Feelings of guilt over injustices perpetrated by our ancestors is common. In the mid-1980s, one of my colleagues, originally from Germany, asked our family to host for two weeks a young German tourist who was related to his wife. We readily agreed and enjoyed the company of a fine young man who, I’d guess, was born in 1961.
Upon learning that we were Jewish, he expressed guilt concerning the Holocaust, as if he personally had anything to do with it. Even his parents, although alive during that era, were children with no significant powers of choice regarding public policy. Nevertheless, I think it’s because he was thoroughly German – his native language and culture – that he identified himself with what Germans had done in history, both for good and ill. He asked if he could attend synagogue with us, so we did.
This case illustrates the general tendency of people who identify with a given group to be ashamed or distressed personally by bad behavior among members of that group even when the distressed individual has no personal responsibility for the bad behavior in question. It should come as no surprise, then, that some white children, learning about the enslavement of black Africans, may feel pangs of personal guild even though they had no hand in such enslavement.
Does this mean that we shouldn’t teach children about slavery? If we say “Yes,” we imply that it would be better if the young German man had never been taught about the Holocaust. In my view, if you say “Yes,” you imply that having the knowledge and associated empathy needed to address the current effects of past misconduct are less important than transient negative feelings that sometimes accompany such knowledge. This would not be a Jewish perspective, and I doubt it would be embraced by most Muslims or Christians.
The case of guilt feelings, however, may be worse for the American child learning about slavery, because among the continuing sources of wealth in this country are the contribution of slaves. We are all subject to unjust enrichment, lives that have been made better by injustices, over which we had no control, which were perpetrated by others. These include injustices not only to blacks, but also to Native Americans and members of many immigrant and minority groups. Each one could promote additional feelings of guilt.
One way to assuage such guilt is to suggest that slavery offered some benefits to the slaves themselves, such as by teaching them marketable skills, as is currently proposed in Florida. But even if it is true that some small percentage of slaves acquired such skills, they and their progeny for a century after the Civil War were limited in the roles they were allowed to play in the South. Jim Crow robbed these skills of the market power they would have had in a less racist society.
More important, I think, pointing to any benefits, even if they were real, is a way of appeasing the conscience of young people by cherry picking a bit of data and presenting it as the norm. After I became aware of the poverty of Native Americans in the 1950s, my mother told me that some of them, mostly members of the Mohawk Nation, made very good money working at great heights during the construction of New York’s sky scrapers. This was true, but worked primarily not as relevant information about Native Americans, but as a distraction from their generally unenviable history and current plight. Including the marketable skills claim in any history of slavery similarly gives people an excuse to ignore the horrors of slavery and its current legacy.
So what should we do? Teach the whole story. This includes the horrors of slavery and the lack of responsibility of today’s children for that horror. It should also relate slavery to the subsequent Jim Crow century and to current evidence that discrimination against blacks is not over, as evidenced in studies of police disproportionately stopping black motorists, blacks being turned down for jobs and bank loans given to whites with no better credentials or credit scores, and the enormous disparities of wealth between white and black Americans.
But the story doesn’t end there. We have no more slavery; the Jim Crow era is over; we’ve had a black president; and there are currently substantial efforts to combat racism. We continue to make progress toward an America that respects the contributions and the dignity of everyone. Students should be proud of our country for this and inspired, as they become older, to take an active role in this aspect of the American journey toward a more perfect union. We’re not perfect, but we can become a shining light for humanity, slavery notwithstanding. Real patriots have no need to gaslight our children.
I am happy to reply to comments sent to my e-mail at wenz.peter@uis.edu.
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