Rising with the Occasion

I love history. I have as far back as I can remember. I remember taking home my first history book in elementary school and immediately beginning to read it from cover to cover. I decided to double major in history simply because it has always been my favorite subject, and although it was difficult to imagine me earning a living with that degree by itself, I enjoyed it too much not to make it a part of my educational journey. This past year, I was offered the chance to teach history for the first time (I had only ever taught English), and I jumped at it.

To say that it has been a transformative experience for me is an understatement. The cliché saying that educators learn so much more from their students and from their career than they could ever impart on others is true. One of the challenges of teaching in Bountiful, Utah (or opportunities if you look at it that way) is that I teach in an area that is far from diverse. Most of my students and I share the same ethnicity, language, religion, and culture—and because of that, our own blind spots when it comes to understanding our collective past. Alongside my students and with their help, I need to be willing to confront the parts of history that make most of us uncomfortable. In short, through my students and my content, I have been able to recognize the importance of not whitewashing history and have realized—even more so in the past few weeks—how much my own education on the subject suffered because it was masked under the illusion of being “colorless.”

I learned about the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, but never about Juneteenth. I learned about the Civil War in all its complexities, but never from the perspective of African Americans—slave or free. I learned about the Civil Rights movement, but again, only on a surface level that was meant to make the experience relatively comfortable with my own whiteness and that of most of my classmates. While I was vaguely aware of the boils of United States history, I was never forced to confront them, lance them, and deal with the ugliness that would seep out. I wish I had been.

Luckily, in my late adolescence and young adulthood, I received a more comprehensive view of history. I was able to read about the plight of African Americans from their perspective through the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I was able to take classes dealing with history in a number of different areas and from numerous perspectives that helped me combat my ethnocentrism. I was able to talk with and befriend people of different ethnicities and vastly different world views and experiences than my own. I am grateful for that, but I still recognize I still have a lot more listening and learning to do in order to become a better ally to people of color.

If there was one specific subject in history I would consider my favorite, it would be the United States Civil War. It has fascinated me from as far back as I can remember, possibly because of how complexly human the conflict was. It pitted brother vs. brother, slave vs. master, freeman vs. oppressors. It was ripe with hypocrisy: northerners, many of whom were outspokenly racist, fought to preserve the union and abolish slavery. Southerners, some of whom were against slavery, aided its continued existence by rationalizing they were fighting for state’s rights and their southern way of life. It forced the nation to reconcile with the fact that its promise of providing justice and freedom for all had not yet been realized. It was and still is a mirror to the soul of the nation as it exposed humanity’s capacity for both great good and great evil. While not all Unionists were purely noble, they were on the side of right. While most fighting for the Confederacy were not purely evil, they were on the side of wrong.

There was a time in my youth that I might have been upset about the removal of Confederate statues and other symbols of oppression. I would have cried, like many are doing now that “these statues are part of our heritage—how dare we erase our history,” or “how can we learn from history if we try to destroy it?” However, I have come to realize something helpful and freeing while studying and teaching history: Statues do not teach history; caricatures of African Americans placed on products from maple syrup to rice do not teach history. They romanticize racism and bigoted tropes of the past that should be exorcised from society rather than immortalized. I can still teach the complexity of the Civil War, including covering important figures from the history of the Confederacy like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, without seeking to unduly bestow upon them heroic value that is unfit for slave holders and traitors. I can take my children to museums and Civil War battlefields where they can learn about this time period with proper context. We can watch documentaries and films—yes, even Gone with the Wind—as long we highlight historical bubbles they were produced in and the resulting biases that may be present. We can learn about our history, warts and all, without explicitly or implicitly celebrating systems of oppression.

Those of you that think that society is finding too much too be offended about—how dare you tell someone what they should and shouldn’t be offended by, especially people whose fight against injustice sadly did not end on June 19th, 1865 but is still continuing today. Those of you who would question my love for my country because I recognize its shortcomings, ask yourself this: Is it more patriotic to perpetuate your nation’s flaws either through active support of them or inactive silence on them, or is it more patriotic to want the nation that you love to reach its immense potential through the refiner’s fire that accompanies increased awareness and empathy? Perhaps because white people not only continue to ignore the plight of people of color throughout history—or even worse, unwittingly deify those who have historically made that plight more difficult—oppression did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the freeing of the last slaves in Texas, or the end of segregation. Like a deadly virus, racism continues to mutate and reform in different permutations, possibly because we allow it to. We cannot allow it to anymore and must rally against its current version—systemic and institutionalized racism—of which police brutality that disproportionately targets people of color is a symptom. White people can celebrate Juneteenth (and yes, it should be celebrated) by studying our history and recognizing how our privilege has allowed injustice to perpetuate. We can learn about the complex stories—like the Civil War—from different perspectives, and join the fight against immortalizing symbols that should be remembered, but not celebrated. We can choose to listen to people that are different than us and become more aware of our privilege. We can vote for leaders who will stand up against injustice and support them as they introduce legislation to do so. We can choose—right here and right now—to amplify the voices of the disenfranchised and ally ourselves with freedom. Abraham Lincoln believed, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” The Civil War afforded him the opportunity for growth and change. Juneteenth affords us the opportunity to “think anew and act anew” as we continue to “rise with the occasion."

Martin Luther King Jr. predicted, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” If you are one of the “bad people” clamoring against injustice, there is still time to wake and change. If you are one of the “good people” who are being silent, there is still time to wake and raise your voice in solidarity with the oppressed. If you are woke, there is still time to do more to become the ally people of color need and deserve—and above all—fight not to go back to sleep. We do not need to feel guilty from history, but we do need to learn from it. History should be one of the reasons we speak out against injustice, not an excuse that perpetuates it.