I can’t remember my first thought after finding a picture of my Nonna in full Nazi salute.
Well, not a Nazi salute. A Mussolini salute? A fascist gesture?
The snapshot of my 16–17 year old grandmother shows her standing in front of a summer camp somewhere in Italy.
I remember my eyes shot right to her arm in that ever-recognizable 45 degrees. I keep looking back-and-forth between her face and her arm to be sure they’re the same body.
There’s no one alive who knew her then who could give this picture context. There’s no one to confirm if my Nonna was a fascist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, nationalist. The picture won’t tell me if she was racist.
It can’t reveal if every kid at the camp was forced to do this salute and take this picture or if my grandmother took it willingly and with pride. It won’t whisper if she was a bystander or a perpetrator or a secret spy for the resistance.
While I pray that the Nonna who made me butter and sugar on bread was not standing on the wrong side of history, I can’t be sure.
This is my 16th year teaching the Humanities in public schools in Texas. Many of those years were spent teaching about human tragedies like the Holocaust and segregation as both an English and US history teacher.
The newest attacks on educators are especially infuriating during a year we’re trying to keep our community together after a destabilizing pandemic. These new calculated cruelties assert that teachers are indoctrinating students and perpetuating a curriculum that many of us had to Google to understand what the accusations leveled against us entailed.
The botched Virginia election also perpetuated a myth that parents aren’t part of decisions at schools — that we don’t care what parents say or need.
That’s news to teachers who call families after school to check on kiddos who have COVID.
That’s news to members of any PTO collaborating on the latest book fair or fun run or fall festival.
That’s news to my high school’s Shared Decision Making Committee which includes parents — a legal requirement, in fact. They just met this month to discuss issues impacting our school.
Not only that, but the myth also asserts that parents don’t want kids to learn from the mistakes of our Past.
Parents — more than anyone — understand how important it is to confront and obliterate bad habits from past generations.
The parents who grew up passengers with someone driving with road rage and chooses to abandon the dangerous habit to become a safe driver…
The parents who learn that hitting your children is no way to help them learn and stop abusive habits…
The parents who grew up hearing family members use the “n-word” and eradicate the racist habit…
If my grandmother was a fascist — if she was anti-Semitic and militaristic — I have a pressing responsibility to right those wrongs. It is that sense of responsibility — not shame — which drives my commitment.
We learn to be wary of hubris from Odysseus.
We learn about the power of investigative journalism to “shine the light of truth” on injustices like extra-judicial and barbaric lynchings from Ida B. Wells.
To accuse history teachers of attempting to shame our students by showing them what my philosophy professor in college called “our checkered past” is a downright insult.
These shallow sound bites expose the sheer laziness of our legislators to even glance at our curriculum. This myth making certainly reveals that they have not sat down to talk to a teacher in their life.
We do confront the inflammatory language of primary sources like Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens’s, “Cornerstone Speech.” He states so plainly that the new Confederate Constitution “has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists among us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” Stephens further clarified that “this was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
We do not read this document from history to shame white kids. We read it to understand the causes of our single Civil War.
We also confront Texas documents like the Declaration of Causes. This document also explains in plain language why Texas left the Union. “She [Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery — the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits — a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”
Any Texan should feel ashamed that we once embraced these ideas.
However, we also show students complex figures like Sam Houston and George Washington.
Washington freed the Americans his family enslaved, legally, after the death of his wife. What would have happened if he had freed them during his lifetime? During his presidency? These are complex choices that students turn over and over in their hands.
Sam Houston prohibited the import of enslaved people to Texas, he refused to allow payments to bounty hunters searching for those who escaped slavery, but he also enslaved 12 Americans himself. Though there’s contrasting theories as to when and how he freed them, these choices obviously generate all kinds of questions in classrooms.
As Texans, we have lessons to learn from our southern history, but we also have many heroic Southerners who show us different choices.
And history, put simply, is just a series of choices.
You can choose to be a perpetrator, a bystander, or upstanders like sisters, Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld. These two white Southern devoutly faithful American women show us that we all have a choice. They broke away from their father’s plantation and dedicated their lives to speaking and writing about the evils of slavery from a personal perspective.
Texas’s SB3 makes the silly suggestion that educators should not propose that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”
If we were trying to shame students because of their race, why would we teach about the Grimké sisters?
The bill continues that we may not teach that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”
In several interviews, Texas Senator Hughes explains that white kids shouldn’t feel “shame” and Black kids shouldn’t feel like eternal “victims.” His arguments are absurd for two clear reasons:
First, the purpose of the study of any of the Humanities — history, English, philosophy, religious studies, psychology — is to learn to be better humans.
The lessons are never about our guilt in association to our race. The lessons are always about our Humanity. This is why we see upstanders and bystanders in every race and gender across world history.
We teach about the dangers of fascism and white supremacy through the rise of the Nazis, but also we teach about the global effort to stop them. We teach about those who President Reagan lovingly called “the Boys of Pointe du Hoc.”
On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Reagan reminded us of the sacrifice of those who would give their lives to stop Evil — white, Black, immigrant American soldiers.
“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” Reagan bellowed from the jetting rock.
“These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”
The senator’s second sin is more alarming: if our representatives are taking it upon themselves to legislate what tiny humans should or should not feel as they learn about the world around them, then we’re in real trouble.
Shakespeare breaks your heart on purpose when you watch these two young idiots kill themselves for each other. We teach about dramatic irony — when the audience knows something the characters do not — to show our kids how tragic useless family feuds and hatred can be.
Literature makes us feel.
It gives me goosebumps every year when I hear Diane Nash explain to President Kennedy’s representative that the Freedom Riders desegregating interstate bus travel would not be turning back.
“Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments before they left.”
History makes us feel.
Diane Nash is no “victim,” and I do not teach victimhood when my students hear her words. I teach about the bravery it took — the bravery it always takes — to fight for justice, whether on buses in the United States or the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc.
My Nonna was an empathetic, politically engaged matriarch who taught my cousins and I that we were accountable for our choices. She taught us basic Catholic values. She lamented the destruction of democracy in Venezuela in the early 2000s. Everything I know from my experiences do not show me a fascist.
But, if my grandmother was a fascist at 16 — if she did embrace white supremacy and nationalism at one point in her life— I don’t feel shame when I learn more and more about the tragedies of WWII. I feel a deep responsibility to confront and correct.
To break the bad habits.
To learn to be better humans.