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APOLOGIZING FOR SLAVERY IS JUST THE FIRST STEP. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY SALLIE TISDALE | We are supposed to be engaged in a cultural conversation about race -- a dialogue largely taking place on television and at the movies. It has already reached the level of absurdity in the controversy over whether or not the United States should apologize for slavery. The absurdity is not in the apology. As reparations go, it's a bit thin for one of the greatest injuries of modern times. And any apology should be the beginning of change, not the end. But I believe all change starts with the wish for it, and I would welcome an apology -- a sincere one -- as the tiniest beginning to a real conversation about racism in this country. The absurdity is in the craven attempt to find out ahead of time how an official apology for slavery will affect President Clinton's standing in the polls. Hesitation, caution and cowardice are everything an apology should not be. We've traded unquestioned racism for a twisted multicultural correctness. Everything is celebrated, nothing can be discussed. We seem to want to live in an imaginary world without racism, where we celebrate differences but never base our beliefs on them. This is a world where people seem unable to simply say, "I'm sorry." I look at this with a jaundiced eye. I am white; two of my three children are Mayan Indian. When I first enrolled them in public school, I checked "Native American" as their race. This, I found out the hard way, means North American Indian, subject to complex tribal agreements and a nightmare of paperwork for the unsuspecting parent. But I couldn't bring myself to choose the only other option -- "Hispanic," the designation of the conquistadors. (I settled for "Other" and a note.) When we first tried to transfer our daughter from an almost entirely white school to a well-integrated one a few miles away, the district refused. It would lower integration in the white school, they explained, which went against district policy. No one wanted to talk to me about why two schools so close together had such distinctly different racial compositions. We insisted, and she transferred. For fourth and fifth grade in that school, my daughter, Annie Rose, was taught by Jeff Creswell. Jeff quickly became her good friend, the kind of friend only a good teacher can be. Annie Rose was part of a successful experiment Jeff and his colleague Rebecca Plaskitt did, when he began teaching with something called the Storyline Method. Storyline centers the entire school curriculum around a particular story, for long periods of time. One of the stories Jeff chose was that of the underground railroad. Jeff says the average high school student spends less than four hours studying the history of slavery. His 10- and 11-year-olds spent several months focusing for most of the day on this one topic. They slowly read a novel describing the escape to Canada of two slave girls named Julilly and Liza. They kept journals, studied geography and climate, learned spirituals, wrote poems and drew pictures. They made models of slave cabins with popsicle sticks and construction paper. They did library and Internet research. They studied the economics of the Golden Triangle. To enter Mr. Creswell's room that year was to enter a dramatic and disturbing world. The classroom was papered with posters advertising slaves for sale and wanted posters for runaways. The ceiling was patterned with the constellations that guided the slaves. Beneath them, 11-year-old children, black and white and brown, huddled around tables, studying escape routes.
"I went through a whole period of grieving where I wanted to apologize to everyone. Now I think the best way I can apologize is to keep the story alive." The underground railroad is no longer a story about race to him. More and more, it is a story about the human animal, its history made partly from cruelty and partly from nobility. Slavery is Africans on Africans, Egyptians on Israelites. It is Spanish on Mayan. It is a fact we rarely face as squarely as did these children. Jeff never felt that the kids responded to the story based on their own race. "The emotional response didn't follow on black and white lines. It was just children responding to the injustice of the situation. They could not fathom how people could tear a child away from its mother." At the end of the months of study, the children gave a performance for their parents -- singing, dancing, reciting some of their original writing and performing parts of the story itself. My daughter played the part of Julilly, who was separated from her mother by auction. White, black, brown, the young actors stood nervously before us, acting out a scene in which the white abolitionist exhorts several slaves to escape. "I don't want to be whipped by Massa Sims one more time," Julilly said. "Even a horse shouldn't be whipped the way he whips us slaves." Then the children sang "Wade in the Water," with a choir of boys shouting, "You got to!" on every chorus. My daughter never knew her birth mother -- a young girl harried by the war against the Mayans, a war partly funded by the United States. This is the same government that wonders if it should apologize for its past grievous sins. I have felt great sorrow for that particular woman, mixed with a strange gratitude. I can't -- and have difficulty trying to -- imagine such loss. My daughter had to leave her, and she came to me instead, and I try to be worthy of that. I am not always sure that I am.
Perhaps the answer to the question of whether or not anyone should apologize for such outrage lies in children. They are not innocent of this suffering, even if we wish they were. The spontaneous, heartfelt expressions of sorrow we all need to share begin here. We have to tell our children the truth -- show them, dramatically, as Jeff has done. We have to do it without hesitation, with courage; we have to be sure they know what humans can do to each other for good and ill. Then their hearts will fill with an apology greater and more pure than our own. Children know wrongness when they see it. They know. Their sorrow is true and will change the world.
Discuss Sallie Tisdale's column in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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"I never once thought I would offend anybody," Jeff says now. Jeff, who is white, first taught at two black-majority schools. "All I was thinking about was my own personal feeling of having been cheated as a child of this part of my history. I remember vividly the first time I heard the name Harriet Tubman. I was 23 years old; I was teaching, and it just blew me away.