(Note: the title may seem obvious... but so should a lot of things)
A Liberal
Dose
April 7,
2022
Troy D.
Smith
“You
Can’t Teach the Truth Without Being Honest”
I talked last week about the legislative bill that bans
“divisive concepts” such as privilege, unconscious bias, structural racism, and
other terms from higher education classes. This includes what the bill calls
“sexual or racial scapegoating,” which might mean saying things like “in
western civilization, men established and have maintained a patriarchy” or
“white people enslaved Africans.” It
also specifically forbids claiming that the legal system was set up to protect
the interests of one racial group over another.
I earned my history PhD at the University of Illinois in
2011 (after six years of work). My dissertation was titled “Race, Slavery, and
Nation in Indian Territory.” My doctoral focus was U.S. History, and the two
fields of expertise I was examined on were the histories of race and ethnicity
in the United States, and the history of the American South. I say all that
merely to show that the history of race, how the concept was developed, and how
it works are things I have spent a lot of time thinking about, studying,
writing about, and teaching. I am going to give you two examples of things I
talk about in class that would be impossible to discuss in a frank, honest, and
accurate manner while following the restrictions the Tennessee government is
putting on higher education classrooms (which are supposed to be a site where
adults -not children -gather for a free exchange of ideas and to be
challenged).
Perhaps you have heard of the seminal supreme court case Brown vs. Board of Education (1954),
which called for the end of segregation in public schools and was the beginning
of the end for racial segregation in general. This overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which had
ruled racial segregation constitutional as long as the facilities were
“separate but equal.” In Brown, NAACP
lawyer Thurgood Marshall (who was later the first black Supreme Court justice)
offered as evidence the research of two psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark
(a married couple). This included the now famous Clark Baby Doll Experiment.
Children were presented with an array of baby dolls, which
came in a variety of skin tones -from very dark brown to very “white.” They
were asked which doll was smartest, and which was dumbest; which was laziest
and which worked hardest; which was honest and which dishonest; which was good
and which was bad. The children always picked the darkest brown baby for the
negative categories, and the whitest one for the positive ones. This was
despite the fact that the children themselves were African American. Now, those
little girls’ parents did not sit them down as pre-schoolers and tell them that
they were dumb, evil, or lazy because they were black. So where did they get
that idea at such a young age? From the world around them. No one taught them
specifically, they absorbed it. This, Marshall argued, proved that segregation
was harmful, and helped win the case. That study was repeated a couple of times
in the last decade or so, by the way, with the very same results (and with a
variety of racial groups tested, not just little black girls). THAT indicates
that the problem is not just segregation, because it ended long ago -the
problem is the unconscious bias implicitly produced in our culture.
What I just said is apparently about to become illegal to
say. I guess they just want us to say the Court ended segregation without
saying why.
The other example is the whole class I am currently
teaching, American Indian Law, which is about federal policies toward Native
Americans. Those policies were designed to take away Natives’ lands, limit
their rights, and limit their tribal sovereignty -and still are. Oops, I did it
again.
I did not study for years to teach you what you already
think and want to keep hearing. I did it to teach you history.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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