CRT

Flipping Rocks, Looking for Snakes

/ cigarman501 / 3 Comments

“Turn over enough rocks you are bound to find a snake.”- Don Miller

My first real memory as a child is of a late spring/early summer Sunday family gathering. I distinctly remember little boy dress shorts, a dress shirt featuring a little boy bow tie, and colorful socks disappearing into my little boy shoes. It had to be Sunday and I couldn’t have been more than four or five.

Doing my best to be seen and not heard, I sat on a large rock in my grandparents’ front yard watching the adults being seen and heard. My biggest desire was to avoid being chastised for doing something wrong on the Lord’s Day and keeping my Sunday Best clean. I failed. I kept my clothes clean but did get chastised and it has corrupted my views on rocks since.

I saw my grandmother headed my way. There was a purpose in her step, and I briefly wondered what wrong I had committed and forgotten about. It turned out I was doing it, simply sitting on a rock.

Nannie exclaimed, “Boy, don’t sit on that rock. You don’t know, there might be a snake laying under it.”

I remember jumping up as if I had been shocked and becoming really shocked when the rock was moved, to find old Charlie No Shoulders was in fact lurking beneath me. Shocked and forever warped when it comes to rocks hiding snakes.

I can’t tell you how many rocks I have moved, first flipping them to make sure a snake wasn’t hiding beneath it, before carrying it to its new location. I don’t know how many times I heard my grandmother’s voice explaining, “You know there might be a snake laying under it.” I do know, since that day, I have yet to find another snake laying under a rock. Yet I still look.

This memory reminds me of today’s society and all the perceived ills that go with it. How much of our divisiveness as a nation, as a world, is due to social media, news sites, politicians, influencers, provocateurs, and opinionators flipping over rocks looking for snakes. If you flip enough rocks you are bound to find a snake or in today’s world, search hard and long enough, you are going to find something to support your particular cognitive dissonance.

If you find your snake, does this make your dissonance true? No.

I’ve never understood how the “exception proves the rule” but I do understand “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” If I take bite after bite of pudding and it taste like banana pudding, even to the point of bananas and vanilla wafers being present, I should rightly believe it is banana pudding. The opposite should also be true because the lack of proof is in the eating.

It is the same with flipping rocks. You may assume there are snakes under every rock, but one snake doesn’t make it true that there are snakes under every rock.

What is my point? I see fingers pointing at educators maligning their “wokeism”, using descriptors like brainwashing. indoctrination, groomers, and accusations of teaching Critical Race Theory or its close kin, racist Marxism…that was tongue in cheek. Is there any truth to this finger pointing? Of course. Under some rocks there are teachers doing just that. Is that proof that the vast majority are? No. Most rocks have no teachers teaching anything other than what they are supposed to. The proof is not if certain aspects of CRT find their way into your curriculum. because some will.

I am a retired teacher who primarily, among other courses, taught history. I even used CRT when I taught science. That would be a cathode ray tube. Not funny?

I hope I used certain aspects of Critical Race Theory when I taught history. Blasphemous you say. Woke liberal! (Probably, at least left leaning and I can spell empathetic, and I am alert to injustice and discrimination in society). Groomer? (No, I need a beard and hair trim right now.) Indoctrinator (If it is about historical truth, yes. Yes, I am…if indoctrinator is a word.) Brainwashing (I wouldn’t know where to begin).

Historical truth? Do we teach it, or do we gloss over those uncomfortable areas? I believe that if I were teaching the period from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era truthfully, I would find it impossible not to teach something that was in line with CRT or the recent Florida ban on teaching Advanced Placement African American Studies. I’d like to point out AP European History and AP Japanese Culture and History are still allowed in Florida. Am I looking for bigots under every rock? No, just in the Florida Governor’s mansion.

Does teaching that millions of African Americans left the South to travel North only to find ‘de jure’ segregation mean I’m teaching CRT? No, but I wonder if I would still find myself under the scrutiny of the Anti-Woke police if I taught redlining, a discriminatory practice in which services (financial and otherwise) are withheld from potential customers who reside in neighborhoods classified as “hazardous”. Could I be hauled off to where left leaning teachers are held prisoner if I dare teach that in 1923 a white mob razed a thriving black community in Rosewood, Florida.  What if I dared to use the words “White Flight” when discussing cities in the late Sixties and Seventies?

I hear many of my right leaning friends say, “Just teach the facts.” I agree but what happens when you move past “who, what, and when” to “how and why?” How do I answer questions like “How or Why did Rosewood occur?” “Why was redlining used to segregate communities?” Answering questions like this will certainly require a teacher to toe a thin line.

I think a certain right leaning political group has created buzz words to send their minions on a crusade to look under rocks for snakes that don’t exist. Certainly, a few do, but that there is a nationwide cabal of educators attempting to indoctrinate your kids is propaganda from the right… unless it is to do their homework or treat their classmates with respect. Is making students aware of certain warts in history really indoctrinating or brainwashing them? I suggest if you have concerns, take the time to look at your state’s teaching standards or drop by your child’s class. I know it is much easier just to pass on the propaganda.

So, Nannie. Once again you taught me a lesson that has stayed with me through the years. I’m just not sure what kind of lesson. I won’t know until I find a rock with a snake under it.

***

It should be noted that history has shown that authoritarians target education in general and teachers in particular. It is a goal of authoritarian leaders to silence the intellectuals. Hitler’s concentration camps, Stalin’s gulags, and Pol Pot’s Reeducation camps were full of teachers, intellectuals, artists, novelists, musicians, and the other educated deemed to be menaces to their policies. There are reasons why schools are taken over by authoritarian governments. This is how future citizens should learn to think for themselves after all. Education that focuses on research and finding truth is scary for authoritarians. Or, as a former president once stated, “I love the uneducated.”

***

Don Miller writes in multiple genres. His latest novel is a fictional historical novel that focuses on The Great Depression and the labor unrest it triggered in the South in 1934. The novel is “Thunder Along the Copperhead” and may be purchased in paperback or downloaded at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJYQ3SSV

My Southern Heritage Doesn’t Require a Flag

/ cigarman501 / 5 Comments

…or a monument.

Summer is upon me.  According to John Phillips, “The Mississippi River runs like molasses in the summertime.”  I know the summer humidity is as sticky as molasses…just like discussions about my heritage. 

The steamy humidity is a part of my heritage, as are lightning bugs and mosquitos, or violent thunderstorms, and the refreshing cool afterward.  Cutting sweet corn off the cob and salting it with the sweat off my brow.  Seems much of my heritage runs the gamut between opposite poles of good and bad.

My Southern heritage is being debated across the far reaches of this country…again.   The left is celebrating a statue of General Lee and Traveler, along with Stonewall Jackson being whisked off to a museum and the Right continues to debate the evils of Critical Race Theory, a theory I believe most have never studied…including me.  CRT is a graduate school or law school course that has been around for some forty years and is beyond the scope of what is being taught in grade schools.  Some people are confusing the truth about our checkered past for CRT.  I notice the folks crying the loudest about General Lee are also crying the loudest against CRT.  Maybe they aren’t confused at all.

These statues were erected to glorify men so gallantly in their Confederate gray or butternut.  Many monuments were bought and paid for by the Daughters of the Confederacy.  Statues bought and paid for by our grandmothers and great grandmothers can’t be bad, can they? 

The problem is many were erected in the badly segregated South of the Jim Crow era, celebrating men who caused the deaths of so many and who brought havoc and destruction to the South.  Erected by those who advanced a segregated society for another hundred years after the war. I find nothing to celebrate on this issue.

I believe there is much to celebrate about my Southern heritage. What I celebrate doesn’t increase the resentment associated with enslaved people bullied and beaten by gun bulls and patty rollers on tall horses.  The enslaved whose present and futures were lorded over by Southern aristocrats whose propaganda led poor whites to their deaths on distant hillsides.  Our heritage doesn’t have to involve a Battle Flag that flew over an army in the employ of a rebellious cluster of Southern states intent on keeping and expanding their “peculiar institution.” A “country” that only lasted for four years.

Is there nothing else we can celebrate regarding Southern Heritage?  Is there nothing else to be proud of?  Is there nothing more than flags flown from pickup trucks and belt buckles and bumper stickers proclaiming “Forget, Hell!!!!”  Are we simply the sum of our rebellious past?

We have a rich culture that doesn’t have to harken back to “old times there are not forgotten.” If you are going to lionize the exploits of soldiers on a battlefield, why look past the Revolutionary War?  More Revolutionary War battles were fought in my state than any other and some of the greatest military leaders of the war fought here.  South Carolina born and bred, Sumter, Marion, Pickens, and Moultrie, along with adopted sons like Morgan, Greene, and Shelby left their mark, not only on my state but on the nation as a whole.

Wait just a “cotton pickin’ minute.”  Weren’t some of these men slave owners? Yes, some were and despite this fact, we should neither purge them from history books nor should we discount their contributions.  As some of my right-leaning friends have told me, “It’s history”.  I agree, it is history and history should be taught warts and all.  It shouldn’t be sanitized, nor should it be taught as propaganda like my eighth-grade Cold War Civics class. History is simply what was. We shouldn’t cover it up and we shouldn’t hide from it.

We have a rich Southern culture and heritage going back centuries despite our “peculiar institution” and resulting Jim Crow…let me rephrase that…” including our peculiar institution and resulting Jim Crow.” It’s history.  We don’t need a flag or statues to worship under any more than we should deny the existence of mosquitoes and high humidity in our travel brochures.  They are facts we can’t or should not attempt to escape.  Facts are facts and history is history.

We have a rich and diverse heritage in my state alone.  Gullah language and art from the coast to Appalachian culture in the mountains and foothills and to German Lutherans in the “Dutch Fork” middle.  Native American tribal influences from the Catawba River, across to the Savannah, and down to Pee Dee just to mention a few.  We have art, music, and literature that sprang from slaves and sharecroppers. Beautiful cities and small towns.   Architecture, music, visual arts, cuisine, sports, a heritage that shouldn’t include praise for men enslaving other men or men who fought for them. 

When I say “shouldn’t include” do I mean we should ignore it?  Certainly not.  We shouldn’t heap praise upon the heads of my long-ago, dearly departed great, great grandfathers for fighting under the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia.  Whatever their motivation, they rebelled in the name of supporting slavery. If there was any honor in that flag it was lost when it was co-opted by the KKK and like minded white supremacists while we or our parents did nothing.

My grandfathers were poor men with little education.  Maybe they bought the propaganda about the state’s rights that included the right to enslave.  Maybe they believed in an unfair tariff that was placed on goods raised on the backs of the enslaved.  Maybe they believed it was a War of Northern Aggression.  I doubt they thought much past the surface.  Wars are started by rich, old men and fought by young, poor ones.  Still, they fought and died under the wrong banner and should not be memorialized or immortalized. 

No, I’ll stick with being proud of a heritage that includes BB King from Mississippi singing the Blues, a Southern invention.  I might sip a bit of Jack Daniels from Tennessee with a bit of Coca-Cola invented in Atlanta, Georgia.  Maybe later I’ll select from a menu that includes Cajun or Creole food from Louisiana or BBQ from anywhere in the South or shrimp and grits, from my state.  I’ve eaten enough Soul food to cause my arteries to collapse.

Afterward, I might go sit on my front porch, a Southern culture trait in itself, while smelling honeysuckle, jasmine, or gardenia with a Pat Conroy, Ace Atkins, or a James Lee Burke novel.  All notable Southern authors who follow a lineage of fine Southern authors from Faulkner, Walker, O’Conner, and Williams to name just a few.

Depending on the season I might watch my favorite sports teams, The Braves from Atlanta, The Tigers from Clemson.  I might catch a NASCAR event, a sport begun in the South that sprang from moonshiners and dirt track racers.  We have a Southern heritage attached to our sports teams and college football is a recognized religion with an attending congregation in the millions on any given Saturday.  Why can’t we Southerners be proud of that?

Again, and with fervor, my Southern Heritage doesn’t involve a battle flag or statues saluting dead Confederates.  My Southern Heritage is too rich for that.   My Southern heritage is about beautiful and historic homes and cities, sharecropper shanties, and Sears cottages. It’s about kudzu, cotton, and long-abandoned textile mills.  It’s about old men, white and black, plowing behind a mule on the river bottoms.

It is about rich music from Nashville or Muscle Shoals and even richer food from New Orleans, Atlanta, or anywhere on the coast. It’s great literature that can be as heavy as Southern humidity or as light as the scent of Jasmine.  My Southern heritage is about beautiful flower and vegetable gardens, and cotton fields bursting white in the fall.  It is about sitting on the front porch with family and friends after church and a Sunday dinner. 

My heritage is about friends and families of all races.  It is about celebrating diversity.

If I haven’t turned you off, further works by Don Miller may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR0A3XCeFAUGkHotYyrBgt6V-v3Rl-6mVzt2hmVK3o_4rtITkiH874sjYQs

Image of Lee’s statue by Paul Mayer, Office of the Mayor, Washington, DC.