To End Racism, Teach Modern History
Beginning in the late 1970s, after 10 years of relative calm, racial intolerance began to spread across American college campuses with alarming speed and intensity.
Some ascribe this antagonism to the resentment of white students toward a selection process that they contend admits “less-qualified” black students at the expense of more talented whites. That analysis can be only impressionistic, because the U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed racially exclusive admission programs.
The resentment is deeper than a reaction to a mythical unfair advantage. For example, the admission of so-called jocks has been similarly criticized for decades, yet the harassment of athletes has never equaled that now experienced by black students.
I submit that the hostility results from widespread racial isolation before college and inadequate U.S. history courses in high school.
The overwhelming majority of white college students graduate from virtually all-white high schools and live in comparable neighborhoods. Similarly, very few black students experience more than token racial integration before coming to college. Students who have personal friends from the other race are fewer still.
They are not only separated from each other; their American history courses seldom reach the Eisenhower Administration. When recent history is taught, it is covered fleetingly at the end of the course. This unavoidable rush often generates more confusion than enlightenment. One student admitted to me that in the haste of covering the post-World War II years in two weeks, he and some classmates confused the extremely right-wing Sen. Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s with his liberal namesake, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, of the following decade.
How could inadequate high school history courses breed the animosity that we have seen in dozens of news reports in recent years? If we reflect for a moment we will realize that these students came late to the social development of the United States. On average, today’s college seniors were only 10 years old when President Jimmy Carter took office.
With no experiential or educational knowledge of the past 40 years, these young people cannot grasp the enormousness of the problem of ridding our society of historic racism. Furthermore, they don’t appreciate how close in time we are to the 1960s, when a strife-torn nation took legislative action to rectify a form of apartheid in this country.
Though less than a quarter of a century ago, there was a period when blacks were often killed for attempting to vote. It was a bizarre time by today’s standards, but in certain states it was illegal to transfuse the blood of a black person into the body of a white person or bury his remains in a “white” graveyard. Black education was more than 90% segregated, integrated employment outside government agencies was almost nonexistent, and television might well have broadcast from Iceland, black participation was so infrequent.
Census Bureau statistics show that the average American is approximately 32 years old and the average black American is five years younger. These numbers bless us and curse us. It is a blessing that the average college student cannot remember a legally segregated America. We are cursed, however, if that student’s only image of Americans different from himself is one gleaned from television, the movies, popular magazines or pre-1950s history.
This “younger half” of America has lived during a period of unprecedented advancement for the highly visible, albeit small, black middle class. It is significant, too, that this period coincided with an almost explosive growth of televised athletics, situation comedies and soul-rock music shows (all areas where blacks are disproportionately represented). A society dominated by the visual medium cannot ignore such a distortion. It has projected an exaggerated image of the progress of black Americans, and this may have spawned the intolerance found on many campuses and racial violence in communities, as at Howard Beach, N.Y.
Somehow the nation must understand that freedom for its black citizens didn’t spring full-blown from Lincoln’s pen. That while the right to check into a first-class hotel was won a quarter of a century ago, the ability to check out of one is still beyond the means of millions of black Americans. Racism is not the cause of all the problems afflicting black Americans, but we are courting disaster if we permit the most critical 40 years in American race relations to fall through the cracks and an atmosphere of “ ‘they’re’ getting everything” to prevail.
Enormous energy and creativity are required to deal with the problems of race and inequity. It would be cruel folly to expect the black middle class to do this alone. The entire nation must help to dismantle what the Kerner Commission, reporting on racial violence in the 1960s, described as “two societies; separate and unequal.”
A significant start would be to formalize the teaching of the history of our country since World War II. A knowledge of those years is so crucial to current sensitivities that it is time to divide American history, like algebra, into two courses: American History I and American History II.
