by Cam Beck
When I was in third grade, my class presented a South Carolina wax museum. I spent weeks crafting cardboard wings for my role as Jimmy Doolittle, who led the first retaliatory raid on Japan after Pearl Harbor. The Doolittle Raiders launched from Florida but trained in Columbia for two weeks. I was perplexed by my assignee – was it truly justifiable to argue that someone who spent less than a month in our state was a defining part of its history? My classmates played similarly disconnected figures: historical heroes who spent miniscule amounts of time in South Carolina. There was no mention of figures like John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, or Strom Thurmond: proud South Carolinians with a more… muddled legacy.
In eighth grade, my history teacher decided to teach “African-American History” rather than the curriculum-defined “History of South Carolina and the United States” (South Carolina Department of Education Social Studies Standards). Her idea of education consisted of arguing for reinstating segregation to create a better America and assigning white students to say the N-word to “understand how it feels to be racist”; those of us who refused received a zero. When my mom reported her to the principal for detailing how much money she thought each Black student would have been valued at during a slave auction, she denied all of her… misguided instructional attempts.
Junior year, I took AP US History. The essay prompt on our final exam surrounded the history of slavery in America. When the class met for a post-exam debrief, our teacher told us he was glad we got that prompt. Being from South Carolina, he said, we have a significant advantage pertaining to historical context; we know more about the institution of slavery than most students because of our state’s… complicated history. As I spotted a classmate’s T-shirt broadcasting the name of her family’s plantation, I could not help but wonder if he might be wrong.
One of the first results for “South Carolina” on Google is a Wikipedia entry titled “History of Racism in South Carolina.” It includes hyperlinks to articles about lynchings, plantations, segregation academies, and the KKK. It discusses the Dylann Roof massacre and the long-overdue removal of the Confederate flag standing in front of our State House. What it doesn’t discuss is my eighth-grade teacher, my classmate’s t-shirt, my dad’s coworkers with Confederate flags on their trucks, or the man behind me at Publix who grumbles that the line is taking too long because the cashier is Black; no Wikipedia page, however thorough, can fully capture the ingrained and institutionalized racism in our home state, which I have witnessed in three different school systems, public and private, though thankfully not my current one. What is included, however, is our state government’s long-standing opposition to critical race theory (CRT): the study and understanding of the prevalence and perpetuation of racism in American and Western society and legal institutions (The New York Times).
CRT is not the partisan political issue that major media outlets declare it to be. If Black students are “old enough” to experience the confusing terror of racism, then white students are “old enough” to learn about it. If we do not learn from our history, the culturally ingrained tendrils of oppression will continue to strangle our community. It is vital that students learn of the systems in this country and state that have long contributed to the oppression of Black Americans so we can continue to push for change moving forward. It is unbelievably pertinent to teach children the impact of our past words and actions so that they are not repeated. No child should understand how it feels to be racist. No child should know what it is to experience racism.
It is ridiculous that the official position of the state of South Carolina is that educators cannot express moral judgment on people or laws discriminating based on race (SC H. 4100) in fear of “distort[ing]” our state’s history. South Carolina’s history is certainly unfavorable, but its future does not have to be. Educating children about the dangerous presence of racism helps stop them from growing up to perpetuate it. Learning about the injustice of systemic barriers breeds compassionate children who are motivated to follow in the footsteps of braver South Carolinians like Jesse Jackson to combat oppression. The true distortion of history is the hypocritically polite, sniveling denial of it. While the history of South Carolina may be complex, it is not muddled, misguided, or morally ambiguous: it is wrong. Racism is wrong.
Those words do not condemn our community; they may be our only hope of saving it.
About Cam Beck, third place winner
Cam Beck is a senior at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School in Columbia, where Elise Hagstette is his English teacher. The son of Carolyn and Bryan Beck, Cam participated in theater and drumming. He plans to study English at Dartmouth College.