The Power of Perspective

It's the time for New Year's resolutions again. A friend of mine (John Russell Stanger, over at pluckypresby.com) has challenged his own reading habits in 2014. His goal is to read only books written by people of color this year. In his essay on the decision, John says, "White-dominated thought -- with all its power and privilege -- has shaped the world enough. I read to feel, to be reminded of what it means to be human, and to be re-shaped, so I have no doubt that spending a year being shaped only by writers of color will leave me transformed for the better."

The stories we hear have power. The perspectives we hear in those stories might be quieter, but they hold just as much power: the power to normalize, to "other," to establish the "right" way of thinking or doing. Unfortunately, most history teaching is done from one perspective. As Sir Winston Churchill said, "history is written by the victors," and that's quite obvious from an overview of modern textbooks. Sure, there are mentions of non-white cultures, but mostly in relation to those of European descent.

Take the slave experience as an example. We talk about slavery and acknowledge its wrongness. But where does the slave story begin in our history canon? It begins when the slaves arrived on American soil, when they first made contact with white plantation owners. We leave out the horrors those men and women had already endured, stolen from their homes, imprisoned. We tell the story, not so much of the slaves, but of the white-driven institution of slavery. The voices in this story are almost all white: white slaveholders, white abolitionists, a white president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Where are the voices of those who lived under the weight of this institution? Surely we would have something to learn from their point of view.

I am a white person. The black perspective is not my story to tell. Fortunately, I don't have to. There are good sources out there, voices that have been silenced or overlooked, that tell this story far better than I ever could. It's simply my job to let them speak. So this year, I will teach from the other perspectives. My students and I will listen to the old slave spirituals. We will read Native accounts of European arrival, passed down through generations. We will look at sections of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Like my friend John, I will immerse myself in other perspectives, giving a louder voice to the quiet one and, hopefully, shifting my and my students' view of the world.