Savage Lies

Savage Inequalities is blowing my mind. Stories of children in East St. Louis who literally live in toxic waste sites, and pictures of schools where everyone--students, teachers, principals, parents--know they are getting the short end of the proverbial stick literally bring me to tears. It feels frivolous that so much time and energy is expended on the particulars of textbook phrases when there are schools that don't even have toilet paper.

But then....

Lies My Teacher Told Me is also blowing my mind. The author shares an anecdote from when he was teaching a freshman class at Tougaloo College, a predominantly black school in Mississippi. When he asked the class what they knew about Reconstruction at the beginning of a unit on the era, here is what he found:

"The class concensus: Reconstruction was the time when African Americans took over the governing of the Southern states, including Mississippi. But they were too soon out of slavery, so they messed up and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take back control of the state governments.

I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions glared from that statement that ti was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. African Americans never took over the Southern states. All governeors were white and almost all legislatures had white majorities throughout Reconstruction. African Americans did not 'mess up'....For young African Americans to believe such a hurtful myth about their past seemed tragic. It invited them to doubt their own capability, wince their race had 'messed up' in its one appearance on American history's center stage. It also invited them to conclude that it is only right that whites be always in control. Yet my students had merely learned what my textbooks had taught them."

To me, this drives home the point that what is in our textbooks really truly does matter. It is not simply an intellectual exercise. What people learn about their past has a direct impact on their present and on their future, a legacy seen all too clearly in the disparities between impoverished East St. Louis/ and wealthy school districts across the nation. If textbooks reinforce the status quo, it will never change.