"Now I Know People Were Not Miserable in Segregated Schools": Erasure in Nonschool Learning Environments

• In Event: 53.064 - New Research on Challenging White Supremacist Educational Structures to Achieve the Promised Equal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

“Now I know African Americans were not miserable in segregated schools.” White supremacy narratives and erasure in non-school learning environments

Museums and historical sites are created to inform the public about our national heritage, yet the contributions of people of color are often excluded from these narratives. Even when they are included, the researchers found that White supremacist and White progressive narratives (where the White majority gradually gave rights to people of color) strongly influence students’ understanding and interpretations. These understandings are also often different based on the racial identity and racial consciousness of the viewer. This study should lead to a reexamination of the mechanisms for content delivery in historical sites and museums and serve as a caution for historians and history teachers. To ignore the structural White supremacy of historical narratives and the racialized difference of understanding of the content amounts to an erasure of minority voices from our history.
The study investigated a student trip to southern Indiana where both Black and White students experienced historical sites from the Underground Railroad and racial segregation. Students connected to the slave experience in different ways, reported different understandings of the history of segregation, and experienced profoundly different ways of disrupting or reifying the progressive (slavery to segregation to civil rights) narrative of American history.
The researchers found that self-identified Black students voiced a sense of pride in their own personal heritage and an ancestral connection to escaped slaves. However, they were also dissatisfied with their own lack of knowledge concerning slavery and expressed frustration that the historical experiences under segregation were not far removed from their experiences of modern day racism. Lastly, they also reported that their own narratives about American history were disrupted in new ways. Self-identified White students ‘reported learning was not always as intended and reinforced their existing progressive narratives of American History. They expressed sympathy with slaves but the descriptions of slavery and escape were constructed as a bootstrap narrative of overcoming adversity. In addition, the White students articulated a perceived new depth of understanding about the experiences of segregated peoples but reported an uncomplicated progressive narrative of the Civil Rights Era. Both the Black students and the White students used the museum experiences to reexamine America’s past but did so in markedly different ways.
This paper builds on the work on racialized historical understanding in classrooms by Epstein (1997; 1998; 2001) and moves the conversation from the classroom to the public spaces that not only tell our history but show it as well. It also challenges non-school learning spaces to first recognize and then dismantle White supremacist narratives in their sites as well as add to the existing literature on racialized historical understanding to places where our history is stored and displayed.

Author

• Karen L.B. Burgard, Texas A&M University - San Antonio