"In the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery," write the authors of a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), "the nation needs an intervention."
This new report, titled Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, is meant to be that intervention: a resource for teachers who are eager to help their students better understand slavery — not as some "peculiar institution" but as the blood-soaked bedrock on which the United States was built.
The report, which is the work of the SPLC's Teaching Tolerance project, is also an appeal to states, school district leaders and textbook-makers to stop avoiding slavery's hard truths and lasting impact.
"Slavery is hard history," writes Hasan Kwame Jeffries in the report's preface. He is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and chair of the Teaching Hard History Advisory Board. "It is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it."
Jackie Katz, a history teacher at Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Mass., says student discomfort is a big challenge when talking honestly about slavery.
"When you bring up racism, kids start getting really defensive, thinking that they're to blame," says Katz. "To feel comfortable, you need to have a really good classroom climate, where students feel that they're not being blamed for what happened in the American past, where they don't feel shame about it. It is 100 percent not their fault that there is racism in this country. It will be their fault if they don't do anything about it in the next 20 years."
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