Our national heroes have rarely gone deep: white America prefers the illusion of a calm surface to the complicated truths of tumult churning below. We have created a culture than sanitizes history, infantilizes art, and dumbs-down politics and religion. The dominant culture of white America is now struggling to maintain our historic shallowness and appears ready to impose a 21st century fascism under the banner of "law and order" rather than change. To be sure, their are models of what true conversion, depth of soul, inward struggle, and humility look like - mostly but not exclusively from communities of color and feminism - but for many of us, those stories remain buried. Indeed, as a colleague recently wrote in an Op-Ed piece in the Hartford Currant: "I graduated from high school in 1975 along with the largest group of the baby boomers. From fourth grade through graduation, I attended multi-racial, city schools in Philadelphia and Bethlehem, Penn. In the 45 years since high school, I find myself continually amazed at what I wasn’t taught."
My lack of education had little to do with poor teachers (most of mine were quite good) or lack of books. Rather, my mis-education sprang from the completely Euro-centric perspective of the curriculum. Here’s a small sample of what I didn’t learn. The first books printed with metal movable type came from Korea, 200 years before Gutenberg in Europe. But I was taught that Gutenberg was the first to print with movable type. The first movable type actually came from China 400 years before Gutenberg. I learned almost no Asian history at all, unless it came attached to a European (Marco Polo or other European explorers).
My lack of education had little to do with poor teachers (most of mine were quite good) or lack of books. Rather, my mis-education sprang from the completely Euro-centric perspective of the curriculum. Here’s a small sample of what I didn’t learn. The first books printed with metal movable type came from Korea, 200 years before Gutenberg in Europe. But I was taught that Gutenberg was the first to print with movable type. The first movable type actually came from China 400 years before Gutenberg. I learned almost no Asian history at all, unless it came attached to a European (Marco Polo or other European explorers).
Anything about sub-Saharan Africa except that enslaved people came from there. I thought the only great civilizations on that continent were in Egypt. Yet much of Africa had vast empires, seats of learning, art and architecture to rival anything in Europe. Enslaved Africans came to North America before the Pilgrims. Yes, I knew Jamestown predated Plymouth, but, because of the mythologically huge Thanksgiving holiday, it always seemed the Pilgrims’ story meant the real beginning of “America.” I was not taught that enslaved Africans began building this country before the Mayflower even sailed. Speaking of Thanksgiving, I never learned that the native peoples of North and South America had huge cities. All those elementary school dioramas of long houses and tepees made it seem like the native population was small, impoverished and living in the woods. And I won’t even start on my education about native peoples in the west that came from all those Hollywood movies featuring white people in “red-face.”
Four books helped me begin to correct the omissions built into my bourgeois education. They were not perfect, and led to further explorations, but each made it clear that the company line I grew up with was both flawed and intentionally skewed away from the truth, the whole truth, the whole truth so help me God. They were:
+ Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown: I remember starting to read this in October 1970 while organizing for the Moratorium Conversation and Teach-In re: the Vietnam War. I knew my acculturation through the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Gunsmoke was incomplete and Wounded Knew began to show me what was missing.
+ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy by William Appleton Williams: I found this exploration of American empire in 1971 while studying at the University of North Carolina. His central thesis was that US control of international markets shaped our politics and foreign policy - including the Cold War - and rang true even 10 years after its initial publication. Williams opened the door for me to find Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd's, The Other Side, a report on encounters with North Vietnam in 1965; as well as Hayden's The Love of Possession is Like a Disease with Them, linking America's genocide of First Nation's people with the war in Vietnam.
+ Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody: The 1968 memoir of an African- American woman's struggles with racism and sexism in the Deep South. Moody's witness - and placement on open library stacks - helped me find Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful (anthology) and Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch.
+ Labor's Untold Story by Richard Boyer and Harold Morais: A brilliant synthesis of the working peoples' movement for safety, democracy and a living wage that was totally absent from any of my official studies. During the mid 70's when I was organizing with the United Farm Workers Union, this book was foundational. It led to Howard Zinn's, The People's History of the United States, and the democratic socialist analysis of Michael Harrington and James Weinstien's The Decline of Socialism in the US.
A few years back I stumbled upon Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbooks Got Wrong by James Loewen - and it knocked me out. It was more engaging and accurate than Zinn. The 70's and 80's were filled with texts like James Washington's anthology of MLK's works, Prophesy Deliverance by Cornel West, Black Theology by James Cone, a variety of Latin American liberation theologians including A Liberation Theology: Perspectives by Gustavo Guitierrez and Death by Bread Alone and Suffering by Dorotee Soelle.
Today, white Americans searching for ways to be engaged in our current struggle for the Beloved Community, are finding the closing words from Dr. Stackhouse's article to ring true: "To those of us shaped, or misshapen, by our limited educations, we need to remember that (this moment) means going back to school in a way, listening to voices long silenced and demeaned with a hope of seeing through a different lens. It means admitting that we don’t know what we don’t know. It means being clear on how that has shaped our perspective on the world, then opening our minds, hearts and spirits to what we have been missing all along."
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