by After her failure to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War sparked a wave of criticism last month, Nikki Haley assured potential constituents that she had black friends and that she understood the origins of the war. Growing up in South Carolina, she said: “literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery.” Unfortunately, conveniently having black friends is not surprising, but claiming that he learned that the Civil War was a battle for slavery in the second and third degree is.
Governor Haley attended a segregation academy, a type of private school established in the years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education by white parents who did not want their children to attend school. school with black children.
In 1975, the number of private schools in South Carolina grew more than ten times, enrolling up to 90 percent of white children in some majority-black counties. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that discrimination based on race was also not legal in private schools, but even today, many segregation academies remain overwhelmingly white.
Mrs. Haley is a 1989 graduate of Orangeburg High School. Orangeburg was the product of a merger between Wade Hampton and Willington Academy, also segregation academies, the former of which was named after one of the largest slave families South Carolina. At one point, Hampton graduates received Confederate flag lapel pins, which They were intended to symbolize resistance against integration. The year Haley graduated, her high school yearbook included at most a handful of black students.
I also attended a segregated academy: Edgewood Academy in Elmore, Alabama, from first grade until I graduated in 1995. Although the city was about 30 percent black, none of the 33 people in my class were. My parents say they sent me and my two younger brothers there because they thought we would get a better education and because it was affordable (the annual tuition is now $6,210, which would have been about $2,000 the year I enrolled), a consideration important. for a family whose sole breadwinner was an Alabama Power lineman.
When I was at Edgewood, there were no AP classes, no college test prep, and no real expectations for any of us to go to college unless we really wanted to (which, for girls, would largely be finding husbands). The science teachers taught us creationism and the principal used a big wooden paddle on students who misbehaved, no matter how young or old they were.
Our history textbooks positioned the Civil War as a states’ rights issue, a narrative that was reinforced by teachers, many of whom, as Governor Haley suggests, mentioned slavery but said the idea that It was a fundamental cause of the war, it was liberal propaganda. They told us that some slaves had good relationships with their owners and were grateful to be cared for, as if they had been given cushy jobs with excellent benefits instead of being torn from their families, abused, and treated as if they were subhuman. We took field trips to Confederate Memorial Park in Marbury, but not to the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, which was the same distance from us.
My fifth grade teacher told us that if Jesus were alive in Alabama, he would have been a white Dixiecrat, that God disapproves of what she called race mixing, and that children who are the products of interracial marriages should be pitied because they are mistakes. . (I now wonder how he would have treated me if he had known that I was the product of an interracial marriage, something that, as an adoptee, I only discovered long after graduating.)
I don’t know what textbook Nikki Haley’s school used, but I know, simply from the fact that she attended a desegregation academy, that her understanding of the Civil War was shaped by white teachers and administrators who were unwilling to deal with the evils. of slavery.
When conservatives talk about education and indoctrination, I consider it the most obvious type of projection, because the environment in which I was educated was carefully constructed to give me the message that white, conservative, Christian Southerners were the real Americans, chosen by God. .
My real education in American history occurred at the public library where my mother used to drop me off while she ran errands, and later at college. If you want to understand why evangelical conservatives are waging war on public libraries and universities, it is precisely because they expose children to facts that undermine the kind of indoctrination I received.
In elementary school, books that mention race or, in some cases, simply include black protagonists have been banned because they could cause discomfort to white children. At the university level, activists like Christopher Rufo have characterized any frank discussion of race as “critical race theory,” a distortion that serves, in Rufo’s own words, to turn the topic into “critical race theory.”toxic”and contribute to “negative perceptions.”
Many Republican politicians like to present American history as an uninterrupted parade of greatness and righteousness, without mentioning the atrocities we committed along the way. They consider that perspective as a kind of patriotic optimism, but it is not. He is fragile and cynical.
That perspective assumes that our nation will crumble under any scrutiny of the racist systems that persist to this day. It suggests that the only way we can be a great nation now is to fool ourselves into believing that we are not inherently capable of evil.
My vision is more optimistic. I don’t need to believe that America is blameless and inherently good to believe in its potential and its ability to be better and stronger. If we can’t (or won’t) do the sometimes uncomfortable work of reckoning with our past, America’s destiny is small, petty, and weak. The unwillingness to tell the truth about the past only serves a dwindling number of Americans who wish to live within the distorted understanding of the world that segregation academies created for their students: an America only for some and with a very limited future.
Elizabeth Spiers, Opinion contributor, is a journalist and digital media strategist.
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