Exactly What Country Are They Talking About?

To everything there is a season. Like so many people, I’m trying to figure out what to do in a world where people with power and resources are energetically, intentionally, and consequentially shredding the web of our interconnectedness and interdependence — with each other, with our planet, and with all living and nonliving things. Stacey Abrams says we should think of a thing that we can do, that gives us joy in the doing, and that needs doing — and then do that. I don’t know if adding more words to the world needs doing, but, for me, at least, it meets the other criteria. So here goes. In this space, and from time to time, I’ll say a few things. Hopefully these words will connect with someone, somewhere. If that someone is you, please feel free to write me back.

Craig Trainor is the Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Office for Civil Rights, at the United States Department of Education. On Valentine’s Day this year, two weeks after the Department pushed out 50 employees for their alleged relationship to programs, policies, or trainings related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Trainor wrote a letter to Department of Education employees.

“Educational institutions,” Trainor wrote, “have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory practices and policies.”

Trainor is saying that the United States is not built upon systemic and structural racism. He means to say that anyone teaching other people that this nation is built on systemic and structural racism is practicing toxic indoctrination.

I’ve taught graduate level university classes in sociocultural approaches to education and Critical Discourse Analysis. I’ve also been an English Language Arts classroom teacher in public and private K12 schools. I’m pretty certain that Trainor would call me a toxic indoctrinator.

The problem is, Trainor is 100% wrong; this country is built upon systemic and structural injustices in multiple and intersecting ways.

Let’s take the word built figuratively, to mean the establishment of our political organization, the enactment and enforcement of our laws, practices, and policies governing land, property ownership, finance, marriage, reproduction, resource distribution, and freedom of movement. Such figurative building would include, for example, the 3/5 clause in the United States Constitution (Article 1, Section 2, drafted in 1787) which established that for the purposes of determining a state’s total population for legislative representation and taxation, every enslaved individual would be counted as 3/5 of a whole individual person, to the political benefit of the states that enslaved millions of people.

Taking the word built figuratively would also include the laws denying to married women any legal existence apart from their husbands, unable to enter into contracts, bring a lawsuit, or earn a salary in their own names.

The word built can be taken literally, too, to mean how the wealth generated from all that political organizing, land-occupying, enslaving, financing, property-owning, and lawmaking was transformed into the very materiality of the United States: plantations, buildings, railroads, factories, family farms, roads, bridges, houses, food, cash crops – in short, the tremendous capital that itself, once it exists, generates additional wealth for those who controlled the means of production in the first place.

Whether we take the word built figuratively or literally, that’s what it actually means. And if that’s what built means, then we have to look at the groups who were especially harmed in the process of building the United States over the last 400 years:

Ten million Native people living across the continent were nearly totally exterminated between 1500 and 1900 by people of European origin who were actively colonizing and nation-building, supported by the structures and systems of the military of the United States government.

Between 1619 and 1816, approximately 10 million people, in accordance with enacted legal systems and structures of that time, were enslaved in the colonies and, later, in the United States, where they contributed 410 billion hours of forced labor in a system of chattel slavery, which legally identifies people as property, not as human beings.

This is all obvious and generally known. If it were not the official policy of the Trump Administration and their allies in Congress to unceasingly gaslight the American people with untruths, the phrase built upon systemic and structural racism would not warrant this kind of unpacking. Moreover, this is not (by a long shot) a comprehensive account of what groups of people were especially harmed – systemically and structurally – in the process of building the United States. Nor is skin color the only axis of discrimination.

At an exponentially smaller scale, I might mention that, while building our energy sector, more than 100,000 coal miners were killed in mining accidents in the United States between 1900 and 1970, and that more than 1,500,000 coal miners were injured in non-fatal accidents between 1930 and 1970. More than a thousand workers from China died while building the Central Pacific Railroad, the westernmost leg of the transcontinental railroad, as this country transformed the idea of manifest destiny into coast-to-coast rails of iron.

By contrast, ask yourself what group of people especially benefitted, structurally and systemically, from the building of the United States of America.

And I’m not even saying anything about the relationship between religious belief and access to power over the course of building the United States (although I could).

In exposing students to these facts, I am not beginning with a false premise and teaching them something false. I am not even using the word racism (or classism, or sexism, or any ism). I am simply talking about what happened here among groups of people.

I am also not indoctrinating them. Indoctrination is trying to make other people believe something uncritically. Facts are not something to believe or not believe. Facts are known or not known. If students want to, and if they know how to read, they can research these facts on their own because facts, if they really are facts, are documented in evidence.

And another thing: among my students of diverse backgrounds have been members of the group who, historically, benefitted from how this country got built. Although these students may have been pained by the realities of our history, they did not resent me, their teacher, for presenting them with facts. They understood that it is up to them to figure out what (if anything) they want to do with the understanding they gain from knowing what really happened here.

What is toxic – poisonous to our body politic – is Mr. Trainor’s attempt to use his position of power to divide and demean groups of people who have historically been excluded from educational opportunities and access to power and have historically suffered harm on account of the laws, policies, and practices enacted in the building of this country.

To deny or twist the facts about structural and systemic harms and benefits in the context of United States history is to practice propaganda. Which is what the Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Education is doing.

We don’t have to just sit here and take it.