Ignorance is nothing new. But there is something new, to me at least, in the way it now gains traction as an official policy response to combat being “woke” in many school districts and in entire states. I had thought ignorance was something to overcome. That was why I thought we went to school.
I hadn’t thought it could be intentional, a practice furthered to maintain some illusory sense of innocence. But that is exactly what I see happening with today’s opposition to teaching the history of racism in this country.
Joe Brusky/Flickr
The author, second from left, alongside fellow civil rights activists, including former Wisconsin Secretary of State Vel Phillips, far right.
When the proceedings of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, were broadcast on television, I saw Fannie Lou Hamer testify before the credentials committee about having been jailed and beaten for the audacity of trying to register to vote. I was, at first, startled. I had been taught that all adult American citizens had the right to vote and were free to exercise that right. As the truth began to sink in, I was outraged. Though I was an A student in my history classes, I had never heard a word in school about the reality: African Americans were still being systematically excluded from voting throughout the South.
Wanting to right this wrong, I volunteered with five other Milwaukee students to work in Alabama on a Southern Christian Leadership Conference summer voter registration project. That was the beginning of my lifelong commitment to social and racial justice. Eventually, I joined the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council and became involved in the historic 1967 and 1968 open housing marches in Milwaukee alongside movement leader Father James Groppi, who I would later marry.
I learned of the Trail of Tears—the removal of the Cherokee from Tennessee and Georgia to Oklahoma—when I was in elementary school, but not from formal history lessons in school then or even later. It was from the Walt Disney Davy Crockett: King of Wild Frontier series in those days when we had just three choices on television: NBC, ABC, and CBS.
Disney reigned as our family’s Sunday evening choice. My two sisters, brother, and I wouldn’t miss it. Davy Crockett in Congress, Davy Crockett arguing against the Indian Removal Act of 1830 for the Cherokee, Davy Crockett quitting Congress and once again donning his coonskin cap in protest over its passage, Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Seeing this history on television 100 years after the historical events, boys started wearing faux coonskin caps. Kids begged to go see the Alamo, celebrated in a catchy Davy Crockett tune. If my family took summer vacations, we didn’t go farther than northern Indiana, where an aunt and several cousins lived, so seeing the Alamo receded to my dreams.
The students I’ve taught do not want someone else’s idea of a feel-good education.
It stayed there, remarkably resilient over the decades. The Alamo was the one site in Texas I wanted to see when I decided to go forward with plans to attend the March 2020 meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in San Antonio, despite growing concern that the COVID-19 pandemic was taking hold in this country. I may or may not have contracted COVID during that trip (there were no tests; it could have been a cold), but I definitely saw the Alamo. I was surprised to see how small, how tucked into downtown San Antonio it was, and how overshadowed by tall hotels and shops it had become.
But what of the Cherokee?
On vacation the year I graduated from high school, I worked as a nanny and traveled to Tennessee as part of the job. We saw a theater production near Gatlinburg, a Cherokee production of the story of the Cherokee removal. The children I cared for may have been as stunned as I was to learn this story as a child.
When visiting a friend in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, I learned about Indian boarding schools. She had taken a job reviewing grant applications in the Department of the Interior. Among these applications were some for dormitory aides at Indian boarding schools, whose job it was to catch students who would try to escape the school in the middle of the night, intending to walk back to their reservations. Why were students trying to run away? There had to be a deeper problem. She recommended denial of these grants and sent her decision on to her supervisor for confirmation. The supervisor reversed her decision. Refusing to cooperate with what she saw as a wrong-headed policy, my friend quit and went back to teaching at a public high school.
I finished college and graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in English in 1977. One year earlier, the English Department offered its first African American literature course. The professor teaching that course was not awarded tenure.
When I joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, a colleague who was scheduled to teach a multicultural literature course asked if I knew of other examples of Indian removal in addition to Cherokee. I did not. He and I both set about digging ourselves out of our ignorance. It took years. It is still ongoing. But I read enough and attended professional development conferences to try to fill in the gaps.
Eventually, I would teach an introductory course in Native American literature. When we read works by Pulitzer Prize-winning Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich that referenced boarding schools, for example, students needed background information. The first time I presented the history of these compulsory boarding schools, I was surprised to see some students respond the way I had responded to what I had learned from Fannie Lou Hamer. Many of them were angry—but not in the way politicians of 2023 suggest would be the case. They did not feel guilt or anger over some imaginary personal blame this information placed on them. Instead, they demanded to know, “Why did no one ever tell me this before?” They were angry at having been kept in ignorance.
I learned to expect this response semester after semester. But this reality has been deliberately obscured in the new push to omit large portions of U.S. history from classrooms and textbooks. To give politicians the benefit of any doubt, perhaps they have never taken a course like the courses I taught myself how to teach. They have not seen how students interact with this material in the classroom. They risk igniting anger. The students I’ve taught do not want someone else’s idea of a feel-good education.
My own ignorance and accidental education led me to want to know, to fill in the gaps in my formal education. It led to an ongoing concern with social and racial justice. It also led me to value the truth-tellers and the telling of hard truths. The students my colleagues and I have taught want no less.
In their desire to keep students ignorant, these anti-woke politicians may actually be fostering the next generation of activists.