contributed photo
I’m still thinking about power and powerlessness as I try to imagine the day-to-day realities of my ancestors , Catherine and George, slaving in the rice fields that are now “Brookgreen Gardens” (see part 1).
I’m thinking about them while trying to remember what I was taught about American slavery and Blackness as a little black girl in a room full of black and brown children sitting in front of a white teacher in an elementary school on Lenox Avenue in Harlem.
I remember one lesson vividly. It troubled me at the time, and I never forgot how it made me feel. As an adult, l now know that there is often a distinct difference between what a teacher thinks he’s teaching, and what students are actually learning.
On that day, my 5th grade teacher, a white male, taught me about race, power and invisibility. Intuitively, I understood, but could not articulate, that he was modeling the dynamics of power and unconscious racial bias — showing me that teachers and schools could be complicit in sustaining them.
It was meant to be a simple American history lesson about the accomplishments and contributions of all of the different cultural groups that were important in America’s past. But he only told us about Europeans: British and French, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish.
He told us that they should be celebrated because they were heroic; they ‘discovered’ places and ‘conquered’ people. They, according to him, made America a great nation.
He was facing a room full of well-behaved, engaged black and brown 5th graders, but he wasn’t seeing us at all. He was oblivious to our reality, our value, our significance. He didn’t see us as part of the American story except as the detritus left from America’s history of enslaving human beings.
Research has deepened my understanding of that moment in time. I now understand that schools are microcosms of society, including those who work in them. So the same biases that define their thinking and behavior outside of school, enter the building with them. Teachers and principals, board members and curriculum designers, superintendents and cafeteria workers and secretaries etc. — all reflect a wide array of attitudes and dispositions regarding race and culture.
This means that school communities replicate the same racialized belief systems, hierarchies of power, and structural bias that exist in society. It means that those who have power control what is, and is not, taught in schools.
This goes far beyond formal curricular decisions. It encompasses the subtle hierarchies of human and cultural value that are insinuated through overt and covert personal behaviors and de facto school policies, like discipline — who is suspended or expelled — and the racial makeup of “gifted and talented” programs.
What was I actually taught about slavery as a little black girl in that school in Harlem? What did my textbook highlight? What did it leave out? What did it teach me about the real lives of my ancestors, and by extension, what was I being taught about my own identity as a Black child? What was I internalizing about the relationship between whiteness and blackness and power in America?
Did my textbook focus on the brutality of a system that was structured to dehumanize and exploit humans for profit? Or did the textbook look at slavery through the lens of economics and capitalism, and present slavery as a simple matter of profit and loss, with people who were enslaved as fodder for the profitable plantation machine?
I remember that the most salient images of Africans and slavery were those showing the fierceness and primitiveness of Africans. My ancestors were never presented in these textbooks as noble or heroic, like Europeans were.
Power protects; power controls. Power creates the frames, the images, ideas and people we are taught to value, and those we are taught to denigrate and despise. Power can even teach us to denigrate our own selves; power creates the “heroes” — who are usually white and male.
I was not taught in school to value African history. I was not taught in school that African history pre-dated the institution of American slavery. I never learned about sophisticated early African kingdoms like Mali, Kush and Songhai, or about the brilliance and creativity of African peoples before, during and after the period of American slavery. They were not included in history lessons because it was presented from a Eurocentric perspective, and those in power controlled (and continue to control) the narrative.
The world will never know about the inventions of countless enslaved people, whose ideas were stolen and monetized by their owners.
As I write this, I’m remembering those four stainless steel sculptural figures at Brookgreen Gardens: the plantation owner, the overseer, the enslaved African male and the enslaved African female. I was taught that these were the major players in the macabre centuries-long American tragedy. I’m remembering the related, clearly-defined stereotypes I grew up with, fixed in my mind since childhood, that are a testament to the powerful collusion of schools and society and textbook publishers to create a durable simplistic racist narrative for their own purposes:
Enslaved person: happy, good-natured, slow, child-like, dependent, lazy, backward, unintelligent, incorrigible, bestial, primitive, uneducable, crude, uncultured, immoral, sub-human, pagan, savage, irreligious, dependent, physical and prone to violence…
Slaveowners: benevolent, patriarchal, moral, Christian, ethical, honorable, principled, powerful, intellectual, successful, in control, protective, paternal…
Slavery: centered on African captives, not on white captors; bad, but a condition of circumstance; unfortunate, but necessary to build America and the economy of the South; a successful economic strategy focused on cotton production; caused the Civil War; divided the country into two clearly defined halves (i.e. the South = ’bad,’ the North = ‘good’); demonized and tarnished the south and southerners; celebrated and elevated the north and northerners; was responsible for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln…
Simply put: South = Slavery, Africa = Slaves, Cotton = Wealth.
I do not recall learning of the importance of rice as a commodity or the significance of rice plantations as a source of the South’s economic success. I recollect that that all narratives about slavery focused on cotton production, and most pictures of enslaved people showed them in cotton fields with large bags of cotton hanging from their shoulders.
I should have learned — in the 5th grade or the 6th grade or the 8th grade or at any point in my academic life in an American public school — about rice production. Not simply because it was as important to the story of the antebellum South as cotton, but also because it helps debunk deeply-embedded stereotypes of enslaved Africans.
As a New Yorker, ‘rice’ merely conjured up images of the red and white box labeled Carolina Rice that was a staple in our house throughout my childhood.
However, during my trek through those South Carolina rice fields, I learned that it was a significant driver of the South’s prosperity. Rice planting is complex and technology-dependent, and its success depended on the knowledge and expertise that Africans brought with them from Africa, where they had already perfected the complex process.
The enslaved Africans who worked in American rice fields were highly prized and sought after because their experience, knowledge, and skill could be exploited and monetized to increase the wealth and prestige of white land owners.
Their skills involved a superior understanding of math, science, mechanical engineering, and physics. They had to understand tidal flow, weather, chemistry, and how to determine the salinity of the water, wind speed and water currents. They had to know how to clear the land, cutting down and uprooting huge trees using primitive hand tools. It took years to clear a single acre of land to make it fertile and suitable for rice farming.
Owners of enslaved people knew the actual value of this knowledge and experience. They knew they needed strong and smart people, functioning as engineers, farmers, meteorologists and other scientists.
I’m thinking about Catherine and George again, and wondering what their lives were like; what roles did they play on Brookgreen Plantation so long ago?
The high level of skill required to have a successful rice crop belies the stereotype of Africans as ignorant; the clearing of the fields belies the myth of Africans as lazy. The work was so grueling that most slaves succumbed to disease and death after three to five years.
Without their intelligence and experience, the rice crop would never have prospered; but white slaveowners told themselves and the world a different story. Power perpetuated the ideology of white paternalism and dominance, serving a white supremacist narrative. This narrative served the incorrect and immoral belief that racialized structures of power are fixed, immutable, inevitable, and right. So Whites perpetuated the myth of Blacks as perpetual children: “boys” who would always need to be cared for and directed and be guided — by Whites.
This kind of cognitive dissonance that props up racialized hierarchies of social dominance has wide-spread negative consequences for generations.
As time passed, Brookgreen became much more than a haunting from the past. It became a lens through which I saw slavery in broader socio-historical contexts as well as a mirror that allowed me to look at myself and how my ancestral connection to slavery shaped me.
I thought about how America’s racial hierarchies have immeasurably traumatized Black children. I also began to think about the sinister racial socialization process that taught me to question my own value, and I realized that my entire life has been dedicated to resisting devaluation.
Many years ago, psychologist Gordon Allport wrote about the impact of racial prejudice on children, and he helped to clarify the depth of the problem. Presenting the issue as a parable, Allport said:
“Ask yourself what would happen to your own personality if you heard it said over and over again that you were lazy…expected to steal and had inferior blood. Suppose this opinion was forced on you by the majority of your fellow-citizens. And suppose nothing that you could do would change this opinion – because you happen to have black skin…One’s reputation, whether false or true, cannot be hammered, hammered, hammered, into one’s head without doing something to one’s character.”
A child who has internalized a lifetime of messages telling him that he is not valued by his society, is less likely to value himself. He is less likely to realize his natural intellectual or physical capacities or his ability to compete in school or in society on equal terms. According to Allport, such a child might become defensive, withdraw, and his natural self-love may devolve into self-hate.
It’s also important to realize that racism, discrimination and prejudice does not simply damage Black children; it damages all children, including white children as well — as detailed in Heather McGee’s book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Heal Together.
When Black children are surreptitiously taught that they have less value because of their dark skin, white children are implicitly taught that this is fair and right, and it shapes their view of the world and their place in it.
When white children are taught that they have more value and should have more power in this society because their skin is white, both Black and white children are implicitly taught that this is fair and right, and it shapes their view of the world and their place in it.
Tragically, all children internalize these distorted values over time because they are reinforced by schools, popular culture, organized religion and other social structures.
These ‘lessons’ reflect the dissonance between America’s official identity as the definitive world democracy and its de facto reality as a country with a racist substructure. They reflect the tension between America’s Constitutionalized commitment to equality and justice and its laws, policies and practices that reinforce white supremacy and Black inferiority.
This cuts more deeply now that I understand slavery in an intensely personal way.
I understand that America’s early prosperity was built on slavery; quite literally on the backs of the enslaved, including my ancestors. People who chose to engage in legalized human sacrifice, also considered themselves civilized, cultured, entitled, genteel, and godly.
This was not limited to the South. New England participated in the Triangle Trade, trafficking in humans as well, there were Jesuit enslavers, complicit Wall Street bankers. A country that was aggressively Christian and moralistic was also capable of being aggressively immoral — when it was profitable.
I am reflecting on the ways that Black people are treated like ‘enemies’ by their own country; not full citizens; not equal; not welcome. Black and brown children continue to be viewed through a narrow racial lens, in one-dimensional negative racial stereotypes.
We see echoes of this all around; the images, narratives and mythology of Black inferiority that was memorialized in the minstrelsy of the past, re-appear. Well-known companies advertised and sold clothing and accessories that are shockingly racist and insensitive, trivializing painful aspects of American history and once again, seeking profit from human suffering. For example, designers Gucci and Prada incorporated black-faced minstrel figures in their clothing lines, as did performer Katy Perry. Adidas sold sneakers with shackles attached, and American Eagle sold shackle bracelets. Burberry sold a hoodie with a noose hanging from the neck.
In response to social pressure, all of the companies stopped selling those products. Burberry apologized.
Why would legitimate, well known high-end companies try to brand racism? Why would they seek to make a profit by evoking lynching or enslavement or demeaning racist depictions of people of African ancestry?
Perhaps, one answer is that American culture has unconsciously normalized anti-Black racism. However, the more likely answer is that the racism on display is a conscious and intentional way of saying that Blacks should be shackled and dominated, and the racist imagery is a reminder of who is in control. Confederate statues served the same purpose.
Consider this in the context of present day racialized educational disparities that show that Black children are under-represented in advanced classes, under-perform in math and reading, and drop out of school at higher-than-average rates.
Consider this in the context of research that shows that racism is a factor in the disproportionately high incidence of low-birth weight babies for Black women (this means that racism is impacting Black children even before they are born).
Consider this in the context of the high incidence of police shootings of unarmed Black men, and the alarming school-to-prison pipeline that funnels Black children, mainly males, into the prison system at disproportionally high rates.
In many ways, my schools, teachers, and country have failed me and continue to fail Black and white children. Denial and self-delusion does not serve any of America’s children. At a young age, children are being programmed to pledge to values like equality and freedom and justice, while simultaneously being socialized to use ‘race’ as a measure of human value.
Ambivalence about teaching the hard truths about the relationship between America’s present and America’s past underserves all students. And yet, many educators have succumbed to outside pressure to make the past stay in the past. Teachers are being told to sanitize history as a concession to those who believe that discussing race and racism harms young white children.
Significantly, I have yet to hear anyone express concern about how discussions of race, racism, and slavery potentially traumatizes Black children of African ancestry.
We need to talk about the past. The past always insinuates itself into the present; and this invites us to confront things that can make us uncomfortable or ashamed.
Can the idea of American exceptionalism co-exist alongside American mythmaking and hypocrisy about the horrors of its past in which Black children were sent to work in rice fields as early as age 9 or 10?
Can America, the exceptional, divinely sanctioned nation that has ‘In God We Trust’ stamped on all of its currency, co-exist alongside the subversion of its belief that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”?
We can assume that Thomas Jefferson would undoubtably answer ‘Yes!’ because despite his critique of slavery as a “cruel war against human nature,” “execrable commerce,” and an “assemblage of horrors,” his self-interest and materialism triumphed over his sense of morality. Jefferson enslaved more than 600 humans throughout his life, made a fourteen-year-old, Sally Hemings, his mistress and the mother of several of his children. He never freed her.
Inadvertently, in his emotional response to George Floyd’s public murder, the celebrated African American coach, Doc Rivers, provides a deeply personal perspective about America and race. Describing the gaping racial abyss that exists in America, he simply said “We keep loving this country, but the country doesn’t love us back.”
Edited excerpt from Dr. Holmes’ book in-the-works, Finding My ‘Self’ on a Rice Plantation in Georgetown, SC: Meditations on Slavery, Being Black, and American. Read Dr. Holmes’ first book, Justice in Search of Leaders: A Handbook for Equity-Driven School Leadership.
Connect with Dr. Holmes directly via LinkedIn or GLHOLMES@uscb.edu