The Weekly Screed (#997)

 Peculiar education

by David Benjamin

“If a slave say to his master: "You are not my master," if they convict him his master shall cut off his ear.”

— The Code of Hammurabi, No. 282

MADISON, Wis. — Since the establishment of public schools, one of the hallmarks of American education has been the suppression of knowledge about slavery. While many historians refer to slavery as America’s original sin it has been, as a matter of pedagogy, our original secret.

When I was in school, I received perhaps an entire hour of instruction on the subject. Uncle Tom’s Cabin dominated this quick run-through. My textbook’s authors left the impression that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s saga was a mawkish, tendentious and a largely inaccurate depiction of the plight of the slave. My history book did not, however, balance its dismissal of Uncle Tom’s ordeal with an “accurate” depiction of slavery. 

The subsequent national bloodbath, according to the Texas State Board of Education — which has long dictated the content of U.S. history texts — was only elliptically associated with slavery. Most texts used the term, “War Between the States,” a Confederate euphemism that presents the Civil War not as a struggle to redress — in Lincoln’s words —the “bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.” Rather, texts and teaching sought to explain the war to me as a tussle over North-South economic disparities, states rights and Southern chivalry. 

My brief history lessons about that war tended to emphasize the nobility of Robert E. Lee, the flamboyance of Stonewall Jackson, the incompetence of George McClellan, the drunkenness of Ulysses S. Grant and the savagery of William Tecumseh Sherman. And… oh, yes! The Gettysburg Address (but not the battle).

In the end, most of us learned more about the Civil War from Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable. And frankly, we didn’t give a damn

Well, actually, I did. Since my high-school miseducation, I’ve been a student of what Kenneth Stampp called America’s “peculiar institution” and its offspring, the creation and enforcement of a nationwide century-long system of American apartheid. I’ve long believed that kids in high school cannot understand or feel outrage about Dred Scott, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, 5,000 lynchings, the souls of black folks, the slaughters at Fort Pillow, Colfax, Greenwood and a hundred other occasions of racist bloodlust, the death of Emmett Till, Medger Evers, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor unless they have a foundation in the truthful explanation of slavery in America.

So, I was dismayed recently to hear about the suppression of a clever slavery unit at a school in Sun Prairie, one of Madison’s burgeoning white-flight suburbs. 

In a lesson lifted from an ed-biz website called Teachers Pay Teachers, sixth-graders at Patrick Marsh Middle School were assigned to picture themselves as slaveholders in ancient Mesopotamia. This lesson was drawn from the Code of Hammurabi, often regarded as the first written set of civil laws. The kids were asked: “A slave stands before you. This slave has disrespected his master by telling him, ‘You are not my master!’ How will you punish this slave?”

I’ve read a few accounts of this shocking incident, but found no clue as to why it was supposed to be shocking. Nonetheless, it incited a panicky backlash from Sun Prairie’s school honchos and a swift deletion of the lesson from the offending website. It was deemed a racist outrage that “trivializes traumatic experiences.”

Okay, let’s go back to Babylon where, in the 18th century BC, slavery was not a noticeably racist enterprise. Being a slave in Babylon was probably a traumatic experience but it was also, in Mesopotamian terms, sort of a rainbow coalition. Slaves — who did most of the empire’s work— consisted of the lowest caste of native Babylonians, plus thousands of captives from Hammurabi’s military conquests. This ethnic melting-pot probably included Syrians and Assyrians, Hittites, Akkadians, Canaanites and maybe the odd Egyptian. 

Among the Code’s 282 tenets, twenty-three refer to the care and treatment of slaves. Because slaves were valued property, none of Hammurabi’s rules provides for the killing of a fractious slave, nor does the law allow the severing of a slave’s hands. Hand-chopping was an otherwise popular punishment, and the death penalty — for free Babylonians — applies to twenty-four different crimes. 

Among my favorite slave laws in Babylon is No. 129: “If a man's wife be surprised (in flagrante delicto) with another man, both shall be tied and thrown into the water, but the husband may pardon his wife and the king his slaves.”

Of course, the genius of invoking Hammurabi as a teaching tool is that Babylonian slavery is evil but not racial. The teacher introduces slavery’s inhuman debasement through its roots in a long-defunct and faraway empire. Thus begun, the lesson plan can tiptoe toward the revelation of slavery’s lingering and unresolved influence on American society, politics. education and systemic bigotry.

By casting students as masters rather than subjects, the lesson forces them to personally confront the moral monstrosity of slavery. It’s easy, after all, to sympathize with the slave and say tsk-tsk to her miseries. It’s harder —even traumatic — for a student to behold the horror of human bondage from the monster’s point of view. The power of turnabout — the experience of walking a mile in the other man’s smelly moccasins — is startling. It induces far more self-examination, and a deeper moral insight, than can be derived from the softhearted sentimentality and melodrama conveyed in the quaint Victorian prose of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Although it’s a deft pedagogic stroke, asking an eleven-year-old in 2021 to order the torture of a slave is politically incorrect. Never mind that torture has always existed hand-in-glove with slavery and that the atrocities visited on slaves, for at least the 3,800 years since Hammurabi, have been tactfully minimized in most of our big-picture, great-man history texts. Never mind that the lesson works.

According to a spokesperson for the Sun Prairie schools, “What happened at Patrick Marsh Middle School is not aligned with our equity work. It was not approved or endorsed at any level of leadership, and does not define our commitment to and work toward racial equity.”

In other words, yada yada yada.

Accidentally, the kids at Patrick Marsh had the rare and enlightening opportunity to confront the intellectual, moral and visceral reality of human beings owning other human beings. If they’d been allowed, they might have been able to open their minds to the vast historic injustice of human bondage, and to consider it separate from the squirming snakepit of American racial politics.

Instead, they got the racial politics without the lesson.

The squeamish overseers of education in Sun Prairie saw harm where there was no harm and horned into classrooms where they don’t belong. In a sort of ass-backward fashion, they proved themselves more demonstrably racist than the suspended teachers or the website providers. Supposedly, they were protecting minority students from the secret that their forebears were Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom. But these kids know where they come from. They’re more wised-up than most adults will ever figure. 

The losers here are the white kids, who won’t get wised-up about slavery until they get out of school and look it up themselves. If they give a damn.

Miraculously, Sun Prairie decided not to fire the teachers involved. We can only assume, however, that each of them now has one less ear.