[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to this special post on a holiday wish for us all!]
On a simple
shift that could change a great deal.
Because my
upcoming year in review series will focus on more upbeat topics, I wanted to
take this holiday post to engage briefly (as I also did at a bit greater length
in one of my recent
Saturday Evening Post columns)
with the current, divisive debates over education in America. I don’t imagine I
have to spell out for even the most casual or occasional reader of this blog
where I come down on the question of whether we should be teaching histories
and issues of race, racism, white supremacy, antiracism, and so on. Indeed, in
many ways, I find the voices raised in opposition to such teaching to be a
profoundly frustrating combination of breathtakingly ignorant of what actually
happens in classrooms (of every type and at every level) and strikingly direct
in their embrace of the most mythologized, whitewashed visions of the nation
and its histories and communities (guess we should have read the writing on the
wall when the 1776
Commission Report was released, on MLK Day no less, and directly attacked
“universities” as “hotbeds of anti-Americanism…that generate in students and in
the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for
this country”).
I likewise
shouldn’t have to state how wrongheaded, and just plain wrong, I find that
image of our universities and those who teach and work in them. But I will add
this: I find it profoundly frustrating that so much of the time it feels as if
inspiration is one of the very last concepts or effects associated with
academic or scholarly history (or academic/scholarly work of any kind). While I
don’t think many of us are teaching disdain, much less hate (not toward the
United States and not toward anything or anyone else either), I do think that
at times our collective scholarly emphases (in our teaching, in our writing, in
our public scholarly voices and perspectives, and so on) can veer a bit more
fully toward the hardest and most painful (and even, yes, the most pessimistic)
sides of our histories, our stories, our issues. All of which are certainly crucial
to remember, to teach and learn, to engage and understand—but all of which, I
believe and have argued
across multiple projects now, also have to be balanced by ideas and goals like
critical
optimism and critical
patriotism.
There are lots
of vital voices doing that work already, of course, and so my holiday wish,
AmericanStudies Elves, is that we learn from those voices and work who are
modeling thoughtful, nuanced, critical optimism and patriotism. Voices and
works about American history like Christina Proenza-Coles’ American
Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World
(2019). Voices and works about education like Kevin Gannon’s Radical
Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (2020). Voices and works that offer models
for where we go from here like Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin
Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020).
As we keep doing the hard work, fellow Elves, let’s make sure we’re doing
hopeful work too.
Year in review
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What wishes
would you beam out to the Elves?
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