Thursday, November 9, 2017

What our History Books Don't Teach Us

When we learn about the Civil War and Reconstruction in our American history classes, African-Americans are rarely afforded any agency. In these classes we learn to be patriotic, an easy task when you only learn the parts of American history where we "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" and fight for democracy. "How did we go from a small British colony to a leading world power?" The answer is multifaceted, but a big part of this growth came from slave labor. The exponential economic development throughout the 19th century was actually a direct result of slave labor, but of course that fact has been erased from our textbooks. African-Americans fought in both the Revolutionary and Civil wars, yet we rarely learn about black people during this time period as being anything other than slaves.

Toni Morrison counters this problematic narrative. Morrison gives her contemporary audiences insight into the African-American experience in Antebellum America. She provides us with extremely complex characters who display a full understanding of their situations. She shows us their agency, their emotional strength, but most importantly, their vulnerability. Toni Morrison gives African-Americans something that most of our history books fail to afford them: a chance to be more than just former slaves.

As someone who is very interested in American history and has studied it in depth, I am disappointed that there is so much missing in our traditional narrative. This being said, I am so glad we are reading this book. The perspectives and insights here are truly valuable, and I hope everyone takes a minute to question why we haven't heard them before.

5 comments:

  1. Yes! I totally agree! We have not heard enough stories from this point of view. There is such a difference between reading this book, full of rich and humanizing moments, and reading some dry excerpt from Eric Foner. I feel that my understanding of the slave experienced has gained more depth and grown more layers in the past couple weeks than in years of learning American History.

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  2. Yeah I agree with both of you. I have always found it problematic the generalization we as students are given towards the slave experience. Nothing we have learned through our American history lessons throughout the years have come close to Morrison's ability to illustrate an America that portrays a dense description of the slave narrative.

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  3. Yeah it's so true that we've been taught a white narrative of history since we were kids. It's been a long process of adding new narratives to the communal perception of American history and it will probably be ongoing for a long time or forever. Books like Beloved are so important for providing counter narratives to our history for students like us who've been mistaught all our lives.

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  5. It is interesting that you bring this up, because my APUSH class had an entire unit learning about slave agency. It is true that in many history classes, people are only taught one story that can leave a lot out and misinform students. I agree that Morrison does a great job at giving the audience a point of view from people who are not often given a voice. We learn, in our history classes, in such a general way. This book shows us that slavery and after is a unique experience to everybody, and that everyone reacts differently to their experience of slavery.

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