Lessons, Truth, Resentment: Why Should We Learn History?

In all the discussion about how we should teach American history and which stories should be included in the curricula, the question that actually plagues us has been buried. Most people actually agree on content — no sensible person thinks we shouldn’t teach about the racial atrocities committed in America’s past. The disagreement is over emphasis and framing, particularly regarding what that history means for the present, how we should respond to that history.

To grapple with this, let’s consider what the reasons are for studying history at all. Two motives, of many others:

1. To learn from the triumphs and mistakes of the past, so that we can replicate or avoid them, in turn, in the future, including, perhaps, the mistake in thinking that people ever learned from the mistakes of the past! (James Madison read furiously in order to figure out how best the Republic he’d helped form could avoid the downfall of republics past).
2. To explain, as accurately as possible, how we’ve arrived at the present moment.

The first should be obvious (and believed with the wry nihilist irony of gallows humor).

The second is trickier than it might first seem. Really, why does it matter how we arrived at the present moment (aside from reason 1, to learn from our triumphs and mistakes in getting here?)

Perhaps the strive for an accurate history can be seen as part of a more general striving for the Truth, even as we acknowledge our frequent shortcomings striving such. Of course, the truth can and ought be wielded for things like ‘justice’ — Should someone point to the vast inequalities of wealth that persist between black and white Americans and conclude, ‘oh, it must be that black people aren’t as smart or hard working,’ a true telling of the history could reveal that person’s flawed reasoning — that there is likely more to the story.

But notice: this is purely an explanatory exercise, not a prescriptive one. Knowing the truth does not tell you what to do or how to feel about it. However, there are people who contort the noble goal of uncovering the true story of how we arrived to the present into a similar but perfidious cousin:

3. To facilitate resentment in the present, using the evils of the past.

Consider two hypothetical people.

Duron is a black American, born in 1990 and raised in a very poor neighborhood in Chicago. Duron’s ancestors were slaves — they suffered unimaginably cruelty and indignity for decades, even centuries, their very lives a commodity and, in the vilest sense, not their own. After the Civil War, Duron’s great-great-grandfather toiled as a poor farmhand in Georgia. Over time, opportunity moved the family westward, and Duron’s great grandfather grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and, despite the continued indignities black people were forced to suffer in Jim Crow America, became a wealthy man. There was even a thriving black community in Tulsa. They called it Black Wall Street. Duron’s great grandfather married a woman who gave birth to Duron’s grandmother. Life was finally going well. But then, a white mob torched that thriving community to the ground. The wealth of families turned to literal ash in an evening. Duron’s great grandfather lost his life, and his family lost everything else. They never recovered. His grandmother lived in poverty under the thumb of Jim Crow laws, his mother grew up in the 60s and lived through the Civil Rights movement — but it hardly made her rich. She ended up in a rough neighborhood in Chicago, where she had Duron.

Andrew is a white American, born in 1990 and raised in a very poor neighborhood in Phoenix. Unlike Duron’s ancestors, Andrew’s were not enslaved — indeed, they lived and took advantage of all the benefits of a racist society systematically tilted to benefit white people. His ancestors were slaveholders, his grandfather benefited from the GI bill after WW2 (a benefit Duron’s grandfather was denied) and then got a loan for a house (something Duron’s family was not allowed due to redlining) and then built a successful small business. He was very wealthy by the time Andrew’s father came of age. However, Andrew’s father, offered all the opportunity a parent could ever hope to give a child, the recipient of over a century of ‘white privilege,’ drank, gambled, and lived beyond his means — and so, lost his wealth. He met Andrew’s mother in 1988, and left shortly after Andrew was born.

Two young men, one whose poverty is the result of the racial injustices of the United States, one whose poverty is the result of his father’s poor choices and character.

But to these children who never asked to be born nor had any say as to ‘by whom,’ it must be asked: what’s the difference?

Duron did not choose to be born into a nation with a history of stripping wealth and status from people whose skin color matched his own, whose progress came slow, never without resistance, and at massive cost for those who fought for it, whose descendents — largely because of that history — have a median wealth one-sixth the median wealth of people with skin color like Andrew’s.

Andrew did not ask to be born the son of a profligate drunkard.

Should the facts of history be taught in such a way that Duron feels embittered and robbed of opportunity, because his ancestors were? Is Duron a victim of racism, because the reality of past racism affects his present?

When I asked before: “To the children who never asked to be born: what’s the difference?” — there is a clear case when there is, in fact, a very large one: if the societal mechanisms that robbed Duron’s family of their wealth still existed to oppress him and rob him of any wealth he might garner.

That is a huge difference, an obvious, inarguable perpetuation of injustice. And it’s one worth discussing whether and how such injustice persists. But for now, I’m putting this debate aside to ask a different question:

Does injustice continue when its effects continue?

It is hard to deny that for critical theorists, the answer to that question is yes: the U.S. is systematically racist today because it was systematically racist for centuries. And this, naturally, foments frustration, disillusionment, and resentment.

After all — if Duron is born poor because a racist United States stripped his family of the possibility of growing generational wealth, as it allowed other predominantly-white families to do, how easy (and politically useful) it is to convince him that he was a victim of a grave injustice at his birth. They took wealth and opportunities from your ancestors, and so they took wealth and opportunity from you — and ‘they,’ by the way, is them, white people, and they’re still out there, clinging to the same Whiteness that enslaved our ancestors, burned down Tulsa, and killed your great-grandfather.

And if, by the way, you’re not Duron, and you don’t know if your grandfather lost everything in the Tulsa race riots, but you do share his skin color? All the same. The event is emblematic. A powerful symbol. It might not be why your family lost their wealth, but it is the distillation of the ‘system’ that explains why they never had it in the first place, of the system that continues today — after all, just look at the inequality between Black and white Americans!

But societies change, drastically, over decades and centuries. “Ideological determination” is not a thing. The ideology of a society at its onset does not affix its descendants to one path with one outcome, an original sin it can never escape. (Never mind that a society is never hegemonic in a single ‘ideology,’ anyway, even at its birth. The United States certainly wasn’t).

And yet, this is — very often — at the core of arguments used to validate that the United States is still a corrupt, systemically racist nation.

The logic goes more or less as follows:

1. Large gaps in median wealth (and other important metrics) persist between white Americans and black Americans (and other minorities — for the purposes here I’m going to discuss only these two groups).
2. Individuals born to wealthy families obviously have advantages those born non-wealthy do not.
3. Therefore, the systemic racism of the past causes a continuation of racial inequities in the present.
4. Therefore, the present remains systematically racist, until the system is dismantled and the inequity eliminated.

This basic outline is used again and again. Consider, for instance, the concept of ‘Stereotype threat,’ as described by Claude Steele and others, which shows (or purports to — the replication crisis is causing earthquakes in the soft sciences) that people perform worse on a test if they are aware of a group stereotype for that test for a group they identify with (i.e. women do worse on math tests because women know that there is a stereotype that women do worse on math tests).

It is essentially similar logic:

1. Racist beliefs for centuries held as a stereotype that black people were not as intellectually gifted as white people.
2. Black students today are aware of that stereotype, and that awareness causes black students to perform worse on tests.
3. Therefore, the systemic racism of the past causes a continuation of racial inequity in the present.
4. Therefore, testing is systematically racist, and we should eliminate use of aptitude tests.

It is a tempting — and poisonous — logic. At heart it is this thesis: injustice persists as long as the negative effects of that injustice are discernible. That is, the accurate telling of ‘how we got here’ is itself the accurate description of ‘how society is unjust.’

But I must ask again — to Duron and Andrew, what is the difference? Each is born to a world in which neither is at fault for his poverty or for the struggles he is guaranteed to face because of it. If (big if, to be clear!) the societal injustices that robbed Duron’s ancestors of wealth have been expunged, so that he does not face the threats they did, is there any reason to give him more help or charity or understanding than Andrew?

There is an enormous engine arguing ‘yes,’ dropping poisonous drop after poisonous drop into the ears of young people: saying black people are poor today (…even if they are in a family that happens to not be poor today!) because of the crimes of history — which has more than a grain of truth to it — and so long as the crime has not been remedied, the criminals live on; the problems they face are the dragons of the past, surviving, thriving, re-shaped, re-formed, re-emerging from past to present, from ancestors to descendants, and apparently, per Colin Kaeppernick, from the slavery auction block to the NFL combine.

But there is a metaphysical issue floating in this discussion. Namely, any person who is born today owes their very existence to the injustices (and justices) of the past, and to the mistakes (and wisdom) of their ancestors. That does not morally justify the injustice or mistakes, but how can Duron claim he is owed something for the loss of his family’s wealth when Duron would not exist had they been allowed to keep it?

Ignore the also pertinent question, “How do we know Duron’s family would have kept the wealth had they been allowed to, or might someone in the line have acted as Andrew’s father did?” Let’s presume the wealth stayed in the bloodline. The question must be asked… which bloodline?

Had the massacre in Tulsa not occurred, had America paid reparations, had Reconstruction not fallen apart, had Duron’s great-grandfather not been killed and his wealth not been stripped from him, and his grandfather allowed the benefits of the GI Bill and not been hampered by the viciousness of redlining, had so many things happened or not happened that should’ve or shouldn’t’ve, the wheel of fate would have turned so drastically differently that no Duron would exist to claim the wealth his family kept. The sheer number of permutations and new experiences would guarantee that the descendants-who-would-have-included-Duron would be completely different people, born with the privilege of living in a world in which the difference in the median wealth of black and white Americans would be much more equitable than what we see today.

Similarly, had Andrew’s father been a different man who made different choices, it would not have resulted in an Andrew who benefited from his father’s love and fiscal responsibility. It would have resulted in no Andrew at all. This does not mean Andrew has to like or even forgive his father — but it would be absurd for Andrew to feel he was robbed of wealth and opportunities that his absent father could have provided him.

The response to this might be an appeal to some sort of ‘collectivism.’ “Sure, Duron would not exist, but the Black Collective would be so much better off, so we should act for the benefit of the Black Collective.” But the same argument applies. The better-off collective that would-have-been is a completely different collective than the one that exists today, except for skin color. Is skin color a bond so powerful it bridges totally different realities? Surely not! Yes, a collective of black America was, largely, robbed of the possibility of inheriting generational wealth — but it was the wealth of a non-existent black collective that was robbed of existence.

None of this excuses America for its racist history or Andrew’s father for his irresponsibility. But it’s a bitter tautology: we are born into the world we’re born into. None of us chooses our lot at the beginning of life, and in a society that allows people the freedom to drink, gamble, and waste their wealth, or that for decades refused people the ability to accrue it in the first place due to the color of their skin, there will be thousands or millions of Andrews and Durons. The difference is because ‘skin color’ is and has always been such a potent visible marker, we can point the group of black people. We can easily visually collectivize the reason for the disparities in median wealth. We can easily say ‘this group of black people’ is worse off than ‘the group of black people we can imagine if history had been more just,’ and look, both groups have the same skin color, and thus… is the same group?!?

We can’t readily point to the group of Andrews. Andrews come in all colors, genders, places…

So what do we do moving forward?

Do we tell Duron he is a victim? Was doomed to be at birth? Do we tell Andrew to live in bitter resentment of his father? Do we tell them the deck is so stacked against them they have no hope unless they burn up the deck? That Andrew cannot escape his father’s mistakes and that Duron cannot hope to buck the weight of an oppressive history?

What poison that would be for them. What injustice we would inflict on them to suggest as much.

We, of course, remove to the best of our ability all remaining racist stumbling blocks and prejudices that Duron might face for his skin color (it is a fool who thinks on matters of race we’ve fully done so).

We learn from our history to never implement racist policies again.

We build a society that gives as much opportunity to people born in Andrew’s and Duron’s position as possible. Make no mistake — though black America is doing better than they ever have (the black poverty rate has gone from about 40% in 1965, to about 30% in 1990, to 16% in 2019) — black people still make up a disproportionate amount of the poor. But that means any program aimed at helping the poor will, necessarily, help a disproportionate number of black people.

None of this is not to say that the societal injustices a group suffered should never be remedied — but it must be a remedy to the people who suffered the injustice. The more that time passes since the original crimes, the less obvious who those people are… And in fact, the more the people who seem to be victims are actually the benefactors, in that they exist at all.

We ought to help those born into poor circumstances that were out of their control. But what historical machinations resulted in them being born there are just not all that germane as to what we do about it. History must not be used as a tool to demoralize people for wrongs they did not commit nor wounds they did not suffer, but as a tool to notice and prevent new wrongs and new wounds.

We must deny the notion that black individuals must carry the injustices people of that skin color faced for centuries, simply because they have the same skin color, just as we can’t ask that white individuals bear the guilt for them. But this is precisely what critical theories ask. They create synecdoches: every black person is a Black person of the Black story, and every white person born into Whiteness. The past lives in them and so must be corrected by them. As Ibram X. Kendi wrote, “The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination; the only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination.”

I can think of little more depressing than this notion of ‘discrimination forever.’

It’s as if we’ve learned nothing from history.