the face of slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights have a true place in American history and they should not be erased by opportunistic race-baiting politicians.
• To acknowledge that African-American heroes such as Frederick Douglass provide moral instruction, inspiration, and role models of excellence for all of us. 
• To acknowledge that society’s sins can be a form of moral instruction and moral reform. (For example, Germany confronted its Nazi past and has not Hitler statues).   

For this unit, I am teaching ZERO Critical Race Theory. Rather, I am teaching racism and Jim Crow from African Americans' point of views, not mine and not from any "theory."  

• Professor David Pilgrim
• Donald Glover, AKA Childish Gambino
• Jordan Peele
• Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
• Frederick Douglass
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 
• Michael Harriot

What I didn't learn from these African-American voices was "Critical Race Theory," which throws a lot of academic words about systemic racism and America as a great evil--so evil in fact that it is beyond redemption.

What I did learn from these African-American voices and others is the following:

Black history is not about self-pity or victimization; it's about genius, resistance, innovation, and heroism.

Black history is not about the White Savior bringing good tidings to the black people; it's about self-reliance and individual heroism. 

Black history is not about stereotypes or sentimentality; it's about a dialogue between conflicting voices and toughness in the face of evil. 

Black history is not about giving up or surrendering to evil; it's about finding solutions and making a path for others. 

***

A Defense of Teaching African-American History from Black AF History by Michael Harriot

Rebuttal of America’s Mythical Counterfeit History

In his book Black AF History, Michael Harriot writes that American history needs black voices to rebut America’s mythical counterfeit history, “a fable that erases the reflection of an entire people to ensure that the mythology of the heroes lives happily ever after.” In other words, Harriot argues that mythology of America’s innocence erases black history. He calls this a “whitewashing.” To erase a history is to erase its people and to perpetuate the very oppression that has afflicted the very same people.

Michael Harriot makes it clear that he loves America. He compares America to his house. If his roof is leaking and he diagnoses and fixes the problem, he does not hate his house. He addresses his home’s problems out of love. 

 

Understanding White Settlers’ Dependence on Others Helps Us Understand the American Slavery Origin Story

According to historian Michael Harriot, the white settlers who came to America were clueless about what to do with the land, how to build societies, and how to feed themselves. 

The Jamestown settlers came from England; they couldn’t get “seed money” from the Catholic Church like Spain and Portugal, so they sailed to America to colonize. Their first four attempts failed “because of disease, lack of food, lack of navigation skills, and the inability to convince the natives of English superiority.” But this was impossible because the white settlers didn’t know how to grow crops and feed themselves. Unable to feed themselves, they relied on native Americans and slaves from Africa to eat. This is not a glorious chapter in American history. To add to this inglorious chapter, the British came to America for freedom, but they did not value freedom for the people they enslaved. In other words, they were two-faced. Their freedom quest and claim of religious piety were both hollow and hypocritical.

By July 1619, the white settlers in Jamestown were about ready to give up. They still couldn’t feed themselves, they had found no gold, and they had no prospects for success.  

But in October of that year, Englishmen headed by James Rolfe raided a Spanish slave ship and brought a little over 20 slaves to Virginia. Less than a year later, the English kidnapped slaves from ships and had thirty-two slaves. The English relied on more and more slaves to build their colony. Just when they were going to give up and head back to England, they relied on slave labor to stay in America. 

South Carolina gives us a unique perspective on African-American skills regarding food. Throughout the country during slavery, most slave plantations had more men than women, but in South Carolina the ratio was one to one because African women, especially those from Ghana and Gambia, were skilled in agriculture. In South Carolina, there were vast rice plantations, which were famous for “Carolina Gold,” a golden rice and was a commercial crop until 1927. It is still grown in certain parts of South Carolina. 

***

Wholesome Pilgrim Myth

Why is it important to replace the myth of peaceful pilgrims coming to America, trading their goods with the indigenous Americans, and using their ingenuity and self-reliance to create a great America?

Number one, the narrative is false. Number two, by embracing this Wholesome Pilgrim Myth and whitewashing slavery, we give implicit acceptance to the human violations that ensued and this kind of acceptance is morally abhorrent. 

We are morally obliged to be accurate in our historical accounts and to have an appropriate moral perspective on those accounts. We can do so without being “woke” or referring to “Critical Race Theory.”

Review Essay Outline

Suggested Outline

Paragraph 1: Draw from Dr. David Pilgrim's video "The New Jim Crow Museum" and Childish Gambino's video "This Is America" to write an extended definition of Jim Crow.

Paragraph 2: Summarize Henry Louis Gates' essay. 

Paragraph 3: Write your thesis in which you defend, refute, or complicate the argument that teaching about the history of systemic racism, slavery, and Jim Crow is not a radical agenda set forth by some professors to brainwash their students into a Woke ideology. Rather, such teaching is a powerful antidote to historical revisionism and weaponized misinformation designed to oppress the already oppressed, is a powerful part of developing empathy which makes for a better society, prevents us from repeating the mistakes and injustices of the past, addresses the historical connection between American racism and gun violence, and strengthens democracy for all people.  

Paragraphs 4-7 are your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraph 8 is your counterargument-rebuttal. 

Paragraph 9 is your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your claim. 

Teaching African-American History to Fight Trolls

In today’s political polarization and troll culture, there is a popular thought propagated by political opportunists that teaching about racism, slavery, and Jim Crow in all its forms is Critical Race Theory: radical indoctrination into the wrong-headed belief that America is a hellscape and the CRT minions are obsessed with rubbing our faces in the racist stains of American history.

Such a grotesque oversimplification and caricature of what it means to teach racism is a Straw Man, a misrepresentation of the aims of teaching racism in a classroom. For example, for the last decade in my college composition class, we have a unit on Jim Crow.

I do not teach Jim Crow to rub people’s faces with exaggerated notions of America’s original sin or to promote some radical political agenda. I teach Jim Crow as a countervailing measure to the revisionist mythologies that replace its real history. Such revisionism leads to immoral acts. For example, the revisionist history of The Lost Cause, which outlandishly claims slavery was a good thing, results in over 200 public schools being named after America's worst racist Jefferson Davis, and today revisionism has caused millions of Americans to praise the criminals involved with the January 6 Insurrection as "American Patriots." I teach Jim Crow because the racist ideas that fueled Jim Crow are alive today in the form of social media white nationalists who are spreading weaponized misinformation. I teach Jim Crow because Jim Crow gave inspiration and instruction to racists throughout the world, for example, Hitler learned segregation techniques from America’s Confederacy creator Jefferson Davis. Finally, I teach Jim Crow because a moral inventory is essential for society’s moral reform, a process that the post-World War II Germans have successfully done in a form of soul-searching and atonement for the sins of the past, a process they call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. 

Trolls

• Weaponize misinformation
• Have no moral bottom
• Take delight in cruelty toward others
• Are blindly loyal to their racial or some other tribe
• They violate all laws of critical thinking
• They violate all laws of decency
• The creators of slavery and Jim Crow were America's first trolls. They are making a comeback. 

America's first trolls were defenders of slavery and Jim Crow.

• They engaged in historical revisionism, denying the atrocities of slavery and arguing that the Civil War was due to "Northern aggression" and "state rights."
• They gaslighted the oppressed, saying they were happy to be enslaved.
• They relied on pseudo-science to create a racial hierarchy. 
• They relied on Jefferson Davis' racist manifesto to justify slavery. To this day Jefferson Davis' name is on over 200 public schools. 
• They weaponized racist propaganda in an attempt to dehumanize African-Americans with millions of Jim Crow images. 

Why do we study Jim Crow?

• To resist the rewriting of history, which is designed to oppress the very people who suffered under Jim Crow.
• Because rewriting history is morally abhorrent and always has malevolent designs. 
• Because people are still rewriting history with malevolent intent today.
• Because the racist ideas that fuel Jim Crow are alive today in an international cult of white nationalists who are dedicated to using social media to spread weaponized misinformation.
• Because denying representation and silencing voices is morally bankrupt and denies us the truth about ourselves and about people who have been historically oppressed. 
• Because Jim Crow gave inspiration and instruction to racists throughout the world, for example, Hitler learned segregation techniques from America’s Confederacy creator Jefferson Davis. 
• Because a moral inventory is essential for society’s moral reform, a process that the Germans have successfully done in the aftermath of World War II. 
• Historical revisionism kills democracy and inverts morality. For example, the revisionist history of The Lost Cause results in over 200 public schools being named after America's worst racist Jefferson Davis, and millions of Americans praise the criminals involved with the January 6 Insurrection as "American Patriots."
• Because Jim Crow is built on troll culture and we need to build a society on critical thinking culture.

 

Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil By Susan Neiman

I’ve been teaching a unit about Jim Crow in my college writing class for the last 10 years. The recent hysteria about CRT has forced me to look closely at why I teach a unit about American racism. 

It seems one can teach American racism in four ways: 

• American exceptionalism, in which racism is minimized as a mere hiccup in America’s grand narrative
• The Lost Cause is the most grotesque perversion of history in which resentful losers of the Civil War cast slavery and Jim Crow as a virtue in which everyone knows their place.
• Radical Fatalism in which the original sin of racism is so egregious that America is an irredeemable hellscape.
• Struggle for Redemption in which we acknowledge our sins of racism and our accomplishments and struggle to find atonement within our country’s contradictions. Working off the past or the struggle to overcome the past is a long word in German: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. 

What is the word?

Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Struggle to overcome the past

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung

I choose the latter category as the only moral and instructive way I can teach a course about American racism. 

See the New Yorker essay by Lizzie Widdicombe: “What Can We Learn from the Germans About Confronting Our History?

Widdicombe writes:

Neiman, an American who directs the Einstein Forum, a public think tank outside of Berlin, has recently published a book, “Learning from the Germans,” that makes the case for an American version of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, a word that she translates as “working off the past,” which refers to the decades-long process through which Germany has come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust. Today, the country isn’t free from racism and anti-Semitism, as the recent attack on a synagogue in Halle showed, but its culture and politics remain deeply informed by its history. All of the arts, including TV and film, regularly refer to and treat Nazi history. And the country pauses to perform what Neiman calls “public rites of repentance” around events such as the liberation of Auschwitz, Kristallnacht, and the end of the war. Then there’s the iconography: the Holocaust Memorial sits at the center of a reunified Berlin. There are also the famous “stumbling stones”—small brass plaques placed throughout the city to mark where Jews and other victims of the Nazis last lived, before they were deported. By comparison, she writes, “Imagine a monument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall. Suppose you could walk down a New York street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labor.”

The lesson for Americans—particularly those involved in racial-justice work—is that “Nobody wants to look at the dark sides of their history,” she said. “It’s like finding out that your parents did something really horrible. There’s always going to be resistance. It’s normal, and it’s something we should expect.” So what made the Germans change? Neiman writes about a number of historical factors, but the most important, in her opinion, was “civil engagement” by the German public, beginning in the nineteen-sixties. A new generation came of age. “They realized that their parents and teachers had been Nazis, or at least complicit in Nazi atrocities, and were outraged,” she said. A small and often controversial vanguard insisted on digging up history that older generations had refused to discuss. People called them Nestbeschmützer, or “nest-foulers.” But the process they set in motion—a process of uncovering the past and talking about it—eventually reverberated throughout German society.

Her final lesson was about balance. She brought up a charge recently made by conservative critics of the Times’ 1619 Project, which commemorates slavery: that focussing on the worst parts of a nation’s history is depressing and, worse, delegitimizing. “They complained about it in Germany as much as Newt Gingrich and company are complaining about it now—‘It’s going to tear the social fabric, and we won’t have a national identity anymore! People won’t have anything to celebrate!’ ” There’s some truth there, she said. When planning monuments, “I think it’s really important that it not just be sites of horror, that we also remember heroes.” Is this to make us feel better about ourselves? “Yes,” she said. “I make this analogy which may seem a bit hokey: having a grownup relationship to your history is like having a grownup relationship to your parents. As a kid, you believe everything they tell you. As an adolescent, you may be inclined to reject everything. But having a grownup view involves sifting through with some distance, and saying, ‘O.K., I’m glad that my mother had those values, and that’s what I’m going to pass on to my kids. Not the other stuff.’ ” She mentioned a few of her own heroes: Sojourner Truth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Brown and Harriet Tubman, Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson. She said, “It’s like being orphaned if you can’t say, ‘No, there are people, and not a few of them, in my nation’s history whom I really admire.’ ”

***

After World War II and the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis, German went through a soul-search process, acknowledged their collaboration with evil forces, and made a concerted effort to work away their sins. 

Working off the past or the struggle to overcome the past is a long word in German: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. 

We cannot overcome the past unless we acknowledge it. Denial of the past causes the past evils to perpetuate. 

To acknowledge evil from our own tribe goes against human instinct. Evil is “out there performed by The Others, but it’s not us.” Such an impulse makes acknowledgment of evil within the tribe very difficult. 

Today in the South, many southerners won’t acknowledge that the South committed sedition and insurrection to defend the evil practice of slavery. There is a different narrative: “The South fought Nothern aggression and defended state rights.”

In post-World War II Germany, there was initial resistance to the acknowledgment of past sins. We read in The Guardian from Alex Clark:

Neiman does not stint on impressing on her readers the details of number one, drawing on a vast body of interviews – half, she estimates, didn’t even make it into the book – to explore how long history’s tail is. It is too easy, she argues, to believe that as soon as the second world war ended, Germany set about the process of atoning for its crimes. It simply isn’t so: after all, 10% of the country’s population had been members of the Nazi party, “and the most shocking, but also important thing, is they were not the uneducated masses. The majority had academic degrees. We like to think that education provides immunity to racist and fascist ideology. And it doesn’t.”

What, then, heralded the start of Germans en masse beginning to face the past? Although some of it can be explained generationally, she replies, as people died off, “that won’t do the trick, as we’ve seen in the United States. And as we’ve seen in Britain where, you know, time has gone by, and people like falling back on national myths of greatness.” In part, she believes the Auschwitz trials marked a moment of change in which the burgeoning of mass travel connected ordinary Germans with other worldviews and there was an emergence of books by Holocaust survivors. She also notes the importance of 1968, “a moment for confronting parents and teachers … and there was a sense of a sudden real wave of disgust and rebellion: what have you done?”

Neiman is also at pains to point out that this work was done more quickly and more effectively in East Germany – much of which went unnoticed because of the relentless focus on West German attempts at rehabilitation. “Whenever you say anything good about East Germany,” she says, “immediately somebody jumps up and says, ‘My God, you’re a Stalinist … ’ I’m not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did. On every level: in terms of bringing old Nazis to trial, in terms of teaching the period in schools, in terms of building monuments, and restoring concentration camps and making them educational.” Meanwhile, the west was so busy fighting a new conflict – “old Nazis were the best people to fight the cold war” – that efforts at serious denazification went by the board.

As one might expect from a philosopher – especially one who has side-stepped the academy to work across disciplines – Neiman is fascinating and potent on how the Holocaust has functioned on multiple planes, and primarily as an example of pure evil that, by consequence, allows other societies to divert attention from their own misdeeds. “Nothing else even comes close to it. And if you haven’t done that, well, then you’re doing fairly well … you know, it’s as if we would like to have a large black hole that says, this is where you put evil and we don’t have to look at it.”

She has, she says, been shocked by the lack of knowledge in Britain about the Nazi period, which naturally leads us into a conversation about the fondness of rightwing politicians for invoking the glories of the war, “this nostalgia for the empire that you see all over the place with Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg and I suppose Boris Johnson too ... As if the empire really was a wonderful thing, as if it brought nothing but civilisation to the rest of the world.”

***

In the New York Times review of Neiman’s book by Deborah E. Lipstadt, we read:

For two decades after World War II, Germany — East and West – practiced “moral myopia.” Communist East Germany claimed that since it was a postwar antifascist state and all the former Nazis were in West Germany (they were not), it bore no responsibility for genocide. West Germans, in Neiman’s words, “from dogcatcher to diplomat,” falsely insisted that only the Third Reich’s leadership knew of the mass murder. “Our men were gallant fighters, not criminals,” one German told her. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer appointed former Nazis to some of the government’s highest jobs, thus telegraphing the message that, on a personal level, all was forgiven. Even the reparation process, Neiman says, was “meanspirited and arduous.” Auschwitz survivors received a smaller pension than former SS guards and their widows. Simply put, Germans, East and West, refused to articulate the words: I was guilty.

What changed? In the late 1960s West German children and grandchildren of Nazis began to struggle with their families’ crimes. Having watched the televised Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, and inspired by student protests sweeping Europe, young Germans demanded an honest account of past wrongs. That confrontation with history, while hardly complete and now under attack from right-wing forces, remains far more extensive and honest, Neiman says, than anything that occurred in the United States regarding slavery and discrimination.

Born and raised in the South, Neiman moved from Berlin to Mississippi to research this fascinating book. She actively sought people and institutions engaged in “remembering.” She found eerie similarities between the response of the first generations of postwar Germans to their evil past and the response of many Americans, particularly Southerners, to theirs. Many of her Southern informants echoed Germany’s post-World War II mantra. Nobody was in the slave business. Southerners just bought what Northern ship captains sold them. Slavery was unconnected to the Civil War. The conflict was all about taxes.

Neiman notes that while Germany’s past no longer immunizes it against resurgent nationalism and anti-Semitism, there is in the heart of Berlin a memorial to the six million Jews murdered by Germans. “A nation that erects a monument of shame for the evils of its history in its most prominent space is a nation that is not afraid to confront its own failures.” While a museum dedicated to the African-American experience has opened in the heart of Washington, recent expressions of racism not just from the highest office in this land but also from many politicians, pundits and ordinary people suggest that America’s confrontation with its legacy of slavery and racial hatred is far from complete.

Many Americans, in the South and the North, insist that Confederate monuments are historical artifacts that simply honor the region’s history and its loyal defenders. They ignore the fact that most were built 50 years after the war, when the children of the Confederacy were creating the myth of a noble lost cause. Others were erected during the 1960s in protest of the civil rights movement.

What Is Jim Crow 1.0?

Jim Crow was born of white southern resentment to losing the Civil War, losing slavery, and being told by the northerners that their way of life was evil. 

Full of resentment, white southerners scapegoated black people by crushing them with a series of cruel and often ridiculous laws that were enforced by violence. These oppressive laws in the words of Isabel Wilkerson constituted a “feudal caste system” with the privileged and servant classes. 

Jim Crow was a sneaky way white southerners brought back slavery “off the books” by making black people subject to violence and exploitation with no protection from the law. In other words, slavery was illegal but Jim Crow brought it back under another name. 

In other words, the Civil War did not end slavery; it merely shifted slavery into another form called Jim Crow. This shift is chronicled in Douglas A. Blackman’s book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. 

Perhaps the best book ever written about Jim Crow from the point of view of African Americans is Isabel Wilkerson’s award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration in which six million African Americans fled the south to escape Jim Crow.

Wilkerson interviewed over 1,000 black Americans who lived in the terror of Jim Crow and fled for their lives to the Northern and Western states between 1915 and 1970. 

Over six decades, six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow south not knowing what was in store for them. By the end of the Great Migration, almost half of all the black Americans in the south were gone. They had no job, no place to live, no assurance of the means to survive, but they went anyway.

That should tell us just how bad Jim Crow was. “I don’t know what’s in store for me, but I’m getting the hell out.” Jim Crow was a 24/7 Torture Chamber. 

All they knew was one thing: Whatever they faced, it couldn’t be worse than living in the Jim Crow states. 

Characteristics of Jim Crow

One. Jim Crow didn’t allow black people to flourish.

In 1953, a black doctor Robert Joseph Pershing Foster got out of Monroe, Louisiana, and headed for California. Why? Because even though he was qualified in the highest medical procedures, the whites wouldn’t let him practice surgery. 

In the Jim Crow south, whites didn’t like to grant any rights to blacks that suggested that blacks were equal to them. Allowing a black man to practice surgery was just too much for the whites to bear. The mere suggestion that blacks were talented and intelligent was a scandal to white southerners and a threat to their carefully curated racist paradigm, so Dr. Foster got in his car and headed for California. 

Two. Jim Crow was a living hell.

Jim Crow was so hellish that it created The Great Migration, the greatest migration ever recorded in America, a migration that far exceeded the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, and yet the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkonson points out, is underreported. Not much is known about a migration that completely changed America, sending black people to urban cities in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities. 

Three. Jim Crow was a danger to black lives.

Isabel Wilkinson makes an astute observation: A lot of black people that we know about would not have existed except that their parents got out of the deadly Jim Crow south. She points out that James Baldwin, Michelle Obama, Miles Davis, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Denzel Washington were “all products of the Great Migration” and might not exist but for the fact that their parents fled for their lives. 

Four. Jim Crow celebrated the myth of The Lost Cause.

The Lost Cause is a re-imagining of slavery as “a good thing” in which slave owners and slaves were happy in a bucolic paradise where whites and blacks “knew their place” and were blessed by God. Such heinous chicanery was embraced by the United Daughters of the Confederacy who published propaganda books to brainwash children in the Jim Crow public schools. 

The myth of the Lost Cause is so strong that to this day the great military heroes of the North who brought an end to slavery--Ulysses Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George Henry Thoms, David Farragut are to this day hated and reviled in the south. 

Five. Jim Crow is a stain on American History that America has tried to sweep under the carpet.

Wilkinson understood that you couldn’t really understand the hell of Jim Crow unless you saw how black people reacted to it: Fleeing for their lives in a mass migration. She was astonished that before her book virtually nothing was written about the mass escape from Jim Crow. It’s as if historians are too ashamed of this chapter or not interested in it. Wilkinson has remedied that by writing a 550-page masterpiece about the subject. 

Six. Jim Crow’s tentacles reached into the smallest areas of black lives to create daily humiliations. Here are some:

• Black children had to learn in separate schoolhouses, always rundown with no resources.
• Black people had to sit in filthy waiting rooms at doctors’ offices while whites enjoyed clean waiting rooms.
• When black people walked opposite direction a white person on the sidewalk, the black people had to step off the sidewalk and walk on the curb.
• Black people had to give all the good parking spaces to white people. Whites parked close to stores. Blacks parked far away.
• No matter how slowly a white driver was going in a car, a black driver was never allowed to pass the white person’s car. 
• When a white person was at fault for a car accident involving a black driver, the fault always was assigned to the black driver. “You’re black so it’s your fault.”
• Blacks and whites couldn’t play chess or checkers together because such a game suggested they were equal.

Seven. Jim Crow violated the Consitution.

As Wilkinson writes: “The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870, which guaranteed all men the right to vote” (38). 

The North tried to grant rights to blacks in the south, but by the mid-1870s, Wilkinson observes, the North bailed on the south and stopped their oversight. 

Eight. Hostility towards blacks in the South was so acute that white politicians who fomented racism against blacks enjoyed popularity, which they leveraged for self-gain. 

When political leaders spoke of black people deserving violence, the white masses saw this as “open season” to commit any violence they wanted against blacks with impunity.

Nine. Lynchings of black people became an epidemic that was normalized and glorified by white southerners. 

In one of the most painful chapters to read in Wilkinson’s book, we read that a black man who was merely accused of looking at a white woman would be lynched. Petty crimes were always worthy of a lynching. 

These lynchings, which included beatings, hangings, and being burned alive, were watched by “festive crowds” who brought their children and let their toddlers sit on their shoulders to enjoy the spectacle. 

I’m reading this, and I’m thinking I’d be part of the Great Migration myself. I would be urgent to leave the south. 

How frequent were these lynchings?

Wilkinson writes: “Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching.”

According to Dr. David Pilgrim, there were 4,730 lynchings that we know about but no doubt many more. 

 

Jim Crow 1.0 and 2.0 First Lesson

Teaching Jim Crow Is the Counter Response to the American Myth of Disneyland Innocence

When I grew up and went to public schools in the 1960s and 1970s, I received what you might call the American Mytho of Disneyland Innocence. 

In this Innocence Narrative, slavery was given a tiny paragraph in the history textbook and treated like a hiccup in the narrative. Once the hiccup ended, America was back on track with Disneyland innocence. Equality, freedom, and justice defined the American scene for all Americans.  

This same Innocence narrative informed the history of the pilgrims and the American settlers.

Christopher Columbus was portrayed as a hero who “discovered” America and was worthy of our admiration. The atrocities he committed against indigenous peoples, including severing the limbs of children, were never addressed because these atrocities would violate the myth of American innocence.

Likewise, the pilgrims and settlers were portrayed as benign travelers who shared cultural good with the native Americans and celebrated a Kumbaya moment. 

As a ten-year-old child in the fifth grade, I assumed the Myth of Innocence to be true. 

Then something happened that pulled the curtains apart and revealed the real America, an America that did not resemble the Disneyland innocence inculcated into me since my days in kindergarten.

As a fifth-grader, I was obsessed with baseball, and I read every baseball biography I could get my hands on. I’d either find baseball player biographies at the library or buy them from Scholastic Books, a mail-order program offered at my public schools. 

A lot of the biographies I read were about African American baseball players, many who played Minor and Major League baseball in the Jim Crow South during the 1950s. Here is what I learned:

 

• Henry Aaron’s wife and other black players’ wives could not sit in the bleachers with the white baseball players’ wives. She had to sit isolated in a section for people of color. 
• Black players could not eat in restaurants with the white players.
• Often, white players would buy food from the restaurant, scurry out of a back door and chow their grub in a back alley inside a car.
• Black players could not ride the trains with the white players.
• Black players could not sleep in the same hotels as white players.
• Black players had to be five times better than white players to get a full-time position. 
• Great black players were resented by white players and white fans because their greatness violated the Myth of White Supremacy. 

As I read about these Jim Crow humiliations, it occurred to me that what my public school was teaching me about America as a place of Disneyland Innocence was a lie. 

As I read about these Jim Crow humiliations, it occurred to me that white supremacy was used against other people of color, including Asians. 

I started thinking of my favorite TV show at the time, Kung Fu, starring David Carradine who played Caine, a Shaolin monk who travels through America’s Wild West in search of his half-brother, and along the way, he was subjected to racist taunts and violence. After reading about the black baseball players being humiliated by Jim Crow, I looked at Cain’s struggles from a broader perspective. 

White supremacy was a systemic disease brought on by deliberate doctrine. Only later would I learn that this odious doctrine was largely created by the founder of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who as I write this, is venerated as a hero by having over 200 public schools in the South named after him.  

I was only ten years old. I was no expert on human relations, no psychologist, no professor, but I knew what I was reading about was my heroes being abused, and this abuse was a refutation of the lie of American Innocence. Several thoughts swirled in my mind:

 

• What the African American players were facing was abuse: mental and physical abuse and this abuse did not square with the America my school was teaching me about. 
• Their abuse was sanctioned and supported by the southern state governments in policies that were made by legal decree, a contradiction of a country that was supposed to be fair, just, and equal.
• The white people committing the abuses were exceedingly pleased with themselves and committed their acts of degradation with absolutely no shame or moral compunction. This told me their behavior had been normalized by some code that needed to be revealed, a code that I would later learn was the code of Jim Crow. 
• My schools withheld this information from me and were complicit in propagating the lie of American innocence and therefore my schools could not be trusted. 
• Either the public school system committed the lie of Innocence through incompetence or deliberate deceit, but it did not matter: Their lie made them worthy of contempt. 
• As a ten-year-old boy, I learned I was going to have to read on my own if I were going to learn the truth about various subjects, not the least of which was America’s original sin of slavery and Jim Crow. 
• I often wondered that if I did not love baseball so much and love Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Lou Brock, Larry Doby, Curt Flood, and others, I may have never had such a personal experience with Jim Crow, and I may have grown up brainwashed by the Disneyland of Innocence. 

 

Lesson for Henry Louis Gates’ Essay “Who’s Afraid of Black History”

One. What are Ron DeSantis and others’ objections to teaching African-American history in school?

DeSantis is making the claim that African-American history doesn’t focus on facts but is rather concerned with an agenda of “indoctrination.” This doctrine, according to DeSantis, says America is bad, racism is so severe and systemic that only reparations can begin to solve it, and anyone who doesn’t agree with this doctrine is a racist. 

While some adhere to this doctrine, many teachers who present African-American history in their classes are not attaching such a doctrine; nevertheless, these teachers are being reprimanded, canceled, and having their books and teaching content banned in class.

To lump all teachers together in one extreme doctrine is inaccurate and by twisting what they’re teaching, their critics are committing a Straw Man Fallacy in argumentation: twisting one’s words to make that person easy for attack. 

***

Gates points out the hypocrisy of DeSantis making a claim of teachers imposing a doctrine on their students when in fact DeSantis is an apologist for racism, The Lost Cause, and erasing Black History, which is a doctrine in its own right. In fact, DeSantis got himself in trouble when he said slavery wasn’t all bad and actually benefited African-Americans.

It is a great irony that DeSantis wants people to teach facts and stay away from doctrines when he himself pushes the false facts that slavery benefited African-Americans as part of his anti-woke agenda. 

Gates concedes that education indoctrinates us but he uses different language. He argues that in schools “we learn how to become citizens, that we encounter the first civics lessons that either reinforce or counter the myths and fables we gleaned at home.”

He further counters that we do indeed learn facts about African-American history. We learn about the following:

• Slavery
• The Civil War
• Reconstruction
• The Confederacy’s “Redemption” followed by Jim Crow segregation
• The Lost Cause Myth
• The Great Migration

The above are all facts about the black struggle in American history. Why does the teaching of this history have to be part of some pernicious anti-American doctrine?

Gates finishes his essay by observing the long history of trying to erase and demonize Black history. He writes:

Is it fair to see Governor DeSantis’s attempts to police the contents of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African American studies in classrooms in Florida solely as little more than a contemporary version of Mildred Rutherford’s Lost Cause textbook campaign? No. But the governor would do well to consider the company that he is keeping. And let’s just say that he, no expert in African American history, seems to be gleefully embarked on an effort to censor scholarship about the complexities of the Black past with a determination reminiscent of Rutherford’s. While most certainly not embracing her cause, Mr. DeSantis is complicitous in perpetuating her agenda.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Addressing these “ravages,” and finding solutions to them — a process that can and should begin in the classroom — can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum, a process in which Black thinkers themselves have been engaged since the earliest years of our Republic.

Throughout Black history, there has been a long, sad and often nasty tradition of attempts to censor popular art forms, from the characterization of the blues, ragtime and jazz as “the devil’s music” by guardians of “the politics of respectability,” to efforts to censor hip-hop by C. Delores Tucker, who led a campaign to ban gangsta rap music in the 1990s. Hip-hop has been an equal opportunity offender for potential censors: Mark Wichner, the deputy sheriff of Florida’s Broward County, brought 2 Live Crew up on obscenity charges in 1990. But there is a crucial difference between Ms. Tucker, best known as a civil rights activist, and Mr. Wichner, an administrator of justice on behalf of the state, a difference similar to that between Rutherford and Mr. DeSantis.

While the urge to censor art — a symbolic form of vigilante policing — is colorblind, there is no equivalence between governmental censorship and the would-be censorship of moral crusaders. Many states are following Florida’s lead in seeking to bar discussions of race and history in classrooms. The distinction between Mildred Lewis Rutherford and Governor DeSantis? The power differential.

Rutherford wished for nothing less than the power to summon the apparatus of the state to impose her strictures on our country’s narrative about the history of race and racism. Mr. DeSantis has that power and has shown his willingness to use it. And it is against this misguided display of power that those of us who cherish the freedom of inquiry at the heart of our country’s educational ideal must take a stand.