[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to follow up last week’s on scholarly books I’ve loved with a handful of scholarly ideas I don’t. Leading up to a perennial favorite crowd-sourced post, a collective airing of grievances of all types!]
Two prior posts that highlight central problems with the early 20th century scholar and his acolytes, and one thing I’d add now.
In this post on W.E.B. Du Bois’s magisterial Black Reconstruction in America (1935), I wrote at length about that book’s final chapter, “The Propaganda of History.” Du Bois was directly calling out William Dunning and his many influential students as having contributed to—if not, indeed, helped create—that propagandistic vision of American history, and I fully agree. Check out that first hyperlinked post above for more!
In this post on Adam Domby’s excellent The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (2020), I noted how much his book (along with others like James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me [1995]) helps us understand not just the frustratingly longstanding “Lost Cause” narrative, but also how it was created and propagated through educational and scholarly spaces, with the Dunning School atop that list. Check out this paragraph’s first hyperlinked post for more!
Those remain the central problems with the Dunning School, and they are indeed foundational and incredibly influential problems. But in this moment when so much of American education and scholarship is under attack for being “woke” or “DEI” or “whatever bullshit term the fascists decide to lean into this month,” I would add this: for a long, long, long time, a great deal of our educational and scholarly work was indeed biased, but in the exact opposite way that these narratives suggest. That is, for most of American history our educational and scholarly spaces and conversations were overwhelmingly tilted toward white Americans, not only in what they did and didn’t include or focus on, but also and even more problematically in the ways they portrayed non-white Americans. It is only very recently that those spaces have started to address and challenge and change those trends, to begin to feature and engage with a more accurate vision of America’s foundational and enduring diversity, and thus with the worst and best of our histories and communities and identities. So as much as I hate the Dunning School, it’s more vital than ever that we remember such educational and scholarly pasts, as we fight for those spaces in the present.
Next non-favorite idea tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Scholarly ideas you’re not a fan of? Other things that gripe your cookies? Share for the weekend post!
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