A Liberal Dose, November 2, 2023 "Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 2, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today”

 

I have been talking about the origins of slavery in America. In part, I’ve been doing so because there is a lot about that subject that most people don’t know -and our current political climate, especially in red states like ours, suppresses honest discussion and true understanding of the subject. You can’t understand the present without understanding the past, nor can you effectively build the future, and some people would rather you not do any of those things. Their strategy for controlling the present and shaping the future is controlling your ability to know the past.

That said. For roughly the first century of the English colonies, labor in the South was done by three groups: African slaves, white indentured servants, and American Indian slaves. For reasons discussed last week, by about 1720 it had become exclusively the task of African slaves. Southern colonies started passing laws to keep even free blacks separate from poor whites, the better to control them both and avoid a replay of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Those laws became, in fits and spurts, more and more restrictive as the eighteenth century progressed. Every time there was a failed slave revolt, or word was leaked of a planned one, Southern colonial legislatures passed more laws exerting ever more control over the black population, free and slave alike. Free blacks lost most of the rights they had possessed the previous century, and slavery became harsher and harsher. This continued after the Revolution and into the nineteenth century. Race was simultaneously defined by LAW, and shaped by custom. This was a way for the planter class -who controlled the economy and the politics -to tell poor white workers and farmers, “Hey, you may not have any money or access to education or many opportunities in life, but you are white like us and we are all on the same side. You are not like those OTHER people... so stop hanging around with them. They are inferior to US.” This was a way to both delude the white “lower classes” and keep them from turning on the powers that be, and to protect the institution of slavery which was making the elites rich.

I’ll return to the cookie analogy I’ve used often. Picture three guys sitting around a table: a black guy, a poor white guy, and a rich white guy. There are ten cookies at the table. The rich guy has eight and the other two each have one. The rich guy tells the poor white guy, “You’d better watch that black guy, he wants to steal your cookie.” And while the poor white guy and the black guy are watching each other, neither notices that the rich guy now has ALL the cookies. Or, as Lyndon Johnson put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This was done to maintain the social status quo, and keep the empowered in power. And it worked. Thousands and thousands of poor white Southerners who had never owned a slave and never would fought and died to protect the institution that only benefited the people at the top. And when that war ended slavery in America, the same economic/political class leaned in heavier than ever on reinforcing racism in order to hold on to that control -and that worked, too.

Today many Americans -95% or more of them white, I would guess -want to gloss over all the history I have laid out these last few weeks, because they think it makes America look bad… and because they want people to stop complaining about racial injustice, because doing so is a “divisive concept.” “Let’s forget it and move on.” But “forgetting” it (or never learning it in the first place) only further cements it.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

 

A Liberal Dose, Feb. 17, 2022 "History Is Still the Key to Everything- Don't Lose It"

 

A Liberal Dose

February 17, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“History Is Still the Key to Everything -Don’t Lose It”

 

Next week will mark one year that I have been writing this column. The first one appeared on Feb. 25, 2021, and was entitled “History is the key to everything.” That is the template I have tried -and, I think, mostly succeeded -to follow: bringing a perspective from the left that is rooted in history. My political outlook is informed by two things: what I feel in my heart to be moral and right, and beneficial and fair to the largest number of people, and what I have learned from studying history. A clear, well-informed knowledge of history is an invaluable aid in understanding the world around you in the here and now. On the other hand, an unclear and misinformed understanding of history, or a lack or knowledge about it, is very dangerous. It can run an individual, and a society, off the rails.

A deep concern about many people’s lack of historical context is part of what led me to agree to write this left-of-center column. I saw a lot of Americans repeating the mistakes, and sometimes intentional cruelties, of the past, and not recognizing patterns that should be objectively clear. A few years of politicians and their enablers re-working the very meaning of what “facts” and “science” are, in a sort of Orwellian doublespeak, had taken their toll. Six weeks before that first column, thousands of people (some from our little neck of the woods), convinced without any proof whatsoever that the election had been “fake,” stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent the constitutional process of certifying a legal and fair election, injuring 140 police officers and actively seeking to murder the vice-president and several others. Most of us watched on TV with jaws dropped, because we had never expected to see such a thing in America- yet now some are claiming it never happened or was blown out of proportion.

If anything, things have gotten worse. Laws have been passed that are designed to make it harder for minorities to vote, because they might vote for Democrats. Books are being burned, books about the Holocaust are being banned, violent physical attacks on minorities have escalated. While some of my conservative friends ask why I am always complaining instead of trying harder to bring both sides together, I am seeing conservative columnists claiming that all Democrats are Satan-worshiping Marxists who hate America and must be stopped. I have to wonder if some former friend might attack or kill me because I said something they didn’t like, or if some student’s parents might try to take away my job because I teach actual history. Politicians in our own state legislature want to tell educators what they can and can’t say about the things those educators have studied intensely for years -to muzzle people who are trying to teach our children the truth about history in order to avoid the dangerous consequences of ignorance. They are the same politicians who sing about small government and individual freedom, and decry “cancel culture.” 

My wife and I often read the Bible together (I’m working on my sixth time through). Recently we read Jeremiah, with whom I have felt a close affinity since I was a teenager. God would give him messages to take to the people, then warn him that no one would listen -in fact, they would beat him and try to kill him. Jeremiah was not a fan of this plan -but “His message becomes a fire burning in my heart” and he is unable to hold it in even if he wanted to. I identify more than ever.

I will not teach lies, and I will not refrain from teaching the truth. Once upon a time, that was considered an American virtue, even by people who disagreed with the message. Now, they seek only to silence any message they do not like.

How American is that.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, June 10, 2021 "What Is Lost Cause Ideology?"

 

A Liberal Dose, June 10, 2021

Troy D. Smith

"What Is Lost Cause Ideology?"

Last week I talked about the fact that, in popular memory in the South, the Civil War was not “really” about slavery –even though the documents from the time show that pretty much everyone on both sides, at the beginning of that war, agreed it was being fought over slavery. I can assure you that, among professional academic historians (who are specifically trained to study and evaluate the documents of the past), it is almost universally agreed that the primary cause of that conflict was slavery.

And yet in 2011, the 150^th anniversary of the war, national polls indicated that 48% of Americans cited states’ rights as the main cause of the Civil War, with only 38% saying slavery. Another set of polls in 2015 were a little bit closer, divided almost down the middle, but according to the Washington Post (Aug. 6, 2015) white people, people over 60, and Republicans were more likely to oppose slavery being taught in schools as the main reason for the war. Still, a significant minority of non-white people, Northerners, and Democrats felt the same way. Now, to me, saying the Civil War was about states’ rights is like saying the Civil Rights movement wasn’t about racism –it was about states’ rights to be racist or not. It’s a moot point. Slave-holding states were for states’ rights when those rights protected slavery, and against them when it did not. Southern politicians were opposed to the right of newly forming states to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery or not, or the rights of Northern states to decide whether or not to return runaway slaves.

It is important to note that the Confederacy and the South were not necessarily always the same thing. About one-third of white Southerners supported the Union. When you count the slaves, almost half the population in the South was against the Confederacy. Tennessee, by the way, provided the most Union troops of any Confederate state. But do you know where Union sentiment was highest? In Appalachia –where you can’t grow cotton, and the population was not dependent on slave labor. That speaks volumes.

The fact is, after the war –when slavery was ended –was when many Southerners started saying the conflict had not been over slavery, something they all basically agreed was the cause in the beginning. Many Southern leaders, artists, and intellectuals started developing what historians call “the Lost Cause Ideology.” That ideology has several components: that slavery was not the main cause of the war, that slavery hadn’t really been that bad anyway, and that the Confederacy had been a noble lost cause to protect a better way of life. I assure you, none of those things were true –especially if you did not happen to be rich and white.

But the truth was ugly, and most people didn’t want to face it. They preferred, instead, to make up a mythology about a chivalrous, beneficent world where even the slaves were happy. Have you ever noticed how, in Gone with the Wind, none of the black people are ever mad about anything until the mean Yankees show up and disrupt their idyllic world?

In recent decades, that perception has gone beyond the borders of the South –just as you are now likely to see Confederate battle flags being waved in places that were firmly anti-Confederate, from New England to the West Coast. Claims that Confederate mythology and imagery is history and heritage coming from people who are not Southern seems strange- and indicates there is more going on than regional pride.

The Lost Cause version of the Confederacy is not tethered to fact and reality. It is an exercise in making up a story that makes you feel good –or at the very least doesn’t make you feel bad –rather than learning from the past. And passing laws to prevent anybody from questioning that story is not “protecting history” –it is protecting your own feelings.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found  HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

A Liberal Dose, May 27, 2021 "Systemic Racism and Implicit Bias- What Are They? Part 2

 

A Liberal Dose, May 27, 2021

Systemic Racism and Implicit Bias: What Are They?  Part Two

Troy D. Smith

 (See Part 1 HERE)

Last week we looked at Brown v. Board and the Clarks’ doll test, which the Court cited to prove the danger of implicit bias and the presence of systemic racism. The problem is that a lot of white people resist the idea of those things even existing, because no one likes to be called a racist. Unlike many people in previous generations, we have been raised to believe that racism is not only wrong it is evil, so to admit we are tainted by it would be to admit we are evil, too. But that is not what systemic racism means. It operates as it does without you making a conscious decision to be part of it, and it takes work and education on the subject to recognize it and work against it.

When my child was very little, in the mid-90s, they were pitching a fit because they wanted to go to the store with their mom and mom needed some time alone. My aunt happened to be over at the time –my beloved aunt who helped raise me and whom I love dearly. She wanted to help out in quieting the kid. So she said “You don’t want to go over there! Them colored people will get you!” I was shocked. I had never heard her say anything so overtly racist, and in fact she usually spoke in favor of civil rights issues. She herself was at a loss to explain it.

I gave that incident a lot of thought in ensuing years. Why would she say a thing like that? Well, because she wanted to scare a little child into behaving. But why that particular approach? It would have to be because that’s what her parents had said to her fifty years earlier to scare her. And their parents said to them, and theirs to them, and so on. To the point that no one remembered any longer why that threat had originally been so scary. Because if you go back far enough, you reach the days of slavery –when white people lived in fear of slave uprisings. Black people out on the roads after dark –with or without the proper “papers” –might be desperate runaways, or participants in a revolt. As one black friend once said, when a white man commented that black people don’t seem to age as quickly as white ones, “that’s because we don’t lay awake at night worried about a white uprising.” And when slavery existed, it was considered the duty of the white community –required by law –to take action against potentially rebellious or “uppity” black people.

Now think about all the incidents in the last few years where black people innocently going about their business were shot dead by panicked white people. A 12-year-old boy in the park with a toy gun. A man in Wal-mart carrying a BB gun he was going to buy. A man jogging at night. Kids playing their music loud. A teenager walking home from a convenience store. Car crash victims knocking on a random door at night for help. With most of those shooters, I don’t think they woke up that morning and said “Man, I hate black people, I hope I get to shoot one today.” I don’t believe they thought at all, I think they just reacted, because they were scared. But why were they so much more scared by black people? Studies prove this happens, and numbers don’t lie.

Do you think it might help if more people were aware of (and believed in) implicit bias, and the history of race in this country? Do you think that white people burying their heads in the sand will solve anything?

You know it won’t.

Another factor is Republicans trying to pass laws about how history is taught is what historians call “the Lost Cause narrative.” We’ll look at that next week.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE

A list of historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Troy D.Smith's official author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

A Liberal Dose, May 20, 2021 "Systemic Racism and Implicit Bias: What Are They? Part 1"

 

A Liberal Dose, May 20, 2021 

Troy D. Smith

"Systemic Racism and Implicit Bias: What Are They? Part 1"

note: unfortunately, the Sparta Expositor has had to cut the word count of their guest columns in half, so many of my topics will have to be covered in two or more parts from now on.

Last week we discussed how some conservatives (and some Republican-controlled state legislatures, including our own) have been following Donald Trump’s lead and freaking out about critical race theory, often without understanding what it is. We defined that theoretical approach (it comes from legal studies, and is about the historical connection between race, slavery, and laws) and other cultural approaches to the study of race. This week I’m going to give some examples, to more fully demonstrate what I’m talking about.

Trump’s complaint, you will recall, was not just about an academic field of study but about the very ideas of privilege, implicit bias, or “negative” focus on historical racism and/or slavery, which his supporters say are “divisive concepts.” One Tennessee Republican legislator actually defended the three-fifths compromise on slavery as a good thing. A GOP leader in Louisiana said earlier this month that schools should teach all the “good” things about slavery such as the fact that there were some kind masters who were beloved by their slaves, implying they were happy in slavery, and said that anyone believing otherwise is “indoctrinated by leftist, Marxist education.”

In other words, they are saying nothing bad ever happened, if it did it wasn’t that bad, and there are no modern-day effects of it. So let’s take a look at that.

In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled –in Brown v. Board of Education –that school segregation was unconstitutional. This decision was the first of several that would end Jim Crow segregation in general, although it would take more than a decade. In their ruling, the Court cited the research of married couple Kenneth and Mamie Clark, both African American psychologists. In particular, the Court pointed to the “doll tests” the Clarks had run in the 1940s.

In the experiments, several children –one at a time –were presented with four baby dolls. The dolls were identical, except that they ranged in skin tone from Caucasian to dark brown. The children were asked to pick which doll they wanted to play with –they all chose the Caucasian doll. They were asked which doll was the most “good” and which the most “bad,” which was smartest and which was dumbest –which was lazy and which was not. Invariably, they always chose the white doll as being good and smart, and the darkest as being bad and dumb.

These were black children.

The Clarks concluded that segregating black children and reinforcing the fact they were different from all the others made them feel that black was inferior and undesirable while making the white children feel superior. Racism, the Clarks wrote, is inherent in American institutions and reinforced by laws. The Supreme Court agreed (and so did the Eisenhower administration, which lauded the Court’s decision). Although the Clarks stood out, many other sociologists, psychologists, and historians were cited in the Court’s unanimous opinion.

Although the term did not exist at the time… the Court was swayed by critical race theory.

Academics and others have been saying ever since then that there is systemic racism in this country, and that as a result people can have biases they are not even consciously aware of. Those children were probably not consciously aware of their bias against their own race; their parents did not sit them down and say “you’re black, therefore you’re terrible, so try your best to be white.” No, the children absorbed that belief from society around them. And not just from school segregation, either.

Here’s something that may shock you (and it may not). The Clarks’ experiments were re-run, with both white and black children, in 2010. With the exact same results. And again earlier this year. With the same results.

There it is. systemic racism; implicit bias. If you were raised in America, you were affected by this whether you wanted to be or not, and whether you want to admit it or not.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE

A list of historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Troy D.Smith's official author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com 

A Liberal Dose, May 13, 2021 "What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Are Some People Scared of It?"

 

A Liberal Dose, May 13, 2021

"What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Are Some People Scared of It?"

Troy D. Smith

Tennessee is one of several red states whose legislatures have passed laws banning critical race theory- something most Americans had never heard of until Trump condemned it in the final days of his presidency, calling it “unpatriotic.” Trump also attacked the New York Times’ “1619 Project” which began in 2019. That ongoing series of articles about the legacy of slavery gets its name from the fact that the first African slaves arrived in the English colonies (specifically, Virginia) in the year 1619. Which seems like a pretty reasonable date with which to begin a series of articles about slavery in America. Following Trump’s lead, a lot of conservatives are conflating the New York Times series, the academic thematic approach of critical race theory, and anything else that takes a frank and honest look at the history of slavery in this country instead of glossing over it like it never happened, and banning it from public school history classes. I’ve read a lot of quotes from conservative politicians and pundits about “CRT”, but I have yet to read anything said or written by anyone who actually knows anything about it. In fact, editorials about it tend to begin with words like “I’m not an expert, and I don’t actually know what this is, but it’s bad.”  Why is it bad? Because, they say, it is unpatriotic; it denies the rule of law and says that all of American history has been different racial groups vying for power; because it claims 1619 is the founding of America instead of 1776. Spoiler alert- none of those accurately describe critical race theory.

I do have some background that qualifies me to discuss the topic, I think. I have a Ph.D in history, specifically race and ethnicity and the American South. I will start out by saying that, like a lot of stuff from the previous administration, this is a lot of hot air about nothing. K-12 public schools are not teaching critical race theory; critical race theory is an offshoot of academic legal studies and is also now used as a theoretical approach in political science, education, anthropology, and some other fields. It is not really used by many academic historians, actually –academic historians who specialize in race tend to use whiteness theory, which is very similar but different in that it looks at culture rather than law. And in that it equally freaks out conservatives who are familiar with it. The 1619 Project uses elements of both.

Critical race theory holds that the American colonies, and later the United States, used the legal system to make racism official in order to support slavery. Because it was such an intrinsic part of the law, it got baked into the system and elements of it are still there, resulting in systemic racism. Let me pause to give you a dose of actual (not imaginary) history: the English colonies, and all thirteen states at the beginning of the Revolution, had laws that legalized slavery and other laws that limited the civil rights even of free black people. Slavery ended with the Civil War, but existed in everything except name in the South during Reconstruction (see “black codes”). That was followed by Jim Crow segregation laws, which existed until the mid-1960s. Before that, black men were lynched or executed on the flimsiest, if any, evidence. Today, factual studies prove that black men are more likely to be imprisoned, and for longer sentences, than white men convicted of the same types of crimes. These are facts. Historical facts.

Whiteness theory is based on the works of W.E.B. DuBois and others, including James Baldwin. This approach says that English colonists in the Americas established a new identity for themselves, apart from being British. This “American” identity was also, de facto, a “white” identity. The idea of being “white” was relatively new –it started in the early 1600s, started becoming a common idea in the late 1600s, and was used universally in the English colonies by 1700. In other words, after they started using African slaves, colonists started pointing out that they themselves were not black. The black slaves were an “other” against which to define themselves, as were the American Indians. I’ve barely seen the 1619 Project touch on Indians, by the way, which is why I’m not a huge fan of it- it’s a good place to start, but it is mostly written by journalists instead of historians and lacks the necessary nuance, depth, and context.

I invite you to go to Sparta Live or my blog (tnwordsmith.blogspot.com) and take a second look at my Feb. 25 column (“History Is the Key to Everything”) and the one from the following week, March 4 (“Understanding the Many Types of Privilege”). Both of them contain elements of both critical race theory and whiteness theory. Did they seem unpatriotic to you? Did I seem to be trying to stoke up hatred between races? Or was I trying to foster more cooperation? That’s a big part of the problem with this (mostly meaningless) legislation- rather than narrowly defining things, proponents of it have quoted the most revolutionary statements they could find and conflated every way of talking about race or slavery that goes beyond what a 1930s textbook would say, or that is frank and honest instead of euphemistic and “positive”, into a lump of unpatriotic, racially divisive vitriol when that’s not what it is. The result is going to be that teachers will be afraid to have real discussions about race in America, and students will not be allowed to even think about it. And nothing will ever change for the better.

I’ve written before, in those first couple of columns, that when you have a gaping wound it’s not going to get better if you just pretend it’s not there. It will keep getting worse. Now I’m going to use a different analogy.

Let’s say you have a cake pan. It’s not just any old cake pan, it’s in a special, complex shape that produces cakes people marvel at. But it also has a big dent in it. No matter how fancy or impressive the overall cakes are, every single cake that comes from that pan is going to have that big dent. Now let’s say you and your family get together and say “you know, I am sick to death of cakes with dents in them. So from now on, we are not going to look at the dents and will pretend they are not there. THAT’LL fix the problem.” Except it won’t. The only way to fix that problem is to carefully pound that dent out. To change the structure.

The structure of this country is, in my opinion, very impressive. The idea of what this country should be is as beautiful and sacred to me as it ever was. But it has never been perfect. Our job is to slowly pound away at the dents in it “in order to form a more perfect union.” Pretending the problems aren’t there will never solve them.

Finally -how about you let the trained teachers decide what to teach and how to teach it instead of making it political?

  

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE

A list of historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Troy D.Smith's official author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

A LIBERAL DOSE Feb. 25, 2021 "History is the Key to Everything"

 

Much has been said recently about the New York Times 1619 Project, but how many folks know about another year in that century -1676?

Warning- real talk about real history lies ahead.

I am speaking of Bacon’s Rebellion. Some of you may have never heard of it; those who have may only recall a sentence or two in a long-distant high school history book. It is, however, one of the most important events in the history of race in this country, and in fact one of its most important events, period.

I’ll summarize quickly: Nathaniel Bacon was a privileged young man in his late twenties who had recently emigrated to the Virginia colony from England. He was upset that he did not get the sort of important position he felt he deserved. He made common cause with the poor white people of the colony –many of them former indentured servants who had been promised land when their labor contract was up, only to find all the land had been claimed by the elites. Bacon stirred them up and became their spokesman in demanding that the colonial government kill more Indians so their land would be available. The governor refused, and the people rebelled. The rebellion was a surge of long-bubbling fury against the wealthy and the government. The poor whites were soon joined by large numbers of free black folks and runaway slaves.

The rebellion collapsed when Bacon died of dysentery –but it came close to working, and to toppling the political and financial status quo. The capital city of Jamestown was burned to the ground. The people in charge of the colony knew they could not afford to let such a thing ever happen again –specifically, the large numbers of white poor and black poor joining forces. So they started passing laws restricting the rights of black people, and illegalizing interracial marriage, thus driving a wedge between the two groups. A color line, really. They told poor whites “you are on the top side of the line, with us, and are better than them.” Even the free ones.

It was the beginning of legalized racism in this country, and has provided the template ever since.

It works like this: imagine you have three men at a table with ten cookies. The wealthy white man with eight cookies tells the poor white man with one cookie, “Watch that black guy, he wants to steal your cookie.” So the two poor working guys turn on each other, and the first guy gets all the cookies.

It’s a scam, to maintain the status quo and keep the elite in power.

And working-class people are still falling for it.

Meanwhile… does any of that sound familiar in a different context?

Nathaniel Bacon was the first populist demagogue in American history. Let’s define that word, demagogue, using the Oxford dictionary: “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.”

Think of the irony there: this privileged, wealthy man led a popular revolt against the elite big-shots. And he did it by saying, essentially, “I know how mad you are! They have lied to you, and not followed through with their promises, because they think they’re better than you. They’ve cheated me, too, so I understand.” (Of course, in his case they had simply not given him the amount of wealth and power he thought he deserved). The solution he offered: Burn it all down!

The events of January 6, 2021, at the nation’s Capitol may have seemed unprecedented… but it wasn’t, really. Bacon’s Rebellion is the closest thing in our history to the Trump phenomenon. It even centered on taking land away from Indians, which was also a big component of Trump policy in the form of privatizing formerly protected areas sacred to local tribes. The big difference, though: Bacon appealed to both white and black poor people. The Powers-That-Be in Virginia made sure that didn’t happen again, by driving a social and legal wedge between the races that still holds almost 350 years later. Populists come and go, but none have managed to breach the racial divide- though some have tried.

You may know there was a Populist Movement in the 1890s  that led to the Progressive Era in the 1900s. In that case, it was farmer’s alliances joining forces with labor unions to undercut the power of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Part of their strategy was to try to convince white and black farmers and workers in the South to join forces and work together to demand their rights.

And do you know what else happened in the 1890s? Jim Crow laws were upheld by the Supreme Court, making segregation the law of the land in the South. Those two things happening at the same time was not a coincidence.

Why did so many people support Trump, many to the point of violence? Why is there still so much racial division in America?

Understanding Bacon’s Rebellion is a step toward better understanding those questions. Our nation’s first demagogue, Nathaniel Bacon, stirred up the common people –who had suffered much –by stoking their anger and fear against the elite establishment and also against an Other who allegedly stood in the way, Native Americans. Bacon told the governor, and I am only slightly paraphrasing, “you love your Precious Indians more than you love your own people,” implying that the governor was a traitor for not persecuting Indians. And in the aftermath of the rebellion, of course, the government passed strict race laws designed to keep poor whites and blacks from cooperating again.

History – without whitewashing –is the key to everything.

Do you think that’s why Trump tried to control how it is taught…? Perhaps you recall (it was only a short time ago) that the former president condemned the concepts of critical race theory, white privilege, and so on, forbidding federal training programs to reference them. By extension, he was trying to forbid all of America from honestly looking at its past. This came as no surprise, since he daily tried to forbid the world from honestly looking at the present (or anything else). Instead, his administration encouraged a view they described as “patriotic,” meaning one that never said anything that could remotely be considered criticism.

Well, that may be nationalistic, but it is not patriotic. Nationalists insist their country is perfect no matter what; patriots want to make their country better because they love it. You can’t make anything better by ignoring it and refusing to even talk about it.

In my opinion, it is my job as a historian to help people face the past even when they don’t want to, even when it is uncomfortable, in order to better understand the present and to make a better future.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s everybody’s job. Let’s start doing it, together.

  --Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.