Counterpoint: Into American history without fear

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Because I am a well-established American historian, I believe it is my ethical duty to expose the multiple atrocities Katherine Kersten committed against our nation’s history and its dedicated public school teachers in her latest Star Tribune opinion piece opposing Minnesota’s new ethnic studies curriculum (“Extremist ideology has already hijacked Minnesota’s social studies classes,” April 7). She concludes it with the mega-decibel warning that, by adopting this program, “Minnesota has sleepwalked into an extremist hijacking of our public schools.”

Kersten’s purported “hijackers” are members of the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition, an inclusive, statewide working group of public school educators and community leaders. In reality, Kersten contends, their attacks on public education are inspired by deeply pro-Palestinian, anti-American biases, and to support her indictment she distorts a single coalition member’s personal affirmation that “‘Given the devastating impact of Israeli colonialism,’ ‘studying Israeli settler colonialism in comparison to U.S. settler colonialism’ is ‘at the heart of the discipline of Ethnic Studies.’”

To further bolster her charge of rampant anti-Americanism among educators, Kersten cites the ethnic studies standards for teachers, which instruct that students should consider how various groups of Americans have fought for “liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power” as well as how to “analyze the impact of colonialism” and “dominant and non-dominant narratives.” In this regard, Kersten damns as anti-patriotic the guidelines’ insistence on the importance of students coming to terms with historical concepts such as “decolonization,” “dispossession” and “resistance.”

Summary of Kersten’s article completed, let’s address those multiple atrocities she commits on American history by composing it. This task is so straightforward that any informed citizen can do it simply by answering these obvious questions about the American Revolution:

Didn’t Sam Adams, George Washington and all those other founding fathers “fight for liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power” by English politicians intent on preserving their empire? Was not the Declaration of Independence an announcement of a war of “decolonization”? Didn’t the slogan “no taxation without representation” express “resistance” against financial “dispossession” by the British government? (All the words surrounded by quotation marks are Kersten’s selections from the ethnic studies standards).

But wait. There’s more:

Did the 9,000 Black patriots who fought alongside slaveholding George Washington share his views about American independence, or did they explain it differently by constructing their own “non-dominant narrative” of Black liberation? Same question regarding the almost 20,000 Black enslaved people who secured their freedom by escaping to join the British.

And still more:

Weren’t both the Cherokee Nation’s choice to support the patriots’ cause and the Mohawks’ to ally with the British attempts to put a stop to white settler colonialism? Did the women activists and patriots who called themselves “Daughters of Liberty” entirely share their husbands’ understandings of the Revolution, or did they construct their own “non-dominant narrative” of female empowerment?

When listing her final objection to the ethnic studies guidelines, Kersten makes clear why she avoids contending with the history of the nation she presumably loves so intensely. In the final analysis, she grounds her objections in her fear that students will grapple with historical facts, problems and questions that will make them dissatisfied with today’s oppressive customs and laws. Teachers, she complains, will pressure their students to use their learning (using concepts such as “decolonization,” “non-dominant narratives” and “liberation”) as a “launching pad for action” for resolving “present and controversial global problems.”

But such aims should inspire admiration, not fear. There is only good that can result from asking Minnesota students to consider historical questions such as these:

If 9,000 Black soldiers fought with slaveholder Washington while 20,000 enslaved people found freedom by fleeing to the British side, was the American Revolution also a Black rebellion against slavery and systemic white supremacy? Could such a huge Black insurrection have something to do with the Revolution’s declaration that “all men are created equal”?

If you happen to be a Black student enrolled in Minneapolis North High School, where might answering this question lead you next? Why not start with George Floyd and then head backward into the history of slavery itself — to avenging slave rebels such as Nat Turner and Joseph Cinque, to violence inspired by John Brown, to Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved mistress and mother of his six enslaved illegitimate children, to the American Colonization Society’s program (which Abraham Lincoln once endorsed) of sending Black people “back to Africa”? These discoveries automatically raise more troubling questions about “liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power,” in this instance about ever-expanding systems of enslavement and systematic white racism and the exceptionally courageous people, Black and white, who battled against them.

Could you embark on a similar historical voyage back to the Revolution as a Native student enrolled in Bemidji Senior High School or a female student of any color? Would you be returning with your own list of disturbing contemporary questions bearing on massive Native impoverishment in our state or the assault on women’s right to bodily independence by right-wing Minnesota politicians? Of course.

By like measure, the preferred destination for a historically voyaging student enrolled in Austin High School might well be pre-annexation Texas in the 1820s, not Boston in 1776. Why? Because the Austin metro area’s population is about 32% Hispanic or Latino residents, and that number is rising rapidly. What can best explain who these newest of neighbors are, why they arrived “here” and what sort of culture they are bringing with them? How about a deep dive into multicultural history?

And finally, what insights would historical voyaging offer to students of all complexions seated next to one another in a class room in St. Paul’s Central High School? Above all is the realization that they have no reason whatever for feeling personal guilt or shame for the sins and sufferings of previous generations. That was then. This is now. Instead, they (like all of us) can be guided by what our conflicted multicultural past teaches in order to embrace our common humanity and work together to bring our nation closer to fulfilling its founding principle — that all of us are created equal.

When Kersten sneeringly labels this process a young people’s “launching pad” for politically destructive behavior that, to me, actually means empowering them to intelligently question, criticize and attempt to change for the better the world we adults have created for them.

In the final analysis a sense of deep cultural/racial apprehension, I believe, explains Kersten’s historical astigmatism and why she warning us that “Minnesota has sleepwalked into an extremist hijacking of our public schools.” Such an outlook goes far to explain why such a dyed-in-the-wool patriot harbors such a desperate fear of American history.

James Brewer Stewart is James Wallace Professor of History, Emeritus, Macalester College and creator of the antiracist YouTube series “Jim Stewart’s Historical Tonic For Fragile White Folks” (tinyurl.com/stewart-youtube).