Twilight of Common Dreams

Henry Holt & Company

CHAPTER ONE

A Dubious Battle in Oakland

Columbus Day of 1992 should have been the perfect occasion for teachingschoolchildren about American Indians or, as the city of Oakland,California, officially calls them, Native Americans. Oakland, with an African-Americanplurality and a white minority in its population and on itscity council, was no partisan of the conquering ex-hero from ImperialSpain, who was now frequently held an author of genocide. Indeed, theOakland Board of Education had resolved that schools should "focus theOctober 12th curriculum of every year on Native American culture, contributionsand history."

Moreover, after much travail, the State of California had just adopted anew kindergarten-through-eighth-grade history-social science textbookseries published by Houghton Mifflin, offering little comfort to traditionalistpartisans of Columbus or, indeed, to anyone inclined to see Americanhistory as the unbroken progress of benign Europeans across a savageand underutilized continent. Of the pages devoted to historical narrativein Houghton Mifflin's fourth-grade book, Oh California!, 15 percent wentto sympathetic accounts of several California Indian nations. In theeighth-grade text, A More Perfect Union, an insert in chapter 3 entitled"Understanding Eurocentrism" cautioned against regarding Americanhistory simply as the saga of triumphant European "discovery." ("As youread more about the colonial period, try to imagine how American historymight have been different if European settlers had been more open to theways of other cultures.") The text declared: "Although their names anddiscoveries live on in romantic stories, most of the conquistadors actedruthlessly in their search for riches and power. They treated the nativeinhabitants of America cruelly, enslaving them and often killing them.The conquistadors left a trail of slaughter as they searched for lost citiesof gold."

The politics of textbook adoption in California, as in a number of otherstates, are intricate. The process could be called messy and political, or itcould be called democratic. To be adopted by California schools, text-books have to pass through several filters. Roughly every seven years, thestate chooses a list of acceptable textbooks. The texts must be written inaccordance with a "framework" approved by the state board of education.After public hearings, they must be cleared by the board's curriculumcommission, then certified by the board itself. Once certified as eligiblefor adoption, they are referred to local school boards for further openhearings. All these hurdles have to be passed before textbooks are votedon by local school boards.

In the summer of 1990, when the Houghton Mifflin series came up forcertification by the state's curriculum commission in Sacramento, onemight have expected Christian fundamentalists, long dismayed by whatthey saw as a dangerous undermining of American verities, to rise inrighteous indignation against so "politically correct" a dismantling of the"we came, we saw, we conquered" version of American history. After all,attacks from the cultural Right have long been a staple of textbook adoptionproceedings. But on this occasion, although one Christian fundamentalist,wielding the psychological jargon that has become routine on theseoccasions, did maintain that the new textbooks "could be very damagingto the self-esteem of a fundamentalist Christian child" because they impliedthat fundamentalists are "emotional and hysterical," the complaintwas easily addressed, was not followed up, and had no great effect.

Rather, the focus in Sacramento, and in the media, was on the groupsof the cultural Left. To great media fanfare, a number of group representativestestified passionately that the books were "racist," religiouslydiscriminatory, and otherwise demeaning. Muslims, Jews, Chinese Americans,gays, and, most vigorously, African Americans objected. A groupcalling itself Communities United against Racism in Education (CURE)offered eighty-five single-spaced pages of objections to the kindergartenthrough fifth-grade books alone, charging that they contain "stereotypes,omissions, distortions, exaggerations, and outright lies about peoples ofcolor"; that they are "unidimensional" and "Eurocentric," taking "theside of colonialism and exploitation," "uncritically extol[ling] the whitesupremacist concept of Manifest Destiny" and "anthropologiz[ing] indigenouspeoples"; that they "justify and trivialize ... some of the mostvicious social practices in our history," and "marginalize the lives andstruggles of women, working and poor people, people with disabilities,and gay and lesbian people." In CURE's view, Houghton Mifflin "placesthe white establishment at the center of the universe and all the rest of usas their `burden.' The insidious message is: in order for some children tobe proud of their histories, other children must be made ashamed oftheirs."

CURE pointed to some genuine instances of establishment bias, andto a number of places where the books were uncritical in a Dick-and-Janeishway, even arguably jingoistic in a traditional civics-book manner.They did find occasional passages in the books that could reasonably beread as subtle or not-so-subtle disparagements of foreign and minoritycultures--for example, a European's jocular account of lengthy Chinesenames. They rightly objected to a traditional account of Thanksgiving forfailing to mention that Puritans and other colonists killed Indians. Theychastised the third-grade book for calling John Wesley Powell "one of thefirst people to explore the Grand Canyon" when, of course, he was one ofthe first white people to do so. They pointed to a literature excerpt thatcontained the line: "She had blue eyes and white skin, like an angel."They argued that telling the children to make simulated Kwakiutl maskstrivialized the spiritual qualities of Kwakiutl ceremonies--though theyneglected to note that textbooks customarily trivialize the spiritual qualitiesof everybody's ceremonies. Where a teacher's edition referred to helpfulpolice, CURE wrote: "In many communities, specifically communitiesof color, police officers are regarded not as helpers, but as people to fear."

But CURE and other critics did themselves no favors by interspersingvalid criticisms among scores of indiscriminate ones. The majority ofCURE's charges were trivial and hypersensitive. They were so eager tofind ethnocentrism in these texts that they seemed to quarrel with thenotion that there was or is a dominant American culture. They objected tothe profusion of American flags in the texts' pages. They objected that inthe kindergarten book's illustrations people of color looked "just likewhites, except for being tinted or colored in," and that when photographsof children of color appeared, "there was no discussion of their respectiveethnic identities and specific contributions." When the books singled outminorities' customs, CURE saw disapproval; when the books didn't singlethem out, they saw neglect. They saw cultural bias against Cambodiawhen the second-grade book mentioned that a Cambodian child living inBoston plays in the snow when he couldn't have done so in Cambodia,since it "never snows there." They again cried bias when the second-gradebook traced an African-American family back one generation lessthan a family of German descent, and chastised the book, written forseven-year-olds, when it failed...