“I wish I wasn’t White; I feel guilty for all the bad things that White folks have done in the past.” –this from a young White member of the British Commonwealth who asked me to help her search her family heritage, desperately hoping to find some evidence that she had ethnic heritage outside of Europe. This sentiment has provoked the ire of conservative parents and lawmakers across the country, resulting in a spate of regulations around the teaching of literature, history, and social studies. But it also demonstrates the failure of many of us to inculcate the real skills of historical thinking, and progressive teachers and parents also despair a bit when they hear this youthful reaction to the confrontation with the past.
My state, Tennessee, is one of several that has passed laws in the last few years making it illegal for a teacher to present material in the classroom that makes students feel guilty about the history of their country. Like other states, these lawmakers want to prevent the teaching of anything that argues that racism or sexism were embedded in the United States’ founding and/or that there are people privileged by virtue of sex or race. The result, whether intended or not, has resulted in a “chilling” effect in many classrooms in our state, especially around the teaching of history. But the law also demonstrates the inherit challenges with teaching history and the difficult of teaching folks to think historically.
The law’s wording makes it clear that what is prohibited is the teacher inculcating the concept of guilt or responsibility. But anyone who has training in teaching history knows that this isn’t something teachers want to do. However, students often feel group identity culpability whether or not that is intended by the teacher. Contemporary media habits with the “gotcha” and “outrage” and 30-second reels laying out “can you believe this happened” sorts of historical tidbits without the hard work of historical thinking are much more to blame. Our young people (and not just the young) are primed to pay attention when they are emotionally charged. Teachers and presenters are encouraged to play to the attention game with which our modern media has trained us all.
Complexity and Change Over Time
Historical thinking requires complexity. Complexity means that we don’t think in terms of villains or heroes or who I identify with in the past. When students look to the past for who they would identify with, who would be like them, and find them to be less than ideal people, this upsets them. They naturally want to be on the side of the angels.
And it is normal to look for where and how someone in my body would be living in the past. I definitely know as a woman that my life in the past would be very different from that of men, and from my life now. When I study the past I do think about how women might be experiencing what I am studying. Teachers can’t present all past actors as race-less , culture-less, religion-less, and gender-less as if there were no differences in how people lived in their communities based on things like disability or economic status, or the physical nature of their bodies.
But being able to take on board complexity in studying the past means that we know that we a) don’t know everything about all people and their motives and actions-we have to deal in the evidence, and b)can tell the truth about humans and their actions while realizing no one action or belief is the whole sum total of someone. We also aren’t doing good historical thinking when our primary purpose in studying the past is judgement about evil or goodness. We need to be engaging in another skill of historical thinking—causation. One of the best skills of the study of history is analyzing cause and effect. And most effects are unintended. So we can assess actions that had consequences truthfully—and name both the motives and the effects—without dumping all the historical actors into the bucket of “evil/perpetrator” or “good/victim”.
I am not saying that no one should ever make judgements about evil or good in either actions or motives. Merely that it is too easy to quickly jump to those. It feels too good to stand in judgement of the past. First we must engage in the hard work of historical thinking—of gathering multitudes of evidence from different perspectives, trying to understand the complexity, being honest to all the actors involved, as much as possible. Complexity and Causation are accompanied by Context—grasping the nuances of language, discerning what allowed people to think and do what they did, being honest to their own understandings of themselves, comprehending the ranges of possibilities.
Historical thinking requires consideration of Change over Time, including the changes in historical actors themselves and in what was valued by humans in particular times and places. Change over Time is not the same thing as the idea of Progress. “Progress” as a concept is itself a product of Change over Time—it only entered our sense of historical thinking in the modern period. So we aren’t saying there’s some way that we “inevitably” as humans improved in our ideas and practices. But we are not the same as we were in the past because our Context has changed. This is why historians don’t speak of history “repeating” itself, since there is Change over Time and Context is different. This sort of historical thinking allows us to step back and be truthful about the past while not assuming we know everything about it.
Historical Thinking Leads to Humility
The virtue of humility can be the result of such historical thinking. Humility is the result of acknowledging that my conclusions about the past are based on incomplete evidence and I expect to change my mind as I learn more. But humility is also the result of realizing I will also someday be a historical subject. I am sure that if the world lasts another one hundred years, well-meaning people will look at my actions and decisions and be horrified by them, or wonder how I and my community could have behaved as we did. While I want to be on the side of the angels, and to make good choices, it’s possible I’m not—especially when there is the benefit of the hindsight of decades or centuries. So, I won’t get to be either a hero nor a villain, and most other humans are the same.
And if I am humble and accept the fact that most people aren’t perfect, including my ancestors, I can be honest about what they did without thinking that it means that I myself bear the guilt of the past. However, I do live in the world that they made. And I have choices I can make now based on the reality of their actions. As the old saying goes “it’s not your fault, but you’re responsible.” My students all too often want to jump to the “whose fault is it and those who benefitted should fix it” without engaging in the virtues of investigation and understanding. If we can do the latter in the classroom, we can leave the former to the Holy Spirit and their extracurricular activities. Otherwise we get folks who want to jump to fixing problems without really understanding them and how they got that way.
For my young friend who is feeling twinges of White guilt, I would say: spend more time trying to understand the various folks in the past and what happened. There are fascinating people in the past—of all ethnicities. You don’t need to feel more or less proud or chagrined than anyone else. It’s not helpful. You can tell the truth about atrocities, but add layers and complexity to that. No one gets a history or ancestors who are innocent. All our histories are full of people who hurt each other and we have all inherited the world we live in. Save your energy to do the best by those around you right now, in the world we live in now. But learn more layers about more people. Embrace complexity in your thinking. Don’t look for heroes or villains and tell the truth.
I have always been deeply persuaded by the late Thomas Haskell’s explanation of what we are doing: “The historical discipline requires that its practitioners “abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and most important of all, suspend or bracket one’s own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers.”—quoted in Mark Schwehn’s chapter in Confessing History.
This doesn’t mean we encourage approve of everything or embrace “there’s no right or wrong, and bad folks on both sides” sorts of thinking. But it does mean that can take on bad news about the past without allowing it to discourage us or turn us into nihilists.
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