In Chapter 13, “Of the Coming of John,” from The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois tells the story of John, a Black fieldhand in Georgia, who goes north to attend school. The community anxiously awaits his return. When he does make his way back home, he is a more somber and stoic man than the jovial and boisterous boy who had left seven years earlier. John leaves his own welcoming party to look at the sea from the bluff where his younger sister, Jennie, joins him:
Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting water.
“John,” she said, “does it make every one—unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?”
He paused and smiled. “I am afraid it does,” he said.
“And, John, are you glad you studied?”
“Yes,” came the answer, slowly but positively.
She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, “I wish I was unhappy,—and—and,” putting both arms about his neck, “I think I am, a little, John.”
“I am Afraid it Does”
I have a visceral memory of sitting in one of my college classrooms in 2007 or 2008 where we were watching the war documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, which examined a prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq in 2003. I remember being stunned and feeling like my entire paradigm was shifting. I remember thinking that I could never go back to how I felt and thought before.
I remember thinking, “ignorance is bliss.” Until then, I had thought of war largely in terms of strategies and sacrifice and saw America as the hero in every story. But that day, I saw something unrecognizable to my naive eyes.
Perhaps those of us who study the past have all felt this. Each of us experiences moments that unsettle us, moments that make us see differently. We also watch this unfold in our classrooms as students encounter difficult truths for the first time.
Each time I encounter a new story or evidence that shows a harsher side of the past, the sting softens as I learn to hold these truths within my new paradigm. Gratitude and disheartenment sit side by side: gratitude for our country’s ideals and disheartenment for the ways we’ve failed to live up to them. I sometimes become unhappy, as Jennie called it.
The Weight of Knowing
There certainly is a personal cost to awareness. There is a heaviness that comes with seeing clearly. As teachers, we don’t simply hand over facts. We invite students into complexity. But clarity and complexity are not the enemy of hope. When we study the past honestly, we don’t just uncover injustice. We also find courage, ingenuity, and inspiration. The same records that reveal harm also show the extraordinary efforts of people who imagined something better.
In these moments, when I am feeling especially critical of our history, I turn to those who have experienced its darkness more fully than I and have still maintained a love for the country. Later in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, he explores African American spirituals and the musical heritage of the nation in a chapter titled “Sorrow Songs.” He writes, “Through all the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond.”
Du Bois reminds us that the same knowledge that exposes the darkness can also illuminate the endurance of faith in a better future. That same faith is what we nurture in our students when we help them face the past honestly. Perhaps, the true work of historical thinking is learning to hold both: the pain of clarity and the hope that something better can be built from it.
Cultivating Hope Through Historical Thinking
In last week’s blog post titled “Historical Thinking Matters (More Than We Think),” Thinking Nation’s Executive Director, Zachary Coté wrote “Historical thinking humanizes us as the scholars as well as those we study. It makes us more engaged and informed citizens. Historical thinking matters.”
“Historical thinking humanizes us…”
Pain is part of becoming more human: we see this in most aspects of our lives. We learn after making mistakes. We recognize the depth of our love amidst loss. We embrace gratitude when we’ve gone without. We find perspective when we’ve lived through something that could have broken us, but didn’t.
Encountering the past can and will bring pain when done authentically.
- When we ask students to employ historical empathy for La Malinche, who aided Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Americas, students encounter the brutality of colonization.
- When we invite students to utilize comparison to analyze the discriminatory immigration policies of the 19th century, students uncover explicit racist attitudes.
- When we challenge students to evaluate evidence of European imperialism in Africa, students discover the long-standing destructive impacts that have continued in the modern world.
- When we prompt students to analyze the historical significance of the Civil Rights struggle, they confront the reality that progress has been uneven and incomplete.
Yet we trade comfort for knowledge, recognizing that becoming more human is the reward. Yes, there is a cost—our “happiness.” But the reward is hope. The reward can be joy. The reward will be a citizenry dedicated to forming a more perfect union and maintaining liberty and justice for all.
Facing the full scope of the past doesn’t have to diminish love of country. Real patriotism invites us to learn from both our triumphs and our failures and to keep working until our ideals move closer to reality.