We Are Not Even Post-colonial Yet!: Archetypes in the Master Narrative of U.S. History Textbooks

Introduction

Swalwell, Pellegrino and View (2015) suggest that, in many regions of the United States (U.S.), teachers’ curricular choices when teaching the stories of oppressed people in the U.S. are limited by their own lack of knowledge, their suppositions about what content matter is relevant and appropriate for their students, and their concerns for “safe” classroom topics. Rather than take the risk of creating their own curricular content and authentic assessments, it is often easier for P-12 classroom teachers to use readily available materials typically found in textbooks and their associated websites. Professional development that might support more courageous efforts seems to be in short supply, according to a recent national survey of teacher professional development (View, DeMulder, Stribling & Dallman, unpublished).

Since we are now at the point where what is tested is what is taught, the recent decision by the Virginia State Department of Education (VDOE) serves as an example of the dilemmas teachers in other parts of the country may face.  VDOE eliminated the Standards of Learning exams for 3^rd grade history and for all of U.S. history pre-colonial to the present, throwing into question the degree to which elementary school history will be taught with any substance in Virginia (see http://www.doe.virginia.gov/administrators/superintendents_memos/2016/284-16a.pdf).  The required local alternative assessments place the onus on teachers to develop “authentic, performance assessments.” The Commonwealth acknowledged that:

“The capacity of teachers to design and implement assessments that are intended to inform instruction is likely to vary widely across the Commonwealth. School divisions should evaluate the capacity and experience of their teachers in implementing such assessments and to use this information to design professional development. Professional development should encourage the collaboration of teachers within grades and across grades in implementing the assessments and in using their results in determining instructional needs. School divisions are encouraged to leverage the resources and established training opportunities available from professional organizations.”

Yet, informal conversations with committed local Virginia-area teachers suggests that the assessments “ignore” slavery and other historical curricular content that is complicated (personal communication, October 2017).

This paper uses the method of literary analysis (Alridge, 2006) to explore whether the theoretical frameworks – post-colonial theory, critical race theory, and racial pedagogical content knowledge -- are observable in the U.S. history textbooks on which public classroom teachers depend.  The literary analysis helps us to understand the archetypes or intractable stereotypes about people of color that emerge in the master narrative of U.S. history, how we might liberate ourselves from these stereotypes toward decolonized urban educational spaces, and ultimately what urban classroom teachers can do to overcome the failure of textbooks in order to achieve anti-colonial classrooms by resisting cultural and structural violences.  It offers specific historical content that might address absences in instructional materials.  Finally, it offers strategies for urban classroom teachers to guide student research and promote deep historical knowledge of American Indian/Indigenous[1], African American, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and working-class white people and communities for the purpose of decolonizing learning.

Theoretical Framework

Three formal theories shape our examination of decolonizing education: colonial theory, critical race theory in education (CRT), and racial pedagogical content knowledge (RPCK). The representation of Indigenous Peoples in US history textbooks is told from a colonial perspective, as is the story of the enslavement of Africans (e.g., Anderson & Metzger, 2011) and the conquering of lands that were part of Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and the Mariana Islands. CRT proposes “whiteness” as property that is denied to people of color and often to poor whites.  In addition, CRT articulates the intractable nature of institutional racism leading to the need for counternarratives of people of color, as well as an understanding that social change typically occurs when there is interest convergence between the demands of people of color and the interest of those in power. RPCK focuses on the uses of a CRT framework for the teaching and learning of social studies content.

Colonial Theory

The contextualization provided by colonialism and colonial theory is helpful in understanding the inequities and representations in the 21^st century.

There are many theories and terms that use the word ‘colonial.’ Colonialism refers to the historical oppression of the civilizations and cultures of Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and the Caribbean by predominantly white European states, through the act of acquiring full political, social, economic, psychological and cultural control over their geography. Post-colonialism refers to the conditions – economic, political, social, psychological – that centuries of colonialism left the colonies in after their liberation or independence. Neocolonialism, in turn, refers to the continued political, economic, social, and psychological control exerted by the ‘cultural’ West (Western ideologies) over the rest of the world – particularly erstwhile colonies (this control does not have to be actual, geographic control). Decolonization, simply put, refers to the complex process of undoing colonization and its lingering effects.

At the heart of all colonial theory is the idea of ‘othering’ and the creation of racialized spaces (Memmi, 1957; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1988). Cultural anthropology, a by-product of 19^th century European colonialism, was particularly consumed with the idea of the “primitive other,” while social anthropology in the United States grew out of a concern for social status and “sociality” and relations among organizations and groups during the rise of the American Empire (Collier, 1993). In these frames, “human societies could be classified into categories of cultural evolution on a scale of progression that ranged from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization" (Morgan, 1877; Tylor, 1871). In a review of Ellingson's book in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4:1 (Spring 2003), Frederick E. Hoxie writes:

“at about the middle of the 19th century when both imperial ambition and racial ideology was hardening into national policy in Europe and the U.S. — Indians became foils of a different kind: people whose traditions underscored the accomplishments of Europe.” (no page number)

Despite the transformations of the discipline of anthropology to include critiques of the embedded ethnocentrism of earlier scholars, the pursuit of “cross-cultural” understanding of human universals still ranks European, Western White “cultures” as normative. From among these various societies come literary tropes that create stock characters as found in popular sources such as Wikipedia and which serve to define individuals as the “noble savage” and “bloodthirsty savages” (for Indigenous Peoples); ”magical negro” and “mammy,” (for African descended peoples); “perpetual foreigner,” “model minority,” and “eager assimilationist” (for East and South Asians); “uneducated hard laborer" and “of homogenous origin” (for Latinx peoples); and “crackers,” “hillbillies,” and “poor white trash” (for poor whites) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_characters).

Colonial, post-colonial, and neocolonial studies are broad fields with multiple intersections and overlaps, each stemming from the need to understand colonial/colonized history, present and future prospects. They have different implications for different disciplines with the singular commonality of providing a background – they contextualize empirical studies and theoretical arguments alike. This framework makes several larger points.  One, the study of anything ‘colonial’ has been dominated by those from colonizer backgrounds, since these theories originate in and are a part of the colonizer superstructure. Two, the social sciences have an inherently stilted approach towards studying the colonized due to this. Three, this stilted approach has an embedded power dynamic which colors all research thus conducted. Four, the focus of colonial studies has always been economic, political or social, while the psychological internalization of colonization is left unexplored, And, finally, equity cannot be achieved using the constructs, tools and concepts of the oppressor – the oppressed need to tell their stories in their own words, on their own terms.

Also at the heart of this argument is the fetishistic depiction of the colonized by the colonizer. The irony of this depiction is that the colonizer depicts the colonized as originally being ‘savage,’ ‘brutal,’ ‘uncivilized,’ and in need of the benevolent colonizer, while implementing the most brutal and savage processes and practices on them in the form of colonization or development. All colonizer-colonized relations rest on the benevolent or violent need of the colonizer to change the colonized and their undesirable ‘original state.’ Even the rhetoric of modernization is a continuation of the colonizing project, for even when it is an attempt to alleviate the destruction caused by colonization, it is viewed as a benevolent effort rather than as reparations.

Critics of the colonial frameworks offer ideas that are helpful to reshaping social studies instruction.  For example, Cesaire (1955) rejected the association of the colonized with terms like ‘savagery’, ‘backwardness’, ‘meanness’, ‘inferiority’ and ‘wickedness,’ instead contributing greatly to the articulation of ‘Negritude,’ the combined struggle for emancipation by all African people by rejecting the European doctrine. Bhambra (2015) argues that a ‘connected sociologies’ approach is useful for understanding a shared global present. The central premise of ‘connected sociologies’ is to rethink sociology from a perspective that puts histories of dispossession, colonialism, enslavement and appropriation at the heart of historical sociology and the discipline more generally. Quijone (2007) also speaks to biased and stilted nature of not just colonialism as a structure, but also its theorization. He writes:

“Nothing is less rational, finally, than the pretension that the specific cosmic vision of a particular ethnie should be taken as universal rationality, even if such an ethnie is called western Europe because this is actually pretend to impose a provincialism as universalism.” (p. 177)

Like Fanon (1967), Quijone (2007) places the power of coloniality in its racialization of people, by first creating the hierarchy of cultures – the superior colonizer and inferior colonized – and then applying that to create biological and structural hierarchies. They trace the creation of race as a construct to colonization. Further, provincial eurocentricity is universalized, while the heterogeneity of the oppressed is represented as being homogenous. Memmi (1957), meanwhile, comments on the connected nature of race and class in the colonial project, claiming that ‘they are rich because they are white and they are white because they are rich.’ Spivak (1988) addresses the connection of race to gender, and how white men positioned themselves as the saviors of brown women in the colonial context. These interlinkages point to the need for considering the persistence of (post, neo, de) colonial theories and thought leaders when theorizing class, race and gender intersectionalites even in the 21^st century.

For example, Derrick Alridge (2006) described four components of the master narrative in his examination of how the modern civil rights movement is depicted in textbooks that might apply to all of the public stories of people of color and poor whites in contemporary textbooks.  The master narrative does at least four things. It essentializes people of color and their struggles to dismantle white supremacy as gradual efforts to assimilate and integrate into mainstream white culture. The master narrative portrays the widespread, legally condoned attacks on people of color communities as isolated acts of individuals or as historical happenstance.  At times, this includes the ways that violence against people of color and poor whites was “collateral damage” in the progression of U.S. political and economic aims. The master narrative portrays people of color who resisted racism as martyrs and messiahs. Finally, it suggests that racial equality has been achieved, largely as a result of victories through the US legal system.

Another common perception is that the United States is “post-colonial,” or that “colonization” is a historical and international phenomenon and not a contemporary U.S. phenomenon, despite the legacies of the origin of the 13 colonies as Dutch and English-funded trading companies competing with France and Spain for dominance over native Indian lands, chattel slavery created as a result of the colonization of the African continent, the late 19^th century U.S. imperialism (into Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, etc.), and the 20^th century globalization of the U.S. economy. More importantly, what Europe brought with it to the ‘New World’ was its ideation of the ‘other’ and the racialized superstructure. As an instrument of economic and political policies, educational policies have tended to mirror and promote dominant interests to create a “colonized” or “re-enslaved” labor force (Anyon, 1981; Blackmon, 2008; Takaki, 1993).  Galtung’s theories of structural and cultural violence describe the intentions of formal public schooling in which the resources and the power to determine resource allocation are unevenly distributed (Galtung 1969, p. 171) and the “symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science – [is] used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence” (Galtung 1990, p. 291). This seems to be an apt historical description of U.S. public schooling, including schools for immigrant European populations.

Meanwhile, the educational experiences of children and youth of color in the early 21^st century manifest structural (Galtung 1969; Garcia-Reid 2008), cultural (Galtung 1990, p. 293), symbolic (Herr and Anderson 2003), epistemic (Ryoo and McLaren 2010, p. 106), and curricular (Chandler & Hawley, 2017, p. ix) violences, some of which are the continuing legacies of 20^th century Jim Crow schooling and some of which are promoted as market-based, neo-liberal fixes for schools that are “failing” to produce young adult consumers and producers who are globally competitive (e.g., Fitzsimons 2002; Giroux 2007).  The use of critical race theory in education may be one antidote to these violences.

Critical Race Theory in Education

Since coloniality created the racialized hierarchy of society, critical race theory (CRT) attempted to theorize it, primarily in the American context. CRT was first developed by legal scholars including Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Neil Gotanda, Charles Lawrence, Gary Peller, Cheryl Harris, and Mari Matsuda (Ladson-Billings, 2013), and further extended into the field of education by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate (1995).  The tenets of CRT are: the belief that racism is normal or ordinary, not aberrant, in US society; an understanding of interest convergences, or the fact that “racial progress” only happens when it is in the interest of “whites” in power to make a specific change that benefits people of color; an understanding that “race” is a social construction reinforced by systems and structures, is not a biological reality, and that all people are racialized; an understanding of both intersectionality (racialized people have multiple identities) and anti-essentialism (not all people who share an identity think or behave identically); and the promotion of voice or counter-narratives to the master narrative (Alridge, 2006). These tenets are more or less in agreement with (post, neo, de) colonial theory.

Of particular concern to this exploration of decolonizing education is the idea of high-quality education as “white property.” Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) identified four “property functions of Whiteness” as the right of disposition, the right to use and enjoy, the right of reputation and status property, and the absolute right to exclude (Hawkman, p. 26). In school settings, this translates into both the physical (e.g., school funding and resources) and intellectual (e.g., curriculum) properties and how they are valued, taxed, and assessed by Whiteness in U.S. schools (Hawkman, p. 26).  This broad racialization of education might be perceived as a manifestation of internal colonization. Spivak (1988) says, “Knowledge is thus like any other commodity. Academia, with its western, patriarchal, racist rules, can hardly be the colonized’s site of liberation,” and perhaps the same might be said of government-controlled public schools. First popularized by Michael Apple in 1993, “official knowledge” is right-wing cultural hegemony in the form of corporate control over textbooks, websites, and other instructional media. If there is evidence of “official knowledge,” it might be expected that textbooks traffic in the perpetuation of racialized archetypes/stereotypes and master narratives that serve multiple functions: the erasure of Indigenous peoples from popular consciousness; the denial of education to people of color and all poor people; and the perpetuation of schools and curricular typographies identified by Jean Anyon (1981; 1997) as ghetto, working class, middle class, affluent professional, and executive elite schooling.

Racial Pedagogical Content Knowledge

A lens through which to explore these ideas is Racial Pedagogical Content Knowledge (RPCK) that places critical race theory (CRT) (e.g., Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) at the center of social studies instruction, particularly in the United States, by infusing the CRT concepts into all social studies materials (e.g., Chandler, 2015, pp. 5-6).  Yosso (2002) proposes a critical race curriculum that acknowledges intersectionality of oppression within the curriculum, challenges stereotypes, advocates for social justice, features counternarratives, and that uses interdisciplinary methods to show the connections between historical and contemporary inequities. King and Chandler (2016) take these ideas a step further away from passive discourses and pedagogies that are “nonracist” toward anti-racist pedagogies that reject “racial common sense” (p. 8). For this paper, we were particularly interested in the stories of Indigenous peoples and Asian Pacific Islanders as the stories that are made most invisible in textbooks.  As an aside, we were also curious about the ways that poor whites are depicted as part of an examination of racialized identities.  

Methodology

Literary analysis methodology (Alridge, 2006; Brown & Brown, 2010) is a primary methodology used to analyze intellectual history where the researcher focuses on reading the literature, noting the themes, discussing the themes and supporting conclusions with examples.  Similar to Brown and Brown (2010), we analyzed the data using a constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) across five middle and high school textbooks to document how Indigenous Peoples, Asian Pacific Islanders and poor whites are depicted, and the “stories” that are told or implied (in another study, we examine African Americans and Latinx depictions in depth).  We chose middle and high school texts on the assumption that they would afford greater narrative complexity than elementary textbooks. We examined the table of contents, the index, images, and page-by-page text for each racialized group. For Indigenous Peoples and Asian Pacific Islanders, we looked for evidence of the pre-Columbian era, resistance and revolts during the colonial and pre-Civil War era, post-Civil War era, anti-racist activism in the first half of the 20^th century, political activism post-1968, economic self-determination post-1968, and diasporic consciousness and engagement (the extent to which the groups looked beyond the borders of the United States for political identity and solidarity).  For poor whites, we also looked at labor union activism across time. To code, we looked at both heroic depictions as well as manifestations that might match the “types” of savage - noble or otherwise - for American Indians; infantilized, model minority, perpetual foreigner and ‘yellow peril’ for East Asian Americans; dual socio-economic representation of South Asians; and finally ignorant, violent rednecks for poor whites.

The textbooks examined (Table 1. Textbooks Examined) were of recent vintage, and were recommended by social studies methods faculty and classroom social studies teachers as ones that are widely used in the mid-Atlantic region where we conducted the study.  They include a middle school textbook, two government textbooks, four textbooks that are used for Advanced Placement courses, and a standard high school history textbook. We included AP texts as the courses are intended to offer a more complex narrative than in more standard trade textbooks.

Table 1. Textbooks Examined.

Analysis

Existing Colonial Archetypes/Stereotypes

Before discussing the specific types of racialized representations of various ethnic groups that exist in the texts examined, there needs to be clarity around how we define the terms ‘archetype’ and ‘stereotype’. The concept of the archetype was first advanced by Jung (Kidd, 2016) in his work on 'dreams filled with basic motifs analogous to mythical characters.' Archetypes are found everywhere – from folklore to films (Kidd, 2016; Shaey and Samoylova, 2013). Kidd (2016) says:

“Media producers face certain basic challenges when developing dramatic programs. One of the primary challenges is telling a complete story in a short time period. The audience needs to be able to identify the basic characters’ roles quickly. Who is the hero? Who is the lover? Who is the innocent? The ability to identify these characters is vital to be able to understand the basic storyline of a movie or television series. We recognize these roles through the use of archetypes.” (p. 26)

Faber and Mayer (2009) define modern archetypes as being culturally enduring so they are easily learned and recognized, besides being mental models for self and other. They also operate at an unconscious level and elicit emotional responses. From the perspective of storytelling, archetypes are necessary and a way to get the audience to relate to the characters and feel the emotions ‘appropriate’ to the genre (Kidd, 2016). However, it is when archetypes are used interchangeably with stereotypes that problems arise.

Lippman (1922) stated that stereotypes were developed as mental maps to cope with the complexity of groups and people. In this sense, stereotypes are neutral; however, in the modern definition, they are limited, mostly negative tropes (Kidd, 2016). Stereotypes are culture specific while archetypes could be applicable to multiple cultures (Kidd, 2016). Stereotypes of minority populations can lead to a negative interpretation of their actions and affects policy decision and voting behavior (Mastro & Kopacz, 2006). Furthermore, the more similar an in-group or out-group is to those perceiving them and their in-group, the more favorably they are evaluated (Mastro & Kopacz, 2006; Kidd, 2016). When differences are highlighted, they are viewed negatively (Signorielli, 2009). And, when confronted with any particular group of people (i.e. the colonizer) having hegemonic control. this promotes an assimilationist view in education and other aspects of society,  Such stereotyping is not just limited to Indigenous Peoples and people of color. Cooke-Jackson and Hanson (2009) write about the stereotypical and negative portrayal of poor whites, particularly from the South and the Appalachian region. They write:

“Although stereotyping is inevitable, when media producers erroneously attribute characteristics of a minority of a group to the whole subculture, stereotyping becomes problematic. Stereotypes usually fail to reflect the richness of the subculture and ignore the realities from which the images come. This action can result in social injustices for individuals who make up that subculture.” (p. 186).

Further, they write that negative stereotypes are also internalized by those they are representing and affect self-perception. This pushes people to devalue themselves and their cultures. Hence stereotypical archetypes are especially problematic in educational texts and literature.

        American Indian stereotypes/archetypes. We began our analysis with the first people to have inhabited the land now known as the United States. Scholars speculate that there are more numerous and varied stereotypes about Indigenous peoples than about any other ethnic group in the Americas. Yet, in many textbooks, there is a binary limitedness to the depiction of American Indians in the texts we examined – either as a savage or as a noble savage.  The “noble savage" is defined by Webster dictionary as “a mythic conception of people belonging to non-European cultures as having innate natural simplicity and virtue uncorrupted by European civilization;  also, a person exemplifying this conception” (see, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noble%20savage).  To this we might add the notion that part of the nobility of American Indians is/was their perceived expendability or use as collateral damage in the colonizing of their lands by Europe and the United States.  As Alridge (2006) outlined in the concept of the master narrative, the portrayals of Indigenous Peoples are oversimplified and inaccurate, and are most often perpetuated in the global popular media. Carter Meland (Anishinaabe heritage) and David E. Wilkins (Lumbee) state:

"Since the first Europeans made landfall in North America, native peoples have suffered under a weltering array of stereotypes, misconceptions and caricatures. Whether portrayed as noble savages, ignoble savages, teary-eyed environmentalists, drunken, living off the Government, Indian princess/Squaw or most recently, simply as casino-rich, native peoples find their efforts to be treated with a measure of respect and integrity undermined by images that flatten complex tribal, historical and personal experience into one-dimensional representations that tells us more about the depicters than about the depicted." (Meland & Wilkins, 2012).

As might be expected, government textbooks are focused on the functioning of the three branches of the U.S. government.  Examples of this functioning, told through historical storytelling, offer less context and a more instrumental narrative.  As a result, a textbook such as United States Government: Our Democracy (Arbetman, Hanson & Scott) tends to present a very generic version of the American Indian experience through the U.S. government justifications of broken treaties and laws to support colonization.

For the history textbooks, we broke the analysis of American Indian portrayals into two sections: 1. mentions of American Indians after 1890, considered the “end of the Indian Wars,” and 2. mentions pre-Encounter through 1890.

After 1890, The American Promise (Roark, Johnson, Cohen, Stage & Hartmann, 2015) mentions the granting of U.S. citizenship to American Indians in 1924 (p. 663), the attempts by the New Deal government to create “happy savages” (p. 699-700), the Termination Act (p. 770-772) which promoted assimilation policies, the attempt by the American Indian Movement to act as “noble savages” to re-occupy Alcatraz Island in 1969 (p. 809-810), and attempts by the Nixon Administration to extend greater resources and rights to Indigenous peoples (p. 824).  Of the People (Oakes, McGerr, Lewis, Cullather, & Boydston, 2011) similarly references American Indian activism in ways that match the “noble savage” stereotype (pp. 839-840) and mid-20^th century attempts at assimilation (pp. 771-772), and mentions in a chart on page 840 that there was “still a substantial [Indigenous] population in every region” as of 1980. In American Anthem: Reconstruction to the Present (Ayers, de la Teja, Schulzinger, & White, 2009), the assimilation of American Indians (pp. 990-991) and the violence of their fight for their rights, as compared with the non-violence of most of the other civil rights struggles of the 1960s (p. 992), are viewed through the colonial lens rather than through the lens of peoples seeking self-defense, self-determination and sovereignty on their rightful lands. American Government; Roots and Reform (O’Connor, Sabato, & Yanus, 2011) describe attempts by Indigenous Peoples to assimilate (p. 139, 213-214, 215), to gain civil rights (pp. 213-217), to file class action lawsuits (p. 215), and to participate U.S. government as members of Congress (p. 233).  The American Pageant (Kennedy, Cohen, & Bailey, 2008) references American Indians as chronic alcoholics and abusers of casino privileges (p. 1097). In all of the other texts, there was no mention of American Indians in the 20^th century.

        Leading up to the “final” showdowns of the 1890s, Of the People explicitly describes the task of “Clearing the West for capitalism” (p. 497-501), casting the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and destruction of their cultures as the collateral damage of “progress.”

The language of Critical Race Theory and its master narrative is vital to decoding textbook representations of American Indians from pre-Encounter to the 1890s.  American history: The beginnings to Reconstruction (2016) is especially ripe for this analysis.  The ideas of "historical happenstance,” rather than intentionality, are used to describe colonization.  For example, increased trade (with China) and travel made Europeans “eager to learn more about the wider world” (p. 30) and made the rulers of England, France, Spain and Portugal eager to increase their wealth. As these nations colonized the lands of the Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, Piscataways, Haudenosaunee, etc., they blamed the death toll among Indigenous peoples on the “severe shortage of workers,” causing Europe to “look across the Atlantic Ocean [to Africa] for a new source of [enslaved] labor” (p. 53).  Although colonists such as William Penn were “fair” to American Indians by being willing to pay them for their lands (p. 88), there was a great deal of “prejudices on both sides” that “stood in the way of white settlers and Native Americans living side by side” (p. 326). The forced removal of 100,000 Southern Indians to Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson is treated as historical happenstance rather than an act of institutional racism, although it “has had an effect on contemporary events” (p. 327). “Angry Indians” in this textbook regularly attacked innocent whites for causing the death of Indian children (p. 341), and many “white Americans” used their belief in their racial superiority to “justify taking lands belonging to people [Indians and Mexicans] they considered inferior” (p. 354).  The “Americans” “needed” the land to complete a railroad (p. 358) and therefore drove the Indians off their lands. This genocide occurred by happenstance, with the narrative centered on the colonial demands of Europeans and European Americans. American Indians in the years before 1890 were martyrs, “savages,” and “teary-eyed environmentalists” who only wanted to save their land and their bison and be free of the white man’s diseases and constant wars (The American Pageant, pp. 635-636), or “mingle” and assimilate (American Pageant, pp. 31-33, 39, 53-54), but never with the expectation that their conquest was avoidable, or that it was immoral.

        Asian Pacific Islanders and East Asians. The first thing to note about the depiction of Asians in the textbooks is the near invisibility of this population. Perhaps as a token way of introducing the reader to the future presence of Asians in the United States, Of the People describes the U.S. participation in the Chinese opium trade beginning in the late 19^th century, in addition to the work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that evangelized “heathen lands within the United States” (including the Cherokee nation) and in China, India and Hawaii (p. 340).

In American Anthem: Reconstruction to the Present (Ayers, de la Teja, Schulzinger, & White, 2009) there is barely enough information or references to Asians to capture a positive or negative stereo/archetype. Chinese Americans are mentioned as having been attracted to the United States as part of the 1848 rush for gold in California and being “initially welcomed as workers” (American Promise, p. 361) before “white workers” demanded the 1885 Chinese Exclusion Act banning more immigration from China (Of the People, p. 485). Of the People includes a photo of Chinese railroad builders (p. 491) with no context. The same text mentions that, in 1924, the National Origins Act excluded Japanese immigrants altogether without explaining why (p. 661).

Five of the texts mention Executive Order 9066 that called for the evacuation and mass incarceration of 110,000 Japanese American citizens during World War II, as a fear-based response by “white Americans” following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese military. In The American Pageant (Kennedy, Cohen, & Bailey, 2008), several paragraphs are devoted to the stereotypes against Japanese Americans that prompted Executive Order 9066. United States Government: Our Democracy (Arbetman, Hanson, & Scott, 2015) devotes three pages to the Japanese internment. But there were few significant discussions about Asians as people or Asian cultures as part of the history of the United States. South Asians, in particular, are only mentioned once, in one book, by Jhumpa Lahiri, the award-winning artist whose Interpreter of Maladies (1999) explored the “sometimes painful relationship between immigrant Indian parents and their American-born children” (The American Pageant, Kennedy, Cohen, & Bailey, p. 1104).

Where there are depictions or mentions that match stereotypes, East Asians and Asian Pacific Islanders can be categorized into four groups: the perpetual foreigner, the cute infant, the model minority, and the ‘yellow peril’ or foreign danger to the American/Western economy.

The effects of orientalism in Western cultures includes the 'othering' of East Asians and East Asian Americans and the perception that their cultures and lifestyles are "exotic" and “ancient” in stark contrast to "ordinary," “modern” Western customs.

Of particular note is the portrayal of East Asians as childlike and not to be taken seriously. Actor/comedian John Cho (2009) states:

“There's this belief that Asian babies are really cute, and it got me thinking that our whole race is infantilized to some degree, and it manifests itself in different ways. You infantilize a woman, and she becomes eroticized. You infantilize a man, and he becomes emasculated. You infantilize a baby—and it's possible, it appears that you can infantilize a baby even more. The babies need to be cuter than white babies. And it's just a weird thing that I felt like said something about mainstream America's relationship to Asians in general." (no page number)

This infantilization results in Asians having less social autonomy. They are often perceived as polite and quiet, and less threatening than people of other races. Treated as children, Asians are also perceived to have little power, access, and control.  One example can be found in the AP Edition of American Government: Roots and Reform (O’Connor, Sabato, & Yanus, 2011).  On page 218, the story of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is accompanied by a photograph of two cute Asian children.  It is part of a quick overview in a 3-5 page section that also addresses American Indians in the 20^th century; more importantly, the photo seems to trivialize (rather than humanize) the devastating impact of the internment on Japanese American children and their parents. Similarly, in The American Pageant (Kennedy, Cohen, & Bailey, 2008), kimonoed schoolchildren are pictured singing the Star Spangled Banner at a U.S. reception in Japan, where the Japanese government acquiesced to Americans as part of the Root-Takahira agreement (p. 696), as if Japanese nationals and Japanese American children were one and the same.

  The relative powerlessness of Asian Americans includes the scant mention of 20^th century activism as derivative of other “minority movements” of the 1960s, and in response to their history of “discrimination, denigrating stereotypes, and hurtful epithets,” leading to “new ethnic self-consciousness and pride” (Of the People, p. 839).

In The American Pageant, East Asians are portrayed as “model minorities” who have eagerly assimilated to U.S. ways: they are “counted among the richest and most prosperous Americans today” (p. 1097), partly because Chinese Americans were always “hard-working and enterprising” (p. 551), including the Chinese women who were prostitutes (p. 550), and because Japanese Americans were “hardworking, determined, successful” (p. 877-878)

        South Asian archetypes/stereotypes. The near complete absence of South Asians in U.S. history texts means that U.S. children and youth receive this information via popular media and culture.  Typically, South Asians are represented in a binary way, either as the “model minority” who is socially awkward and overly eager to assimilate, or as a heavily accented, taxi driver or convenience shop owner.  Contributing to these stereotypes are shows such as the Bangladeshi store owners represented as Sirajul and Mujibur on The David Letterman Show, the character Apu on the animated show The Simpsons, or the Babu Bhatt character on Seinfeld. As always, these stereotypes are in contrast with the realities of South Asian participation at all levels of community and government, and in every profession.

 Poor whites.  Wikipedia, a popular, Western crowd-sourced digital source of information, describes “poor whites” thus: “In certain contemporary contexts the term is still used to pertain to their descendants; regardless of present economic status. While similar to other White Americans in ancestry, the Poor Whites differ notably in regard to their history and culture.”  Scholars indicate that the term “poor white” tends to be applied to people from the rural South and Appalachia (e.g, Flynt, 2004; Moss, 2003), despite the fact that there are white people all over the nation who live in poverty, constituting the largest population of poor people in the U.S. (see Table 2. Poverty in the United States). The pejorative terms applied to this population includes “rednecks,” “hillbillies,” “crackers,” and “poor white trash.”

Table 2. Poverty in the United States.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2015

*No statistics for multiracial poverty

**The percentages exceed 100% because people identify in multiple categories

The disproportionality of poverty, where the smallest population in the nation – Indigenous Peoples – has the highest rate of poverty, says as much about systemic oppression as the fact that people who are racialized as “White Americans” comprise 40% of the poor. The pejorative terms describing whites who are poor historically have been used most often by affluent whites to distance themselves socially and politically.  The conditions of African Americans and “poor whites” in the South were nearly identical throughout most of the years between 1865 and 1965, and there are episodes in the history of the U.S. when the two groups worked in solidarity to improve their collective economic position.

Typically, however, the economic and political structures of white supremacy actively drove a wedge between the groups in order to maintain power (see Table 3. A Sampling of Content Absences Regarding Indigenous Peoples, Asians and Poor Whites in the United States 17^th To 21^st Century for selected examples; see Appendix A for additional examples). In particular, textbooks tend to describe the actions of the U.S. government as being driven by the demands, the greed, and the religious faith of poor whites rather than by the colonizing avarice of owning class industrialists and elite, power-hungry politicians. The middle school textbook, American History: Beginnings through Reconstruction, stands out for its portrayal of poor whites as the drivers of colonization and institutionalized racism. President Andrew Jackson responded to his “base of white men without property” (p. 303) and their support of the Democratic Party to turn these poor white men into “settlers,” “missionaries,” and “pioneers” to claim the “western frontier” for themselves.  These poor whites “resented” and were “annoyed” by the sovereign nation of Mexico and its rejection of an offer of $30 million to buy California and New Mexico, because “many Americans felt that Mexico stood in the way of the Manifest Destiny of the United States” (p. 356). Later in the 19^th century, it was landless poor whites who formed mobs to “defend slavery as essential to the Southern economy” (p. 412; p. 441) or poor European immigrant whites who refused to work with newly freed Blacks (p. 388), thereby forcing industrial workplaces to be racially segregated. The interest convergence of wealthy whites afforded poor whites the right to vote through grandfather clauses (if your grandfather voted before 1840, you could vote), even though a lack of schooling for poor whites left them unable to pass literacy tests (part of an attempt by Southern states to prevent Black men from their 15^th Amendment right to vote).

Largely, poor whites are as absent from history and government textbooks as Asians. As poverty has become more urbanized and suburbanized over the last 60 years, the population of whites who are poor is even more invisible, particularly in urban public schools.  Counternarratives about who is poor and why is an essential part of decolonizing education.

Discussion

What is Missing

The images and narratives that persist serve the continuing colonial enterprise.  They are encoded in textbooks for urban teachers who do not have the time or resources to research counternarratives.  Of particular importance to urban teachers is the fact that “urban” populations include significant populations that are typically perceived to be “rural” – that is, Indigenous peoples and poor whites. There are at least three elements missing from textbooks for the purpose of decolonizing U.S. history education:  racial pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogy; efforts to fill (or valorize) specific content gaps; and an antiracist lens through which to tell the stories of individual people who help change the arc of history.

RPCK/CRT, critical racial curriculum, antiracist curriculum. In addition to theorizing about RPCK, the challenge for overworked, underpaid teachers is to put the theories into practice.  The case studies in texts such as Race Lessons (Chandler & Hawley, 2016) help teachers learn from one another about the pitfalls and small victories from teaching history and social studies with new approaches.  Working collaboratively with critically minded teachers is another way to build greater capacity to deliver antiracist curriculum.

Content absences. The content absences from the textbook include the ways in which colonization and racism were normalized and institutionalized through education, and the ways in which they were resisted by people of color and poor whites. Table 3 includes the kind of content that should be included in RPCK historical instruction.

Table 3. A Sampling of Content Absences Regarding Indigenous Peoples, Asians and Poor Whites in the United States, 17^th to 21^st Century

Adapted from View, J.L., Kaul, A., & Guiden, A. (2018).

Deconstructing heroes. We assert that the counter-narrative to the master narrative and the archetypes in textbooks is decidedly not a new racialized form of hero worship (Carlyle, 1888).  Too often, in counternarratives, people of color and working class people are portrayed as saints or ascetics, similar to the martyr/messiah archetype that Alridge references (2006) and distinct from their role as a political leader/activist with pragmatic concerns.  These heroes and sheroes are perceived to be disengaged from a well-organized and highly theorized socio-political movement, but rather act “alone” or under the guidance of “spirit.”  Text and images treat revelations of the person’s contradictions, either as violations of their personal code of ethics, or of the code of ethics governing their associated freedom movement. The “freedom” that the hero or shero pursues is often perceived as gendered, or only available to heterosexuals and men. And, finally, there are silences about the extent to which each hero or shero challenged (or accepted) the cultural norms of masculinity and femininity of their time.  An understanding of counternarrative and intersectionality, as defined by critical race theorists, demands that the stories we tell about our heroes and sheroes be complex and authentic so that we can see ourselves in them (including all of the human messiness) and learn from their errors. Sanitized versions of their lives have never dismantled institutional racism and colonialism and never will.

What (Urban) Teachers Need

To be post-colonial, we must be at a place of jus post bellum (justice after war) where the terms for ending a (cultural) war are negotiated among equals.  Orend (2000) considers a number of issues, including terms for the end of war such that once the rights of a political community have been vindicated, further continuation of war becomes an act of aggression; guidelines for the construction of peace treaties; guidelines for the political reconstruction of defeated states; the prevention of draconian and vengeful peace terms; and the rights a just state fights for in a war, provide the constraints on what can be demanded from the defeated belligerent. If we regard as a type of just warfare the labor movement, the battle of Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee and the American Indian Movement; the abolitionist movement and the modern civil rights movement; and other challenges to the cultural, economic and political violence of the last 150 years of U.S. history, then we might also declare that the cultural wars are far from ended or that the treaty process has been severely stalled (for example, see the film Precious Knowledge, the continuing battle over Confederate memorials, the 2015 murders at Mother Emmanuel AME church, and so on).

In "Redemption Song" (1979) Bob Marley expanded the words of Marcus Garvey (1937) by urging us to “emancipate yourself from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” Among the big lies from which we need freeing are: that we are post-colonial; that whiteness is attainable by poor whites merely by virtue of their skin color; that equity and justice is attainable by “whitening” our heroes and sheroes; that the continual exploitation and oppression of people of color and poor whites, although a necessary condition for sustaining the status quo, is the only way to “do democracy;” and that in the “race to nowhere” (Abeles & Congdon, 2010), the segregated affluent schooling that is the property of the “executive elite” class (Anyon, 1981/1997) truly educates their children or prepares them for survival in the real world.  While it is a tall order asking overworked and underpaid P-12 public classroom teachers to add “cultural warfare” to their to-do lists, there will be little in the way of textbooks or professional development that will decolonize their classrooms.

In attempts to offer students an inclusive classroom experience, many teachers use a non-racist curriculum and pedagogy. According to King and Chandler (2016), this type of teaching favors passivity and ideologies that reject extreme forms of racism. In contrast, an anti-racist curriculum and pedagogy represents “an active rejection of the institutional and structural aspects of race and racism… making the social construct of race visible” (King & Chandler, 2016, p.4, as cited in Chandler & Hawley, 2017, p. x, emphasis in original). The latter approach challenges teachers and students to name and then begin the process of dismantling the interlocking layers of a system that work to remain anonymous. We suggest that the social studies teacher is in a unique position to carry out these aims.  Adopting a critical lens as the basis from which all instruction and student engagement stems is a first step, as is the application of RPCK to meld content knowledge in the social science disciplines, pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986), and critical race theory. The combination of RPCK and NCSS’s C3 Framework represents a partnering of established social studies thought and marginalized race thought.

In this final section of the paper, we offer some specific recommendations for teachers who are committed to social justice and desire to infuse their classroom environments with critical, historically-sound pedagogy while considering the intricate contributions of diverse races and cultures.

In addition, there are resources through organizations such as Teaching for Change the Zinn Education Project, publications such as Rethinking Schools, and colleagues through organizations such as New York Committee on Race and Ethnicity, Teachers 4 Social Justice and Free Minds Free People that can fill in the gaps left by textbooks.  Teachers never need to be alone in their efforts to decolonize education.

Appendix A. An Expanded Sampling of Content Absences Regarding Race and Education in the United States 17^th To 21^st Century

Note:  In the United States, colonialism was first determined by European contact with Indigenous Peoples; “race” was first defined by European enslavement of Africans. The two concepts became conflated to impact all of the People of Color that eventually became part of the U.S. population. The African experience in the United States has historically been the reference point for other experiences of “race” and resistance, and the 1848 theft of Mexican land expanded the U.S. empire, so this table includes some examples of these populations as context for the racialized experiences of Indigenous Peoples, Asians, and poor whites. An evolving digital version of this timeline appears on the website associated with the article: View, J.L., Kaul, A., & Guiden, A. (2018). Timeline of race and education in the United States. In D. Menkart, A. Murray, J.L. View (Eds.) Putting the movement back into civil rights teaching: A resource guide for classrooms and communities, 2^nd Edition. Washington, DC: Poverty and Race Research Action Council and Teaching for Change.