“I still very precisely know the moment when I discovered the atrocities my tribe had conducted,” German philosopher Thomas Metzinger said in a podcast following Donad Trump’s first inauguration. “I was 10, this little scholar in me was awakening, and I was getting interested in the books on my parents’ shelves. I saw there was one book they put up very high because they didn’t want me to see it, and of course the next time they were out, I put a chair on my father’s writing desk and crept up there.”
The book he found was a compilation of photos titled The Yellow Star, published 15 years after World War II, which graphically depicted Nazi crimes against humanity.
“I saw bulldozers pushing piles of corpses into mass graves, I saw photo documentation of medical experiments on Jews with phosphorus burning away their flesh,” he recounted. “And that was the moment when my childhood ended.”
Practically every kid of his generation, according to Metzinger, 66, can tell a similar story. And when he became a teenager, he noticed how evasive adults were when questioned about the atrocities.
“There’s this aftermath, when you ask your parents, ‘How much did you know?’ And they all tell you, ‘We didn’t know anything,’” Metzinger said. “Then you ask the other schoolchildren in the schoolyard, and they all say, ‘My parents also say they didn’t know anything.’ And then you ask your history teacher, and they tell you, ‘Don’t let yourselves be fooled. Almost everybody knew.’”
If only students in the U.S. could trust their educators to reveal the ugly truths that adults would just as soon keep on the hard-to-reach shelves. By Texas law, for instance, “a teacher, administrator, or other employee of a state agency, school district, or open-enrollment charter school may not: require an understanding of the 1619 Project.” The project in question is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historical investigation into the cruelty of slavery and segregation.
Which brings us to the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum, narrowly approved by Texas’ State Board of Education (SBOE) late last year. The bulk of the commentary surrounding the Texas Education Agency’s instructional materials recommended for elementary and middle school students has focused on the use of Bible stories in lesson plans. Although an optional curriculum, accepting the whole kit and caboodle comes with funding perks for fiscally strapped districts.
Compared to the predictable liberal outrage on this issue, my reaction has been a shrug. I’m reminded of what political science professor and atheist Adolph Reed said when asked why he raised his kids Catholic: “Because I didn’t want to risk their being religious.”
The cultural well we draw from in the U.S. is undoubtedly Judeo-Christian, after all, and I doubt an ancient fable about Queen Esther will be what sends us down the slippery slope to establishing a state religion. I trust teachers not to proselytize and, should they, I trust students to roll their eyes.
However, what students can’t reject, much less wrestle with, is what they’re never taught. Far more concerning is the curriculum’s writing crucial facts about slavery out of the history books. Bluebonnet learners will hear about the architectural marvels of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate without a word about the enslaved laborers who built it under the lash, according a Texas Tribune report.
A second-grade lesson reported on by the Tribune, notes that “slavery was wrong, but it was practiced in most nations throughout history.” That claim downplays “the race-based nature of slavery in America that made it distinct from other parts of the world.”
Another lesson for the same grade lionizes Gen. Robert E Lee’s battlefield prowess and commends his preference for “a peaceful way to end the disagreement” — also known as civil war. However, it fails to mention that Lee himself was a notoriously punitive slave master.
A lesson for kindergarteners named “Our Great Country” informs students that Washington and Jefferson “realized that slavery was wrong and founded the country so that Americans could be free.”
Maybe our nation’s original sin was the sin of omission.
Age-appropriateness is a reasonable worry. Yet the Tribune noted, “In stark contrast to the state curriculum’s lack of detail when covering American slavery, a fifth-grade lesson on World War II is clear and precise about the horrors of the Holocaust, which it defines as ‘the state-sponsored and systematic persecution and murder of six million Jewish people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators’.” That lesson “highlights how Jewish people ‘were dehumanized, imprisoned, attacked and murdered’ and ‘stripped of their rights, dignity and lives’,” but leaves out entirely that the Nuremberg Race Laws “drew inspiration from Jim Crow and the dehumanization of Black people in America.”
“A great disappointment” is how Julia Brookins, senior analyst for the American Historical Association (AHA), summed up the Bluebonnet curriculum in testimony before the SBOE. Some lessons are so vague that students will struggle to learn anything from them, she added.
“Rarely do curriculum documents reflect on how slavery and racism were mutually constructed,” AHA noted in a report. And according to a survey of 3,000 history teachers, including many from Texas, slavery “was singled out by teachers as a uniquely challenging topic due to its potential for controversy.”
That’s a bit counterintuitive. While we might expect a range of opinions on New Deal social insurance programs or Reaganomics, presumably most of us agree that owning other human beings is wrong.
The contentiousness seems to hang on whether chattel slavery was an excisable deviation from stated egalitarian ideals or instead reveals something essential about our political and economic system as normally practiced. Perhaps one way to win over “divisive concepts”-averse conservatives is to point out that slavery was a national investment, not merely a Southern one.
Brown University history scholar Seth Rockman has spent the past 15 years researching his book Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery. During one discussion of his work, he mentioned that Newark, New Jersey, was once known as the “whip-making capital of the United States” for the reasons you’d expect.
“First and foremost, recognizing the embeddedness of slavery in American life is crucial to creating a future that is ripe with social justice and inclusion,” Rockman said, “and the way we reach that … is by telling a truthful and full history.”
UCLA legal professor Cheryl Harris is a card-carrying practitioner of Critical Race Theory, which the Texas GOP has boasted about banning from public schools. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is also itching to make teaching CRT in universities sufficient grounds for denying tenure.
“Despite efforts to obscure the central role of slavery and indigenous dispossession in narratives of nationhood, these realities are deeply imprinted in the relationship between race and markets and property,” Harris said in a 2016 talk. “We still have an underlying presumption of the market as a liberated space, in which people can negotiate freely, but … the market, depicted as neutral and driven only by rational and inexorable laws of supply and demand, is far from neutral, as embedded within it are racial norms, presumptions, ideologies and structures.”
Members of the Confederacy saw themselves as defenders of private property.
At the time of this writing, hundreds of incarcerated firefighters are working to keep Los Angeles from being engulfed in flames. They’re paid around $25 for 24-hour shifts — an exploitative setup not unrelated to the racist history of chain gangs and mass imprisonment.
If there’s a state religion worth remaining vigilant against, our hallowed belief in the sanctity of the market might just fit the bill.
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This article appears in Jan 22 – Feb 4, 2025.