some blacks and many whites. It is all too easy to blame the victim and
conclude that people of color are themselves responsible for being on the
bottom. Without causal historical analysis, these racial disparities are
impossible to explain.
When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct
our already poor ability to see it in the present. The closest they come to
analysis is to present a vague feeling of optimism: in race relations, as in
everything, our society is constantly getting better. We used to have slavery;
now we don’t. We used to have lynchings; now we don’t. Baseball used to be
all white; now it isn’t. The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of
black-white relations, implying that race relations have somehow steadily
improved on their own. This cheery optimism only compounds the problem,
because whites can infer that racism is over. “The U.S. has done more than any
other nation in history to provide equal rights for all,” The American Tradition
assures us. Of course, its authors have not seriously considered the levels of
human rights in the Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in Choctaw
society in 1800, because they don’t mean their declaration as a serious
statement of comparative history—it is just ethnocentric cheerleading.
High school students “have a gloomy view of the state of race relations in
America today,” according to nationwide polls. Students of all racial
backgrounds brood about the subject.^82 Another poll reveals that for the first
time in this century, young white adults have less tolerant attitudes toward
black Americans than those over thirty. One reason is that “the under-30
generation is pathetically ignorant of recent American history.”^83 Too young to
have experienced or watched the civil rights movement as it happened, these
young people have no understanding of the past and present workings of racism
in American society.
Educators justify teaching history because it gives us perspective on the
present. If there is one issue in the present to which authors should relate the
history they tell, the issue is racism. But as long as history textbooks make
white racism invisible in the twentieth century, neither they nor the students
who use them will be able to analyze race relations intelligently in the twenty-
first.