Ms. Morgan, your sincerity is as clear as your consternation. Like most people of European descent, especially white Christian Americans, it sounds like you are not clear on the role white people play in the historical atrocities still playing out today.
White culture is the answer. The un-examined ways of being, thinking, believing and behaving have been entrenched in white culture so long, that white people today honestly believe that aggression and violence is human nature (meaning genetic, or biological, and thus inescapable for all humans regardless of race, ethnicity etc.). Nothing could be further from the truth.
Human nature is peaceful, community-oriented, and risk averse. Be it a volcano or an army, people will do almost anything to avoid violence and destruction. To free themselves from violence, people have crossed deserts, mountain ranges, frozen tundra, and oceans in search of a peaceful place to live. If that isn’t bravery, and the love of peace, I don’t know what is.
The reason is obvious: people need peace and stability to grow, multiply, and develop to their fullest. No one can teach children, map the universe, invent mathematics, find a cure for cancer, or learn to play the piano, if they are fighting a war every day – right?
European culture revolves around violence and aggression – not peace. In fact, white people consider peaceable people weak, stupid, backward savages – in need of saving, civilizing and education in white culture.
James Baldwin once wrote, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”
Ms. Morgan, if history is trapped in you, how can you help students who are trapped in history? I’m no expert, but I think the answer begins in a paradigm shift. By definition that means people making fundamental changes in their approach or underlying assumptions about themselves, human nature, and history. I will elaborate.
When teaching history, developing student’s ability to identify the difference between peaceable people defending themselves and aggressive people attacking them is essential. Without that essential understanding, all humans appear to be brutal, violent, predators and aggressors. For example, if I am forced to defend myself against an attacker, I will be violent. However, my violence is self-defense, not a thought-out, calculated decision to attack someone else. Students need to understand that difference.
History becomes much clearer when students begin asking who was the aggressor and who was defending themselves? The Tulsa Race Massacre and Jim Crow was aggression. The Watts Riots in Los Angeles and the recent Black Lives Matter protests were self-defense.
Learning history helps children understand their own personal choices in life. They can decide to be peaceful and productive people, or violent and aggressive people. White children struggle with this choice, because white culture insists that peaceable people are stupid, lazy, weak, and backwards. That’s a shame, because violent, aggressive people are never satisfied, content or happy, because they are at war with their own human nature. Conversely, peaceable, productive people are satisfied, content and happy, because that is human nature.
Perhaps two important historical questions students might answer are… #1. Why has the United States never had a Department of Peace? #2. Why does no American university, especially the Ivy Leagues, offer a degreed course of study in Peace? IMHO, no Doctorate degree in Peace available anywhere in the United States says everything we need to know about white cultural dominance.
Giving up the idea that human nature is violent, aggressive and cruel may not be possible for white people who’ve been taught that attacking and demeaning peaceable people is “normal, human nature.”
Ms. Morgan, I don’t know if those thoughts are worthwhile to you, but your sincerity compelled me to try.
