Advice | Nikki Haley's bad upbringing
After her failure to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War sparked a wave of criticism last month, Nikki Haley assured her potential voters that she had black friends and that she understood the origins of the war. Growing up in South Carolina, she said, “literally in second and third grade you learn about slavery.” The adroit production of black friends is unfortunately not surprising, but claiming that she learned in second and third grade that the Civil War was a battle over slavery.
Governor Haley attended a segregation academy, a type of private school founded in the years after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education by white parents who did not want their children to go to school with black children.
By 1975, the number of private schools in South Carolina had increased more than tenfold, enrolling as many as 90 percent of white children in some predominantly black counties. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that discrimination based on race was also not legal in private schools, but even today, many segregated academies are still predominantly white.
Mrs. Haley graduated from Orangeburg Preparatory School in 1989. Orangeburg was the product of a merger between Wade Hampton and Willington Academy, also segregated academies, the first of which was named after one of the largest slaveholding families South Carolina. At one point, Hampton graduates received lapel pins with the Confederate flag were meant to symbolize resistance to segregation. The year Ms. Haley graduated, her high school yearbook included at most a handful of black students.
I also attended a segregated academy: Edgewood Academy in Elmore, Ala., from freshman year until I graduated in 1995. Although the city was about 30 percent black, none of the 33 people in my graduating class were. My parents say they sent me and my two younger brothers there because they thought we would get a better education there, and because it was affordable (annual tuition is now $6,210, which would have been about $2,000 in the year I enrolled), an important consideration. for a family whose sole breadwinner was a lineman for Alabama Power.
When I attended Edgewood, there were no AP classes, no test prep, and no real expectation that any of us would go to college unless we really wanted to (which for the girls would largely consist of finding a husband). The science teachers taught us creationism and the principal used a large wooden paddle to combat misbehaving students, no matter how young or old they were.
In our history books, the Civil War was positioned as an issue of states' rights, a narrative reinforced by teachers, many of whom, as Governor Haley suggests, did mention slavery but rejected the idea that it was a root cause of the war. liberal propaganda. We were told that some slaves had good relationships with their owners and were grateful to be cared for, as if they had been given cushy jobs with excellent benefits, rather than being torn from their families, abused and treated as if they were were inhuman. We took field trips to the Confederate Memorial Park in Marbury, but not to the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, which was the same distance from us.
My fifth-grade teacher told us that if Jesus had lived in Alabama, he would have been a white Dixiecrat, that God frowns on what she called miscegenation, and that children who are the products of interracial marriages should be pitied because they are mistakes. . (I now wonder how she would have treated me if she knew I was the product of an interracial marriage—which, as an adoptee, I didn't find out until long after college.)
I don't know what textbook Nikki Haley's school used, but I only know from the fact that she attended a segregation academy that her understanding of the Civil War was shaped by white teachers and administrators who were disinclined to deal with evil to struggle. of slavery.
When conservatives talk about education and indoctrination, I see that as the most obvious form of projection, because the environment in which I was educated has been carefully constructed to give me the message that white, conservative, Christian Southerners are the real Americans, chosen by God.
My real learning about American history took place at the public library where my mother dropped me off while she ran errands, and later in college. If you want to understand why evangelical conservatives wage war on public libraries and universities, it is precisely because they expose children to facts that undermine the kind of indoctrination I have.
At the elementary school level, books that mention race or, in some cases, simply have black protagonists, are banned because they might cause discomfort to white children. At the university level, activists like Christopher Rufo have labeled any frank discussion of race as “critical race theory,” a distortion that makes the subject, in Mr. Rufo's words, “toxic' and contribute to 'negative perceptions'.
Many Republican politicians like to think of American history as an uninterrupted parade of greatness and justice, without mentioning the atrocities we committed along the way. They see that perspective as some kind of patriotic optimism, but it's not. It is vulnerable and cynical.
That perspective assumes that our nation will succumb to any scrutiny of the racist systems that persist to this day. It suggests that the only way we can be a great nation now is to deceive ourselves into believing that we are not innately capable of evil.
My view is more optimistic. I don't have to believe that America is spotless and inherently good to believe in its potential and its ability to be better and stronger. If we can't—or won't—do the sometimes uncomfortable work of reckoning with our past, America's destiny is small, mean, and weak. The unwillingness to tell the truth about the past benefits only a shrinking number of Americans who want to live within the distorted worldview that segregation academies have created for their students – an America that is only for some, and with a very limited future.
Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist.
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