DeSantis signs bill limiting tenure at Florida public universities

[freeloader]

The problem doesn't come from teaching students about negative aspects of history, it comes from teaching "their" version of history while conveniently leaving out important parts of history.

America had black slaves, fact. Grind this over and over into students' minds while conveniently leaving out that countries in Africa were the ones selling slaves. There were millions of white slaves too, and oh btw, the United States of America was one of the first countries to abolish slavery.

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Being proud of American history doesn't mean you have to agree with everything. For example, the 2nd Iraq war was based on lies IMO. And putting the legal U.S. Japanese citizens in concentration camps during WW2 were a horrible thing to do and a blatant violation of constitutional rights.

I can only speak from my experience, as someone who has read, been taught, and taught the history of slavery in the United States.  

The mechanism by which slave traders acquired slaves was always a part of the narrative.  This included talking about the mines and mills in Europe where workers (many of whom were paid starvation wages) labored to produce finished goods that were shipped to Africa to purchase slaves.  It also included talking about slave catchers and wars in Africa, the result of which were slaves brought to the coast to be sold to white Europeans.  If included discussion of the very difficult decision that coastal leaders (kings and chieftains) had to make: we know from documentary evidence that leaders in many cases had to decide between capturing people from farther inland (or serving as middle-men for those catching people, particularly as time went on and coastal areas had their populations depleted and as people fled from the coast) or having white Europeans steal people from their own community.  

I was taught and taught in my classroom that there was a fundamental difference between slavery in Europe/European colonies in the New World and in Africa.  In Africa, it was always much easier to move between slave and non-slave status.  Many slaves were "adopted" into their new families and communities.  Their children often were not considered slaves.  Slaves were routinely returned for ritualistic and cultural reasons.  A slave who was captured in a war might also be freed in the next war a few months or years later.  This was not the pattern in the British North American colonies.  There were some places, particularly in Brazil, where the bounds of slavery operated differently than in the United States.  I also taught that the institution of slavery in the New World changed, often for the worse, societies in Africa and that the presence of slave ships on their coast was the necessary precondition for those changes.  

If a person put a gun to your head and said you could send your friends, neighbors, and cousins to live in slavery OR could get some people from the next town/village/kingdom/etc. who would be sent to live in slavery and, in exchange, you would be made wealthy and would never have to worry about your enemies again, which would you chose?  Just because an African leader made a deal with the white men, it doesn't absolve the white man of responsibility.  Victim blaming is really easy, but it doesn't make it right. 

At the end of the day, I was teaching American history to American undergraduates in the United States.  I had to draw a box around my discussions.  I couldn't teach everything. So, I focused on the British North American colonies, the settlers who came here voluntarily, the slaves who were brought here agains their will, and the indentured people who could look more like settlers or slaves depending on their situation and the time.  So, in other words, I couldn't teach everything.  I spent 10 years studying history at the graduate level, reading hundreds of books and thousands of articles.  I couldn't and wouldn't want to teach even a fraction of that. The only version of history that I could possible teach was my version of history; I literally could not have taught anything else.

I do think there is a tendency for many teachers and professors, particularly in history, but in other disciplines as well, to be too critical of the United States.  Part of that is how historians are trained.  For Americanists, in particularly, you learn about the triumphalist narratives of American history that really dominated the discipline until the mid-20th century when new subjects and new methodologies started to become widely taught and valued.  There is some hostility to some of the traditional sub disciplines, such as political, economic, and military history.  I experienced this first-hand, having people make assumptions about me personally and politically because of what I chose to study.  You spend years studying the discipline's literature that is on the cutting edge (things like Subaltern studies, fat history, and so forth) and understand that the handful of jobs that are available are often in these areas as opposed to more traditional areas, so maybe your thinking and focus starts to drift because you want to actually get a job with your PhD.  

On the other hand, I also became MUCH more liberal in grad school in history.  I became more liberal, in part, because I came to understand how groups, including countries, create narratives for themselves.  Those narratives are not reality, even if they are told repeatedly and believed widely.  I studied, for years, how the American government crafted narratives about being a nation of freedom, liberty, and justice, while perpetuating white supremacy at home and abroad.  I read about the corruption of our state by wealthy men and corporations.  I read so many things that made me truly sad to be an American.  But for all of that, I believe that our nation is good or at least has the potential to be good.