The History I Wasn’t Taught (and Why It Matters)

I loved these ValueTales books when I was a kid. Each book features a famous historical figure, and an imaginary friend who talks the protagonist through difficult periods in their lives. Each book focuses on a value you can learn from that historical figure’s life.

I loved these books so much I saved them into adulthood thinking if I ever had a kid, we would read these books together. When I finally did read them with my child, I discovered these books were not everything I remembered them to be.

I think the author meant well. Many of the books in this series focus on historical figures who aren’t white or aren’t men. But while this passage in Ralph Bunche’s biography highlights the difficulties of the poor in dealing with tuberculosis in the 1900s, the book never acknowledges the role of race.

Many hospitals were segregated in the 1900s. Access to a white hospital wasn’t guaranteed (even in the North), and the first black hospital in Detroit (where Bunche grew up) didn’t exist until 1917. Black patients didn’t have equal access to what medical care was available, and creating spaces where black patients would be welcome wasn’t easy. Black students who wanted to become doctors often had to study abroad.

Black patients still have worse health care outcomes than whites because of unequal access to quality health care. This gap has become more pronounced in the COVID-19 epidemic.

Throughout the books, the author has a habit of labeling people instead of actions. In Helen Keller’s biography the child is labeled as being “dirty and nasty and angry.”

This becomes more ominous when the subject is prisoners in the biography of Elizabeth Fry, a woman who campaigned for more humane prisons. The prisoners are portrayed as victims of themselves.

Like with the Ralph Bunche biography, what isn’t said here is important. I have no idea what Elizabeth Fry actually believed, but the implicit message of the book is all the imprisoned women deserved to be there. Newgate prison, the one featured in the book, was a debtor’s prison. Elizabeth Fry’s biography never mentions the inequities in the debtor prison system in 1800s London. She is portrayed as the savior that teaches the prisoners to be good human beings.

The modern justice system in the United States is far from equal. Innocent defendants who can’t afford bail are forced to choose between pleading guilty (which puts a charge on their record) and staying in jail for long periods of time while waiting for a trial (which might cost them their livelihood.) Native American juveniles are twice as likely to be incarcerated for minor crimes as other minority groups.

When sentenced, black males get longer sentences for the same charges. Black people are arrested more often for drug crimes and punished more severely, even though white people use drugs at the same rate.

I remember the D.A.R.E. officer visiting my school. We were told the war on drugs was meant to tackle a public health crisis. In truth, the war on drugs was targeted at arresting the antiwar left and black people. Here’s John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Watergate co-conspirator: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

And while other officials dispute this account, Nixon’s chief of staff put this in his diaries: “P [the president] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. Pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true.”

Nixon sold the United States the war on drugs by telling people he was the candidate of law and order. And once the nation was on board, the incarcerated population exploded over the next decades. Many of the people incarcerated were punished more strictly than necessary, or did not deserve to be there at all. As Ehrlichman predicted (and intended) these arrests and incarcerations disrupted Black communities and made upward mobility difficult.

What isn’t said is also prominent in the biography of Johnny Appleseed. This series of pages describes how Johnny Appleseed alerted a nearby Army base to a Native American attack on settlers. In the book, Johnny Appleseed only agrees to help because it might “save a single life.” The life implied here is white. The book never mentions how the Native Americans were treated by the government or by the settlers. And when the book wraps up the incident by saying “Peace came again”, there is no mention of the price Native Americans paid.

The biography of Cochise, an Apache chief, attempts to tell the story from the other side but even then the book downplays the mistreatment of the Native Americans. The end of the book is especially problematic. The “peace” mentioned on the second to last page lasts two years. The author acknowledges in a long, dense page of historical facts how the Apache were forced off the land they were promised in the treaty. She also acknowledges that Cochise was right not to trust many of the white people he encountered. But in attempting to highlight the good characteristics of an important figure (Cochise) she takes the history out of context. The conflict between the settlers and the Native Americans wasn’t an argument over lifestyle differences. The United States routinely broke treaties with Native American tribes.

When tribes demanded what they had been promised, they were punished. One good relationship between a white man and an Apache chief does not make the rest of the history irrelevant.

The United States government took most of the Native American’s land, pushed them onto reservations and then forced Native families to send their children to schools to learn “civilized” ways. This history is still relevant because generations of trauma and discrimination have led to disadvantages for Native Americans today.

Lincoln’s story also has some very relevant history missing. Lincoln considered freeing the slaves less important than preserving the union.

Perhaps the most egregious lack of context, however, is the book on Columbus. I couldn’t find my copy to get pictures for you, but all you need to know is there’s an entire book focused on the value of being curious when Columbus was guilty of multiple atrocities.

You might argue that none of this matters. Why am I spending so much time dissecting a bunch of children’s books written during the seventies and eighties? Because they’re emblematic of the history I wasn’t taught.

We learned about the Trail of Tears, but we never learned the large-scale massacre of bison was an intentional act to deprive the Sioux of their main source of food.

We never read this letter from Thomas Jefferson: “we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt”. Jefferson is explaining his plan to put the Native Americans into debt so they will sell land to the United States, and get territory without bloodshed.

The mistreatment of black people, Native Americans and other people of color is not ancient history. The last known survivor from a U.S. slave ship died in 1940. Think about that for a second. There are people alive who had a grandmother who was a slave.

The mistreatment of black people, Native Americans and other people of color was not accidental. Powerful people in government decided that certain groups were less worthy of protection and resources than other groups.

My ancestors came to the United States from Europe in the 1700s. They settled on land stolen from the Native Americans, and lived in states were slave labor was used. I don’t know what my ancestors thought about slavery. I don’t know if they ever owned slaves. But for my purposes, it doesn’t matter.

While my ancestors may have struggled with economic discrimination when they were first generation immigrants, white European immigrants were eventually accepted as equals. My ancestors benefited from an unjust system. Their upward mobility eventually led to my middle class life. It would be too simplistic to say my ancestors succeeded only because they were white. But I can say being white made it easier for them to succeed. Being white makes it easier for me to succeed.

I don’t want to acknowledge these things. It hurts. But this is growing up on a larger scale. We learn to recognize what our parents did right and what they did wrong, and we do better. We need to recognize what our country has done right and what it’s done wrong, and do better.

I need to be perfectly clear here. I am not responsible for my ancestors’ actions, whether they owned slaves or not. None of us are. But we are responsible for what we do now.

The social system in the United States is not just. People of color do not have the same access to education, health care, housing and economic success that white people do. (And yes, sexism and economic discrimination are also serious issues, but I can only fit so much in one post.)

We all want a good origin story. We want to be descended from families who always did the right thing. But we aren’t. We are descended from human families who lived within flawed systems.

Whether or not we perpetuate those unjust systems is our choice.

p.s. Here’s another page that hasn’t aged well.

In Ralph Bunche’s biography and several of other books there are casual references to what would today be considered sexual harassment. What constitutes acceptable behavior changes over time, I understand. But we can acknowledge those changes. The “Ordinary People Change the World” series by Brad Meltzer does. Comparing Meltzer’s book on Sacagawea to Johnson’s is worthy of a whole post on its own.