Dec 30, 2004
Cary Christian School Bru ha ha.
It appears that Cary Christian School in North Carolina is getting some bad press for having used a short text entitled “Southern Slavery, as it Was” (by Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson) as part of the school’s curriculum. In light of the attention, the school has dropped the text. An on-line version of the pamphlet can be found here. You can also view some erudite comments on the issue here on HNN via William Ramsey.
For those familiar with the apologist or “redeemer” schools of southern historiography, there is nothing particularly new in the text. In a nutshell, “Southern Slavery” portrays slaveowners as kindly, slaves as happy, and everybody as way better off during slavery. Perhaps the biggest zinger in the text is when it allows that slavery in the South does actually deserve some condemnation. “The truth is, Southern slavery is open to criticism because it did not follow the biblical pattern at every point. Some of the state laws regulating slavery could not be defended biblically (the laws forbidding the teaching of reading and writing, for example).” Ohhh... I see. BIBLICAL slavery is fine, it’s that nasty UNBIBLICAL slavery that’s the problem.
What is always saddening, of course, is to find out that something as painful as this is being utilized in a classroom somewhere. However, I have to say that I’m not terribly surprised. When I was living in North Carolina and teaching at Livingstone College it was not unusual for me to meet folks who were eager to engage a white teacher of African-American history in an argument about the portrayal of slavery and the civil war. At times I felt I should carry around a copy of South Carolina’s declaration of secession just to be ready for the “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery” argument. I once had a 15 year old become enraged when I told him that it was a lie that “hundreds of thousands of Negroes” had fought for the confederacy, as he was learning from his home-schooling textbooks. I was far from shocked when I later found Salisbury (where I was living) featured in chapter two of Confederates in the Attic. This was a town that had, in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, put up a statue to commemorate Confederate dead, complete with the old Confederate slogan. Dio Vindice (God Vindicates).
Of course, I shouldn’t just pick on North Carolina or pro-Confederacy white folks. One of the interesting things about the Civil War (and it’s inseparable companion, American slavery) is that it so often fosters bad history. One of the few things that “Southern Slavery, as it Was” gets right its claim that there is a tendency to teach a rather oversimplified version of antebellum slavery in American and African-American History classrooms – though the text’s authors fail to realize that they are guilty of the same foible. Slavery in the US was a terribly complex and highly varied system, with a great variety of social, economic, and political permutations. The tendency of many teachers to site sources such as the Willie Lynch Letter, which is almost certainly a hoax is a case in point. Perhaps what the case of Cary Christian School points up is that the “Past is Always Political,” and that far too many teachers are still guilty of approaching history in ways that validate, rather than challenge, their own (and their audience’s) preconceived notions.
For those familiar with the apologist or “redeemer” schools of southern historiography, there is nothing particularly new in the text. In a nutshell, “Southern Slavery” portrays slaveowners as kindly, slaves as happy, and everybody as way better off during slavery. Perhaps the biggest zinger in the text is when it allows that slavery in the South does actually deserve some condemnation. “The truth is, Southern slavery is open to criticism because it did not follow the biblical pattern at every point. Some of the state laws regulating slavery could not be defended biblically (the laws forbidding the teaching of reading and writing, for example).” Ohhh... I see. BIBLICAL slavery is fine, it’s that nasty UNBIBLICAL slavery that’s the problem.
What is always saddening, of course, is to find out that something as painful as this is being utilized in a classroom somewhere. However, I have to say that I’m not terribly surprised. When I was living in North Carolina and teaching at Livingstone College it was not unusual for me to meet folks who were eager to engage a white teacher of African-American history in an argument about the portrayal of slavery and the civil war. At times I felt I should carry around a copy of South Carolina’s declaration of secession just to be ready for the “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery” argument. I once had a 15 year old become enraged when I told him that it was a lie that “hundreds of thousands of Negroes” had fought for the confederacy, as he was learning from his home-schooling textbooks. I was far from shocked when I later found Salisbury (where I was living) featured in chapter two of Confederates in the Attic. This was a town that had, in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, put up a statue to commemorate Confederate dead, complete with the old Confederate slogan. Dio Vindice (God Vindicates).
Of course, I shouldn’t just pick on North Carolina or pro-Confederacy white folks. One of the interesting things about the Civil War (and it’s inseparable companion, American slavery) is that it so often fosters bad history. One of the few things that “Southern Slavery, as it Was” gets right its claim that there is a tendency to teach a rather oversimplified version of antebellum slavery in American and African-American History classrooms – though the text’s authors fail to realize that they are guilty of the same foible. Slavery in the US was a terribly complex and highly varied system, with a great variety of social, economic, and political permutations. The tendency of many teachers to site sources such as the Willie Lynch Letter, which is almost certainly a hoax is a case in point. Perhaps what the case of Cary Christian School points up is that the “Past is Always Political,” and that far too many teachers are still guilty of approaching history in ways that validate, rather than challenge, their own (and their audience’s) preconceived notions.