Public Education, Power, & Possibility

Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society...The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions...To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

- James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers”

As The Neutral Ground highlights, one of the most effective campaigns for falsely positioning this fiction as “history,” and inserting Lost Cause myth into national memory was through the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s (UDC) propaganda campaign in public schools. The UDC, and supporters, focused most of their energies, power, and money on creating textbooks, lessons, and filling public schools with portraits of Confederate figures that supported this inaccurate historical narrative. The UDC established standards for assessing history textbooks to ensure they reflected Lost Cause fictions with guidelines like, “reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.” Historically, public education prepared students to think about slavery and race in ways that were consistent with the centrality of white supremacy in American law, society, and politics. This approach highlights the power of education and ensured that even when Confederate veterans and pro-Slavery white supremacists of the past died, their ideas would live on. In fact, up until 1980 Mississippi public schools exclusively used Lost Cause textbooks when they were forced to change by a Federal Court decision (Lowen vs. Turnipseed). We continue to witness the centrality of education in battles for racial justice today as states across the US seek to implement policies that would ban Critical Race Theory (the practice of teaching history from perspectives that have historically and structurally been marginalized). Education, in this sense, has the potential to complexify how power works in shaping singular “truths” and to intervene in oppressive structures and systems.

In the film, C.J. asks, “why is it so hard to break up with the Confederacy?” While we aren’t often asked to consider the role of emotion in conversations about “history,” justice, or education, the answer to the question can be realized when we frame the Lost Cause as what it was: a fictional story. Emotional attachment, nostalgia, and fear of losing power motivated white Southerners and those white Confederates also happened to be the people with power to script and publish the stories that would legitimize their violent practices and ideas. Though, why is C.J.’s question still relevant in the 21st Century? Any attempt to address the question of white supremacy and racism in the present must also address slavery and colonialism in the past, but in order to confront these realities they must be taught in an historically-accurate way. The long history of education’s role in misrepresenting and erasing the realities of slavery; however, has perpetually failed to name the perpetrators of the atrocities and still impacts educational institutions and curricula today.

Like any good story, the fictions constructing the “Lost Cause” narrative, conjure a lot of feelings. Emotions are powerful political motivations, especially when accompanied by ideas of morality, superiority, and bolstered through power structures. Much like the ideas historically used by whites to justify the forced enslavement of people of African descent did not suddenly vanish when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation; the emotional connections to ideas of whiteness, the “goodness” of the South, or desires for whites to claim innocence and to sustain power are still very much alive. Importantly, this false history and its contemporary manifestations are not only tied to power in the form of supremacist ideas, but also to money. Colonization and land theft in addition to the institution of slavery as the first economic framework in this country - is foundationally connected to the wealth of white people, institutions, and communities and undgirds the systemic economic disparities people and communities of color face in America today. In this way, as historian Ira Berlin (2006) states, “Slavery thus made class as it made race, and, entwining the two processes, it mystified both.”

Despite Jefferson Davis’s 1881 claim that, “As a mere historical fact, we have seen that African servitude...” was “the mildest and most humane of all institutions to which the name ‘slavery’ has ever been applied” (Davis, 1881), slavery was neither mild nor humane. Since the perpetrators of violence, who benefited from colonization and slavery, also had the power to frame the violence they enacted against Black and Indegenous people, the foundations of our contemporary understandings of colonization, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism were unequal from the beginning - particularly with regards to power and race. For people of African decent who were enslaved, the truth of slavery was suffering and death. For white Americans who forced human beings into bondage, the truth of slavery was life and prosperity (Horton, 2006). The Neutral Ground invites us to consider how, what scholar Christina Sharpe (2016) refers to as “the afterlives of slavery,” haunt and harm us today.

To counter the notion that the past should remain in the past, we can point to other truths like how the Lost Cause myth has been put to use to benefit white supremacy and how the life of ideas has social, cultural, and material consequences. An example of this is the second emergence of the KKK as a response to the swan song of the Lost Cause, “The Birth of a Nation” by D.W. Griffith. The wildly popular film retells the Civil War while employing blackface to paint Black Amerians as violent savages. It plays on fears of Black uprisings, effectively encouraging white Americans to take up arms against the mobs of invading negroes. Or the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre when white mobs burned an economically thriving Black community to the ground. Or the January 6, 2021 insurgence at the Capital by white supremacists and in contemporary political debates that are challenging Critical Race Theory and its effectiveness in schools.