Friday, October 14, 2022

Yogi Raghunath (Ray) Cappo



How Long Does It Take to Fix a Marriage? Give the Gottmans 7 Days.
How U.S. Textbooks Helped Instill White Supremacy A new history by Donald Yacovone examines the racist ideas that endured for generations in educational materials.......... Each state sets its own curriculum guidelines, but typically they are loose, with 13,000 school districts making their own decisions on textbooks, and individual teachers exercising great autonomy. ......... Teachers also understand that in order to keep their jobs, they must stay alert to the biases and concerns of their local communities. They may adjust their curriculum accordingly. And students, as we all know, are unlikely to read dry, written-by-committee textbooks with great attention. ......... Northern publishers, universities, religious authorities and social activists were more responsible than Southern ones in disseminating an enduring ideology of white supremacy and Black inferiority — one that outlasted the institution of slavery and was expressed forcefully in school materials. In many cases, this ideology existed alongside strong beliefs in abolition and preserving the Union, tying the survival of the Republic itself to the idea of America as a white nation. .......... Many white Christian abolitionists wished to see freed Black people removed to Africa. Some white feminists argued for suffrage by saying white women were morally and intellectually superior to recently emancipated Black men. Northern white labor activists often saw Black Americans as unwanted competition for jobs. All these ideas were reflected in grade-school textbooks. ......... Harvard was the seat of the eugenics movement, whose pseudoscience was approvingly cited in teachers’ journals and textbooks. Columbia gave birth to the “Dunning school” of Civil War history, named after William Archibald Dunning, the turn-of-the-century historian who popularized the myth that Reconstruction failed not because of violent white resistance, but because Black people were not competent to participate in democracy. .......... Textbooks in each generation debated whether the abolitionist John Brown was a mad zealot or a hero. ........ Most books before the civil rights movement left Black Americans voiceless, ignoring Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth and W.E.B. Du Bois. ............ Van Evrie was a popularizer of scientific racism, such as the absurd theory of polygenesis, which held that Black and white people were separate species, with slavery being a natural state for the lower, Black order. ......... Van Evrie was “a toxic combination of Joseph Goebbels, Steve Bannon and Rupert Murdoch,” Yacovone writes, noting that his ideas are today distributed on white supremacist websites. ........... While the racist myths in that book endured for generations — for example, that enslaved people liberated by the Union Army clung to their masters rather than embrace freedom ......... Between 1936 and 1957, at least 12 states adopted a high school textbook called “The Development of America,” by Fremont P. Wirth, who called slavery a “necessary evil” for the nation’s economic growth. ........ even Rugg portrayed the conditions of slavery as “no worse than that of some employees in the mills and factories in the North.” ......... “Textbook after textbook described slaves as living in comfortable cabins,” Yacovone writes, “with plenty of nourishing food, and spending their evenings singing around campfires.” Authors and publishers elided the brutality of the Middle Passage, rape and family separation. ......... the United Daughters of the Confederacy — an organization that still exists — worked in the early 20th century to place positive books about the Ku Klux Klan in schools throughout the South. ......... quotes a Connecticut teacher who reports that one challenge in teaching the resonance of history is that many students see racism as “fixed now.” ....... Most American children, though, are fully able to observe the distressing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow that surrounds them, from segregated neighborhoods and schools to police violence. Those lived realities, Yacovone rightly suggests in his conclusion, are far more powerful than textbooks ever were or will be. .

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