There are complex answers that deserve interrogation through all their interwoven facets and there are complex answers that converge toward a simple response. The cause of the American Civil War is the latter.
Unfortunately, former governor Nikki Haley quickly found the nuance out the hard way when, in response to a question about the cause of the Civil War, she answered “Well, it was basically about how government was gonna run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” Over the past few days, she’s done everything from alleging that the questioner was a Biden plant, to doubling down on the “freedoms” answer, to finally acquiescing that it was about slavery. Her opponents have blasted her for not being able to answer such a simple question, while other conservatives have reveled in the idea that it was Republicans who freed the slaves while Democrats sought to keep Black people enslaved.
Of course, this all muddles the moment we’re in now, and the reason why, for many, the word “slavery” is difficult to say for some political leaders. Part of that starts in our classrooms.
The recently departed Roni Dean-Burren (RIP, Dr. Roni) set off a firestorm less than a decade ago when she took a picture of her son’s social studies textbook and pointed out an egregious mistake within the text. In it, the writers of the textbook captioned one of their maps with “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” Describing enslaved people as “workers” is an obfuscation of the highest order. While McGraw-Hill issued an apology after Dean-Burren’s video went viral, it bears reiterating that so many writers and editors pored over the texts and saw nothing wrong until a Black woman scholar who happened to be a parent in the district found it printed in her son’s textbook. She goes on to point to several other errors about marginalized people throughout the textbook, in case readers thought the atrocities just stopped at Black people.
Given the distribution of these textbooks, thousands – if not millions – of children will have read “workers from Africa” as fact. In the same article, writer Laura Moser describes the Texas State Board of Education as favoring the Lost Cause, a movement that has only picked up steam in the last two decades.
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