English professor uses literature to help cure historical amnesia

I'm an English professor because I love to help students probe the texture of a masterfully crafted image or the gnarly complexity of a brilliant sentence; because I cherish those moments when a student’s face registers that an epiphany has just landed. But increasingly, I value teaching literature because of what it can do for the future of the past.

We live in a nation plagued by historical amnesia, by a tendency to sanitize troubling chapters of the past. Ironies that should be front and center in our national memory are often airbrushed out of the history books in our nation’s classrooms — like the fact that America was "founded" by genocidal robbers on land stolen from the people who were there before them. Or that we are a nation established by slaveholders on principles of individual liberty. Or that after the Civil War, America effectively re-enslaved the freed slaves for the next hundred years through sharecropping, lynching, and the convict-lease system.

Facts like those are difficult to reconcile with the idealized view of the past favored by the Texas State Board of Education. Because that body approves textbooks statewide in the second-largest textbook market in the country, publishers cater to its likely reactions before they go to press. Recently a Texan named Roni Dean-Burren complained about the "Patterns of Immigration" section in her son’s textbook. It noted that "The Atlantic Slave Trade … brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations," suggesting that her ancestors had come to the United States willingly and had been paid for their labor.

The approved social-studies and American-history textbooks that five million Texas students began using this past fall were based on state guidelines that play down the role of slavery in sparking the Civil War, and fail to mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws. To avoid offending statewide textbook-adoption panels in almost all Southern states, publishers regularly whitewash America’s past.

In a course I co-taught last fall to Stanford freshmen, "Race and American Memory," four students designed a final project that juxtaposed passages from textbooks used in Texas high schools with passages we’d read by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, undercutting the textbooks’ glib distortions about slavery with the words of writers who bore witness to slavery themselves.

If textbooks mention lynching at all, it is most often in the form of statistics that lie flat and affectless on the page. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s story "The Lynching of Jube Benson" takes students inside the head of a man whose judgment was so distorted by racial stereotypes that he found himself lynching a man he had thought of as a friend. Dunbar’s story "The Tragedy at Three Forks," about a jealous white woman who first commits arson to hurt a rival and then allows two innocent black men to be lynched for her act, provides another perspective on the history of a crime so common that for decades the New York office of the NAACP hung a banner from its window announcing "a man was lynched today."

Literature can help us hear voices from the past that were silenced. ...