Some Advice For Pataki On Slavery

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Last week, I wrote that I supported the creation of the Amistad Commission, a 19-member group, to be chosen by Governor Pataki, that would examine whether New York schoolchildren learn enough about slavery.


The commission, which has become something of a lightning rod in certain quarters across the state, is a no-brainer for me and, quite frankly, I just don’t understand what the fuss is all about.


Put simply, Americans in general – not to mention school-age children – do not know enough about what historians have long dubbed that “peculiar institution.” Even after the demise of slavery, many are unaware of the periods that followed: Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, which attracted civil rights leaders looking to dismantle those unjust laws.


After it conducts its investigation, the commission would recommend changes to the state curriculum, which could remake the ways educators teach about slavery in schools across the state.


I have not been asked by Mr. Pataki to join his commission. If I were consulted, I’d recommend that all high school students in the state be required to read several texts about slavery before receiving a diploma.


Though slavery remains an uncomfortable topic to discuss, educators should not shy away from openly educating youngsters about the sullied parts of our country’s glorious history. Attempts to shield schoolchildren from ugly episodes in human history, such as the Holocaust and slavery, do little to force students to grapple with the suffering that whole groups experienced because of their religion or ethnicity.


Any high school student looking to learn about the dehumanizing aspects of slavery ought to start off with “Classic Slave Narratives,” edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African-American Studies at Harvard University and one of the country’s preeminent public intellectuals.


The text includes the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” autobiography of the abolitionist, orator, and journalist who agitated for change. Three other autobiographies – Harriet Jacobs’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” “The Life of Olaudah Equiano,” and “The History of Mary Prince”- are also included, and together they help enrich our understanding of how slaves managed to survive in an environment that was so uncivilized.


By reading those texts, we come to see the sheer devastation caused by the institution of slavery: the separation of families, the loss of identity, and the brutal violence inflicted upon slaves by their masters. For example, after all of these years of reading Douglass’s “Narrative,” I still find it hard to stomach the passage in the text in which the author’s Aunt Hester is whipped by her overseer.


Contemporary fictional treatments such as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Sherley Anne Williams’s “Dessa Rose” are also important, in that they tell the heroic stories of black women who often remain invisible in discussions about slavery, though they aggressively fought to secure their own freedom. I’d also throw in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a revolutionary book at its time that was written by a sympathetic white New Englander, who tried to make sense of a system designed to exploit a subservient group of people for economic gains.


We live in an environment in which slavery has become politicized. Many whites remain ambivalent about talking about slavery, in part because they fear that such a conversation will renew calls by some activists for reparations.


“I think everyone believes that schools could do more to teach students about slavery,” a reader wrote in an email to me after reading my column last week. “The thing that I worry about is that the establishment of a Commission to examine how slavery is taught will be used as a political ploy by some who have ulterior motives of pushing forth another agenda. If this was just about teaching slavery, I would have no objection to it.”


As we’re engaging in these political fights, many students graduating from high school remain ignorant about that period in our country’s history. More troubling, they seem unable to make the connection between slavery and the myriad social problems that beset blacks today. Their inability to make the connections suggests that we have a long way to go in integrating the narratives of slavery into the canon of American history.



Mr. Watson is executive editor of the New York Amsterdam News. He can be reached at jamalwats@aol.com.


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