racism

“What Black History?”: Giselle’s Story

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I was 22 before I really understood what had happened during the Civil Rights Movement. That was the year I learned that segregation had been widespread, that people had fought, marched, suffered, and even died merely for the right to be equal citizens in the eyes of the law. And it had all happened, not one hundred years ago, but in the decade before my birth.

The majority of my educational years were spent being homeschooled by my parents, who were well-intentioned, kind-hearted people, but who pretty much left out any aspects of Black History from my education.

I was raised to believe that people were equal, no matter what color they were, and I even had a few black friends growing up, but in my mind racism was something from the past, something that happened during the time of slavery, something that was obviously over and had been for a very long time, except in the cases of a few backwards folks who hung on to hate—but no one paid them any attention, anyway, right?

During the years when I wasn’t homeschooled, I attended various church-related schools where the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t a big topic of study. There weren’t any black children in my kindergarten, and I only remember one in my first grade class. I don’t remember learning about any famous Black Americans or any aspect of Black History at all in the early years of my life.

In fact, the entirety of my Black History education was practically encompassed in the stories of two Black Americans who were included in my third grade American History book after we had started homeschooling. The text was set up as a series of chapters, with each chapter outlining the life and accomplishments of an important American. There were two African-Americans included: Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Both were born slaves, but luckily both had helpful white people in their lives who made sure they got great educations and went to college. (Paternalism, anyone?) Both became professors—one a scientist and inventor, one a school administrator. So rosy and happy were their stories (even though they came from difficult beginnings) that I naturally assumed all Black Americans lived similar lives to mine. After all, now that slavery was over, it was so much easier than it had been for these men, whose lives already seemed pretty good overall.

The whitewashing of struggle influenced me in ways I wouldn’t and couldn’t understand until decades later.

This was in the 1980’s. Interracial dating was prohibited in one of the colleges associated with a school that I attended. A law against interracial marriage, which went against the Supreme Court’s ruling, was still on the books in one of the states where I lived.

Basically, I lived in a rosy bubble of privilege, blissfully ignorant of what had really taken place in my country a mere 20 years previous. I was a happy little 8-year-old, learning about a few token Black people from my history book, with absolutely no conception of the trials that children had gone through in my very city to integrate their schools, or the governor that had blocked the door of the state university in defiance of a federal order of desegregation.

I remember maybe one or two conversations with my mother about how, as a student, she had watched protests on the evening news, and thought it was horrible how the people were treated. But those topics of conversation somehow felt small and far away, insignificant. I never knew how huge the fight for equal rights had been, never knew how common discrimination was (and still is) in our country, never knew that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t end all the horrors that slavery had established.

Not only was my conception of slavery and the ease of its end unrealistic, but my understanding was also severely limited by the fact that most of my history education consisted of repeating topics from colonial and early American history over and over again, rather than moving forward to the history of the 20th century.

At my tiny school in 6th grade, I remember hearing Nelson Mandela’s name from my (black) South African teacher, who was thrilled that he had finally been released. I don’t remember much about it, except that my parents had shaken their heads a bit because they thought she was a “liberal.” I had no idea what apartheid was or why Mandela’s release was significant.

In 8th grade I attended a southern, Christian school. I recall hearing from my well-loved history teacher that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery, but primarily about states’ rights. I was surprised, but I assumed my teacher must be right. We studied American history that year, but there was little, if any, mention of the struggle or contributions of Black Americans.

In high school, my family became part of a homeschool organization that believed backbeats were from the devil and rock music opened you up to satanic influence. I realize now that by forbidding the music of other cultures, this group ensured that white people would be more likely to view other races with fear and disdain. This in itself was a subtle, but significant form of racism.

Eventually, I learned that most of what I had learned from this homeschool organization was inaccurate, harmful, and even unbiblical. It took some time, but eventually I broke free from the ideology and attended a community college where, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by a racially diverse group of people. This was where I learned about the fight for Civil Rights, the Birmingham church bombings, lynching, sit-ins, and Emmett Till.

We went on a field trip to the Civil Rights museum, watched documentaries, studied poetry about Civil Rights issues, and created our own. We saw statues of the dogs that had attacked protesters, visited the church where little girls died, and learned about the local high school honors students in our city who had walked out of school to participate in sit-ins.

I drank it all in, wondering to myself how I could have been so ignorant for so long…how did I never learn about this?

I remember sitting, wide-eyed, in my community college auditorium, watching a documentary about Civil Rights leaders, staring at the faces of men and women my grandparents’ ages (and even younger) as they told of the struggles they had faced just to vote, sit at a lunch counter, or obtain an education in an integrated school. It was the beginning of the erosion of my ignorance.

I soon developed an intense thirst for knowledge of the Civil Rights period of history. I read books, articles, fiction, nonfiction. I watched documentaries and talked with people. I wanted to learn everything I had missed. I wanted to understand. Another decade passed, and many patient friends and a helpful church with an integrated community of leaders helped to teach me even more about racial justice, white privilege, social justice, and the continuance of racism in our country and the world. I purchased recommended books and continued to learn and grow and immerse myself in environments that would help me grow towards a greater understanding of the challenges faced by people of color. Friends have reached out, patiently shared with me, talked about their own experiences and invited me into their lives.

Now, 30 years after my experience with that third grade history book, I am a third grade teacher myself. I sit in front of a classroom full of 8-year-olds with black and brown faces, and I read them a book about segregation. They know the history all-to-well, even though it seems like ancient history to them. Their faces are sad, resigned, concerned…but also aware, indignant, resolved. This will not happen again. Their determination confirms it. Even the occasional white students in my school are generally vigorous opponents of racism and inequality of any sort.

This generation of children is full of determination and activism at an age when I wasn’t even aware it was necessary.

They know names like Ruby Bridges, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks—and they aspire to be like them. They give me hope for our future.

Kirk Cameron Lends Support to G.A. Henty Audio Drama

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Bill Heid and Kirk Cameron. Source.

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Content note: anti-black, racist language.

Three years after championing a providential view of history in his movie Monumental, former child star Kirk Cameron has joined forces with Marshall Foster and Bill Heid to create and promote an audio drama based on G.A. Henry’s 1890 book, With Lee In Virginia.

Ever since starring in Left Behind, Cameron has enthusiastically embraced the Christian Reconstructionist worldview, a worldview that Foster has long promoted through the World History Institute. In her 2015 book on Christian Reconstructionism Building God’s Kingdom, scholar Julie Ingersoll notes the following: “When I told Foster that I was writing about the influence of [Christian Reconstructionism founder] R.J. Rushdoony, he embraced Rushdoony’s influence on all his work, and indeed, it is Rushdoony’s philosophy of history that Foster articulates throughout the film [Monumental].” A friend of Doug Phillips’s, Bill Heid is a self-proclaimed “expert of Christian history” and the Executive Producer of Heirloom Audio Productions.

Heirloom Audio Productions specializes in creating audio dramas based on stories by G.A. Henty. As Heid says on his website, he “turned to the adventure books of G.A. Henty for rich, exciting story material.” Henty lived from 1832-1902 and was, ironically, a universalist and racist evolutionist who wrote popular historical adventure stories. Despite his beliefs in universalism, white supremacy, and evolution, conservative Christians who fetishize the U.S. Antebellum South (like Doug Phillips and Marshall Foster) have long adored Henty’s books, which are ripe with defenses of southern slavery, idyllic depictions of slaves adoring their masters, and thickly patriarchal gender roles.

This time around, Heid chose to create an audio drama based on Henty’s 1890 book With Lee In Virginia. Last July, Marshall Foster and Kirk Cameron were both enthusiastic about and endorsed the project. Cameron voices the character of Stonewall Jackson. He has stated that he liked the project because it makes “people look biblically at the subject of slavery, and to understand that there were good and godly men on both sides of this war [the American Civil War].”

In the book, the main character Vincent is a Confederate supporter who fights against the Union. Though the character initially finds slavery repugnant, Vincent learns from his father that not all slave owners are bad and that some slaves like being enslaved. “There are good plantations and bad plantations,” the father tells Vincent, “and there are many more good ones than bad ones.” Throughout the book, Henty as narrator (and through his characters) defends the institution of slavery. He lambasts “Mrs. Beecher Stowe” (abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), accusing her of “libel” against the South. Henty writes that, “Taken all in all, the negroes on a well-ordered estate, under kind masters, were probably a happier class of people.” This sentiment echoes other contemporary slavery apologists like Doug Wilson. At the end of the novel, Hentry has the freed slaves decide to return to their former owners because the black people decide freedom “was a curse rather than a blessing to them.”

This theme of black people returning to their former owners extends from Henty’s belief in white supremacy and black inferiority. In With Lee In Virginia, Henty writes that black people “are very like children.” Henty believed black people could not handle freedom, a belief he makes explicit in his other novels as well. In By Sheer Luck, he writes, “The intelligence of an average Negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old… Left to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.”

In A Roving Commission, Henty declares that, “The majority of blacks are as savage, ignorant, and superstitious as their forefathers in Africa.” He also describes “the utter incapacity of the negro race to evolve, or even maintain, civilization, without the example and the curb of a white population among them.” Because of their alleged “incapacity to evolve,” Henty thought slavery was necessary for black people. In A Woman of the Commune, Henty refers to slavery as the “nature of the negro” because “servitude is his natural position.”

This is not Kirk Cameron’s first foray into the controversial subject of slavery. Though he has taken a firm stand against the modern-day practice of human trafficking, he also published in 2012 — and continues to host to this day on his website — an article from WallBuilder’s Stephen McDowell that claims, “We cannot say that slavery, in a broad and general sense, is sin.” McDowell says this is because “aspects of slavery are Biblical (for punishment and restitution for theft)” and because “unbelievers are by nature slaves” and thus can “be held as life-long slaves.”

My Church Tarnished Homeschooling: Leigh’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, James Lee.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Leigh” is a pseudonym.

My home schooling education started in high school, but even before that I was raised in a church that believed it was the best form of education. All of my close friends were home schooled; my pastor regularly preached on the subject.

About how good it was to home school, how the government was using the school to warp our minds.  My home was like any conservative Christian home: God came first. Democrats were bad, gays were bad, and anything that was not agreeing with the Bible was wrong.

Anything to do with traditional white America was good.

When it came to homeschooling itself it first started online, which made me happy. I could do the work how I wanted to- history first, and the rest later. Then my mother was handed used books from my closest friend’s mother. Instead of learning about the Civil War, or World War 2, everything related to the Bible.

I truthfully wasn’t upset; I planned on going to my church’s Bible school, which considering I was the daughter of a single mother I would have gone to for free.

I lost myself in it. I stopped speaking to the few non church-going friends I had.

I regularly stated I would court instead of date. For the only boyfriend I had ever had, it upset him. He himself was a conservative Christian, but he began to state that I was no longer myself. I only wanted to be a good Christian wife and mother. It upset him to the point until I left the church, we stopped speaking. His last conversation before me leaving the church was, “he wanted his future wife to be more than a wife, more than a mother, he wanted a equal, and I wanted to be less.” The friend’s mother who was teaching me stated this was for the best. That boy is not good. And she muttered something in relation to his Spanish heritage.

As I look back, I don’t know how I could have been that person.

I was raised in Florida, not some odd Midwestern state. I wore jeans, boots, and these things did not change.

My mother was a high school dropout, while my teacher was a military wife. A college-educated woman. When I would question why she made that statement, she said “because I don’t want you to make the mistakes I did.” And when this former nurse saw and was told the mental health problems I was having, I was given vitamins, and told that I needed to ask God to take it away.

I went to what can simply be called fundamentalist Pentecostal church. We believed in healing, and crying and laughter in the spirit.

I don’t know how much was real, and how much was fake.

I am isolated from my family because of what I now believe. I am still a Christian, but I still question things. I want to still learn about science. I don’t believe our president is a Muslim, nor do I feel the world is ending. Something that my former church holds onto firmly.

Homeschooling, and what it could have been, was tarnished for me because of my former church. The isolation, not getting my formative years, other opinions. I was raised to believe “hate the sin not the sinner,” but when it is someone who is gay, or another religion, or anything the church rejects, it’s “hate the sinner not the sin.”

We went out soul winning, as it was called, many times instead of school work.

My church was called a cult by many from the town I am from.

Before I woke up, I wondered how someone could be a member of Jim Jones’s church. The fact is, what many don’t understand, when you are a part of a controlling church you don’t see what it could be.

You see the healings, the hope, and even the love of God. I was the frog put in the pot and then someone started to boil the water. If I would have been put in at the end I would have ran, but like many I was given time to get used to it. Healing a woman, a man claiming that he, after being prayed for, finally feels the love of God?

What would be so wrong about that? Nothing, but when the same pastor states he has a witch in his church? Would that cause many on their first day to run? I would have.

He has talked about farms, K through 12 schools, and even building apartments.

The only reason I think I am out is because a former friend told me about a school involving horses. Because while I didn’t end up staying, it gave me some time to see there was a world out there. Where I could be anything I wanted to be.

Sign Post Moments: Kathryn Elizabeth’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

Kathryn Elizabeth blogs at The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person.

I don’t have a single lightbulb moment, my views gradually changed over time as I read and paid attention to the world around me. Although they certainly wouldn’t agree with all of the conclusions I’ve reached, I have to give part of the credit for my belief system to my professors at Covenant College, who taught me to question and who emphasized the importance of doing justice and loving mercy to thinking Christianly about the world. There are two moments in my life, however, that stick in my head as sign posts, moments, coincidentally, that have converged again over these last weeks with the renewed confederate flag debate and the marriage equality ruling.

The first sign post memory was the debate over the old Georgia state flag—the banner that flew as a memorial to the confederacy and an emblem of Georgia’s fight against integration and civil rights. Growing up as I did in the part of Florida that’s more north than south, and so attending college in north Georgia during that time was a real eye-opener to me.

I couldn’t understand why the topic was so hotly debated in campus discussion boards at my Christian college and why so many Christians were turning a blind eye to the messages this symbol of bigotry and discrimination was sending to our African American brothers and sisters.

Watching the Georgia Republican party line up and support the confederate flag was the first time I realized that whatever political affiliation I might have at home in Florida, I couldn’t justify registering as one if I stayed in Georgia. That’s when I started questioning my political affiliations and whether the accusations of racism levied against the party were correct, because here was this issue that seemed like a no-brainer, and yet here these people who were part of the same party lining up to support something so noxious.

To make matters worse, the state representative from my district in Georgia, Rep. Brian Joyce, was a member of the PCA church down the road from Covenant, the church just before the point that African American students were warned not to venture beyond, for their own safety. Brian Joyce, the good Christian PCA member, who was supposed to have all of the right doctrine, was busy pandering to his district in support of the flag, going on about heritage not hate in a district that everyone knew was overrun with the Klan. There was no way you could pretend it wasn’t anything other than a heritage of hate in Dade County, GA, and yet here was this supposedly godly man insisting just that. Whether because of political expedience or because he was part of the racist streak that still hasn’t been fully rooted out of the PCA, that episode cost me respect both for him and the church leaders who should have stopped it and didn’t.

Any idealism I still had left was gone by the time the flag fight was over.

My second signpost memory comes from my time working in Vietnam. By that point my politics had shifted more, and I was supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race. As an aside, there are few moments in my life more surreal than teaching my classroom full of foreign relations students that morning the election results were announced. Anyway, like a lot of other Americans, my elation at President Obama’s election was tempered both by California passing Prop 8 and my home state of Florida passing a similar constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

That made the email the pastor of the international church in Hanoi sent out to the entire congregation a few weeks after the inauguration all the more frustrating. In the email the pastor, a Chinese-South African gentleman—or in other words, not an American—told the congregation that we needed to pray for the coming persecution of American Christians, and be prepared to take in Americans fleeing the inevitable crackdown lest they be thrown into camps. The evidence of this coming persecution that would be so bad Christian Americans would have to flee to whatever places in the developing world would take them? Barack Obama’s election and the backlash against Prop 8.

That email broke something in me.

There I was, halfway around the world, in a country whose relationship with non-Catholic Christians was rocky, to say the least, where I was supposed to be thankful that I even had a church to worship in. Here the pastor was proclaiming that the president I campaigned for and the backlash to the ballot measure I opposed were proof that my homeland was going to start persecuting me. No sense of proportionality whatsoever.

I’d expected the American religious right to flip out, but I didn’t expect a message like that to be sent to a congregation filled with people from around the globe. Not when many of them were from countries where Christians really do face government persecution. I certainly didn’t expect it from a pastor who had spoken about his church bravely standing up against the Apartheid South African government. How are people getting angry about their rights being voted away and picketing corporations that funded the measure even in the same ballpark as Apartheid or actual persecution of Christians?

And yet somehow, the American religious right managed to export their paranoia about non-existent persecution to Christians halfway around the world.

I suppose the moral of this story is that everyone is good for something, even a bad example, and both the fight to keep the confederate flag and the imagined persecution over an election are examples of a Christianity so myopically focused on narrow political debates that it misses the big picture. If your version of Christianity leaves nothing but distasteful memories of racial division or persecution fantasies, is it really God who you’re honoring or is it yourself and your own worst impulses?

Not An Asian Stereotype: Asa’s Story

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race

Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Asa” is a pseudonym.

I am Taiwanese-American (ethnically Han Chinese). I was homeschooled for most of my life until I went to college. (I attended Patrick Henry College for several semesters before transferring to another Christian college.)

This should go without saying, but I can only speak for myself and from my own experience and observations. I cannot speak for others and my experience does not negate theirs or vice versa.

My experience with homeschooling has been mostly positive, and race has been no exception. Almost every homeschooled person I’ve known has been very welcoming of my race or ethnicity. This was true even in overwhelmingly white Caucasian communities of people.

The American homeschooling community is very white Caucasian, and since there are fewer homeschoolers of minority races, I think such minority people attracted more curiosity or attention. It was a good conversational ice-breaker, though.  Since homeschoolers tend to be a largely Christian crowd, a lot of their interactions and conversations with me had to do with missions and what God was doing in foreign countries. Quite a few conversations revolved around China and the Chinese government.

There is a tendency for Asians to be seen as foreigners in America, though, I think, more so than people of other races. (I’m referring here to the views held by Americans as a whole, not just homeschoolers.) I think it’s because Asia is halfway across the globe – about as far away from the USA as you can get – and also because Asians comprise a relatively small percentage of the US (as compared to, say, African-Americans and Hispanics.) Time also plays a factor.  African-Americans, for instance, have been part of the American societal fabric for a lot longer than Asians, and hence may be perceived by Americans as being more ‘American’ than Asians. To be fair, some Asian-Americans view each other the same way. It may be a situation that only time can improve. For reasons of this sort, I also don’t think that we’ll ever see an Asian-American President of the United States.  But I digress.

Society always clings to certain stereotypes. In my experience, though, some homeschoolers held some positive stereotypes about certain races – for instance, that Asians were good at math and science, that African-American men excelled at basketball, etc. In a way, it’s a compliment, I suppose. This may have been due to, as mentioned earlier, there being relatively few minority people in the homeschooling community, which sometimes allows stereotypes to persist longer. But positive stereotypes are much better than negative stereotypes, of course.

I tend to be quite different than most American stereotypes of Asians. I’m terrible at a lot of math, for instance; I struggle with algebra and trigonometry, although I’m good at simple, quick arithmetic.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of racism in America is not by white people against minorities, but rather, by minorities against each other. Racism by minorities against each other doesn’t get addressed as much in American society as it ought to.

In summary, my experience in the American homeschooling community has been, for the most part, a friendly, welcoming and positive one.

I realize that by sharing a positive experience about homeschooling and race, my story may not fit in with your Homeschooling and Race article. But I hope you will not disqualify it from being published for that reason.

The Deep Drone of Unseen Cicadas: Gary’s Story

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race

Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Gary” is a pseudonym. Also by Gary on HA: “Hurts Me More Than You: Gary’s Story”.

I sit here thinking, How do I talk about something like Homeschooling and Race? How do I talk about something that was both rarely spoken of and yet a constant background noise? Like the deep drone of unseen Cicadas that drowns out all other nighttime sounds?

It’s there. It’s deafening.

But you have to search in the underbrush with a headlamp to find the source. 

Race was not a topic I heard often spoken on as a child. Not by the pastors of churches we visited. Not by my parents. Not by the other homeschooling families we interacted with in Washington, Idaho and Montana. It simply was not spoken about.

And by that I mean there were no conversations. If different races were mentioned at all it was in generally neutral to negative terms, but not in an overt way.

As a child I never heard my parents use racial slurs. I never heard pastors or other homeschoolers use racial slurs. Not even a single time. Not once that I recall.

But there was a reason for that:

Other races simply didn’t exist in our closed Homeschool world.

We were from a county that literally had three African American residents. Three. In the whole county. The churches we went to, in the first eighteen years of my life, spanning three states, had not a single, solitary adult member of any other race than white European. None. None at all.

Before the age of eighteen I had met and spoken to exactly five persons of different race than my own, and I thought nothing of this fact. It was simply how things were.

It wasn’t till I was older, when I went off to University at a prominent Fundamentalist University that I started to realize that the lack of diversity in my childhood had not been by chance.

Far from it, it had been by intentional design.

I realized, like a flash of lighting, that one of the key reasons I had been homeschooled for twelve years was to keep me, but more specifically my sisters, apart from other races. But the revelation didn’t stop there. I came to understand that this was one of the key reasons behind the homeschooling of nearly everyone I had grown up knowing.

I learned that many of the families in our homeschool circles had moved out west in the 60’s and 70’s to “escape” integration in the east and south. It was simple reasoning on their part, “other races moving in to our neighborhoods? Fine, we’ll go somewhere there are no other races, as in Montana, Washington and Idaho.” (The lack of diversity was far more marked in these states in the 60’s and 70′ than it is today.)

I found out that many in my social circle growing up were not just motivated by racist ideologies to move west and homeschool, but were actually involved, in at least two cases, deeply involved, in actual racist organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood.

My eyes were opened to the reality that the reason there had been no other races represented in the churches we had attended was not just because of demographics. It was because these churches were pastored by men who had graduated from Universities that taught, even up till year 2000, that “race-mixing” would bring on the actual rise of the anti-Christ.

Other races were not welcome in churches pastored by men from these Universities……and they knew it.

Like I say: Racism was everywhere — but hidden just under the surface. 

After all, how can you see someone react in a negative way to a person of another race if you never even encounter, in any extended way, peoples of other races?

It was one of the driving forces for many of the people I knew for even living in the states they lived in. It certainly was one of the reasons why many of my friends were homeschooled. Not that their parents were afraid their children would have to interact with other races in public school. No, their parents had eliminated that possibility by moving to some of the least diverse places in the Unites States. But they also were homeschooled, in part, because their parents actively and intentionally did not want their children learning about racial equality and other race issues in public schools.

I found all this out later of course. These reasons were never spoken of out loud to us children. After all, why discuss racial issues when there simply are no other races in your child’s life?

Turns out I never heard my parents use racial slurs because we never encountered many members of other races, not because my parents were not more than ready to say those things. Racism it turns out, was the foundation that held up the house, under ground, unseen, largely silent, but there alright, holding up the structure that was my homeschooling experience.

I saw the light when I attended University, and realized that the place that had printed my homeschool textbooks was a place founded, funded and expanded by racist teachings.

I saw the light when my sister was asked out by a man of an other race and my parents displayed an immediate, hysterical and frightening reaction to this occurrence.

I saw the light when we elected Barack Obama as the U.S. President and saw the outpouring of paranoid hatred from every corner of my social circle.

I saw the light when more people of other races started to move into the Caucasian stronghold that was northern Washington, Montana and Idaho, thus providing ample opportunity for those I knew to exhibit racist slurs, ideologies, thought patterns and racial profiling.

I saw it then alright. In all its festering, racist ugliness.

Racial slurs. Bigoted attitudes. Voicing of the real sentiments that led to my family being homeschooled, as well as that of many of my childhood friends. My Facebook feed looks like an exercise in what not to do: Post after post of subtle, and not so subtle, racist bigotry.

I can’t scroll more than a few inches without seeing some post about how our “Muslim President” is pushing “The Gay Agenda” and is “building concentration camps for Christians.” Some of these posts come from my own parents, and most of the others come from the parents of the other homeschooled children I grew up with.

By my estimation at least 75% of the “Homeschool Parents” I knew growing up are die-hard racists.

Turns out that when our parents told us they were homeschooling us to “protect” us, it was to “protect us” from integration. Often times it seemed it was particularly to “protect” my sisters (and other girls) from interacting with the males of other races.

Fifteen years after I finished 12 years of homeschooling, I have reached several conclusions about my homeschool experience in regards to race and racism:

(1) I have come to the conclusion that the “Courtship” model has direct ties to racism, at least in the circles I traveled in.

After all, how can your daughter marry someone of another race if you get to pick her husband? Simple, she can’t. “Problem” solved. I know for a fact that this was part of the reason my parents considered “courtship” for my sisters, and a good part of the reason my parents sent my sisters to a University that (as of that time) did not allow inter-racial dating.

(2) I have come to the conclusion, based on actual conversations with some of the parents involved, including my own, that a good portion of the reason they homeschooled at all was to keep us children separate from other races.

They homeschooled us to propagate specific racist teachings (no interracial marriage etc.) through us. If we were public schooled our minds might be polluted with all that “racial equality” junk, so, homeschooled it is.

(3) I have come to the conclusion a good deal of the time “Homeschooling” is done based off fear.

Fear of other races. Fear of LGBTQ individuals. Fear of other ideologies. Fear of “losing” your children to a culture different than your own. Fear that your children will grow up to be human beings with lives and minds of their own. Fear that after 18 years you won’t be able to control your children anymore, so the only thing to do is to brainwash them into such total submission that they will remain voluntarily under your control after reaching legal adulthood.

And after all this I tell you I am not against homeschooling.

I’m not.

I think that given the right mind-set and reasons, homeschooling may be, in some cases, the very best thing for some children.

But sadly, in my personal experience, homeschooling was used specifically as a tool to isolate myself and my siblings, as well as many of the homeschool children I grew up with, from other races. It was used as the one sure way to make sure my sisters and other girls would never meet, much less attempt to date or marry, anyone of a different race.

Homeschooling was seen as a fail-safe way to insure your children would end up exactly as you intended, in every facet of their lives, attitudes about other races included.

The truth is that no matter how hard you try to isolate and control your children, no matter how pure the strain of brainwashing, no matter how severe  the isolation, at some point children grow up. They discover other ways of thinking and decide, ultimately, what is best for them, regardless of your decades of efforts to prevent that very thing from happening.

They may just decide that every single shred of the racist mindset you raised them with is false and try to cleanse it from their minds like the garbage that it is.

I am living proof of this possibility.

Slaves, Heroes and Communists: Home Schooling and Race Education

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

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About the author: Annelise Pierce blogs at www.annelisepierce.com. She spends her days being a mom first and a free-lance writer second while spending as much time as humanly possible thinking and reading about the issues that she cares about most. Annelise has lived all over the map, first with the Navy and then in East Africa. Now she and her family are having a quiet rooted time in the Beautiful Northern California.

I was home schooled my whole childhood or “all the way through” as the home school community proudly refers to it.   My family of origin is intelligent, curious, and out-of-the-box. That’s probably what led them to home educate, a way of life that allowed them to emphasize their particular form of intelligence and indulge their curiosity and worldviews with a rapt audience of six – children, that is.

My mother taught me all I knew about history. I didn’t have the internet to turn to in those days and every library book I brought home was carefully checked over for appropriateness. Some were turned away, even books about historical fiction. Some were not considered appropriate. I was never sure why, as my hurried and discrete pre-review behind the library aisles had not yielded any sign of falling in love, bodies touching or other topics that might anger my mother. Over time I learned from her that some people’s ideas of history were threatening, even dangerous. That much of the world wanted to teach me a series of lies and that if I believed them I too would be a bad person. This was why we didn’t read a lot of those kinds of books.

This left me with an ever-present feeling of vague dread and a deep distrust for the world around me. I realize only now that perhaps it is part of why I never liked history much. It seemed like endless stories of war with dubious winners and a thousand dates to memorize. I found few heroes there, few people I would wish to emulate or who led me to dream of how I myself could change the world.

My mother had a hero though. He was Robert E Lee, a southern general during the Civil War. We celebrated his birthday with cake most years. I still remember that.

I remember too, hearing about some of the villains of history. There were the obvious ones such as Hitler and Stalin. And some that remained shrouded in mystery such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, evil in a way that I did not understand and which was never talked about.

In my twelve years of schooling I never learned more about Martin Luther King than that he was a communist. 

Needless to say we did not eat cake or get a day off on his birthday – with home schooling, you get to choose your own holidays.

No, we never learned about MLK, we just skipped right over that part of the A Beka textbook, because even Christian textbooks aren’t all good. We did, however, learn lots about the War Between the States. Not the Civil War . . . . we were carefully taught that that name itself was propaganda. Books on the War Between the States populated our shelves and we learned in detail how a few bad slave owners were used to color the whole bunch of slave owners and make them all look bad. Most of them, we were taught, were actually a kind group of people who were doing the best they could to look after the African slaves and give them a chance at a good life.

This puzzled and worried me as I have always had a strong sense of justice for as long as I can remember and the idea of slavery always felt so wrong. To add to my puzzlement, I remember that we had home schooling friends growing up who believed slavery was still a healthy way of life. They called themselves theonomists – they were looking to create slave relationships but somehow it hadn’t worked out yet. I remember wondering as I watched their two cute young children, how you went about finding someone to be your slave? It seemed strange, dark and frightening, yet they looked so normal. I wondered how their children would grow up.

Now, at thirty-four I have found new friends and new perspectives – ones that fit my deep calling to justice. I am still exploring the great big wide world of history as seen with no blinders on. My heroes are MLK, Ghandi and Mandela. I am reading my way through Maya Angelou’s autobiographical series and loving every minute of it. I follow Feminista Jones and I learn every day about what race is and how it shapes me and those around me. I teach my children about white privilege.   We read and reread books about Ruby Bridges and they marvel at a little girl’s courage to stand up for equality.

History will always be a matter of perspective. But the wonder of multiple history teachers is that we learn over time that each person’s perspective on history is different; that even those recording the “facts” have their own bias. That is what I missed when I home schooled “the whole way through.” And that is what my children could so easily have missed too, had I drunk the Kool-aid and continued the home educating cycle without reading and learning outside of the boundaries I had been given.

This is what can make home education dangerous – propaganda. Yes, that very word I learned to fear growing up, used so often about the “left wing”, “communists” and public schools is very much a part of home education too. It surfaces in a million ways with a million stories. And as it touches our young, developing brains, it shapes the very fabric of who we are.

I’m glad that I am someone else now.

When You’re Raised by Racists: Junia’s Story

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Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Junia” is a pseudonym.

I was raised by a mother who was intensely racist.

I didn’t realize it for years, but she was, and is. My father is as well, but less obviously, more in an oblivious sort of way.

As far as education went, I always thought that we received above average education. My mother was committed to good education, erudition was a trait that my parents prized highly, to the point that friends of the family would comment on how intelligent we were and note it as a family thing. I will always be grateful for the education I received from her and from the other teachers, both in co-ops and online, that she arranged. But one area that I completely missed was race.

We’re white, with one distant Native American ancestor. But otherwise we’re Western and Northern European through and through. I never realized until the past year how much this has colored, no pun intended, my life and worldviews.

With history we were raised on the motto, “The South was Right.”

Slavery was justified because of Bible passages about how to treat slaves. If slavery was inherently wrong God would have banned it, wouldn’t He? We listened to speeches from the group The League of the South and read its literature. It’s still hard for me to admit that this group promotes racial inequality by justifying slavery. I was really into the Civil War, or as I called it, the War Between the States, in high school. I spent hours reading about it, but almost nothing from the perspective of anyone in the Union or the perspective of people like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass. I even had a livejournal account about the War. Mostly copy/paste of historical documents or letters etc. Inspirational stories about specific individuals.

I had only friend growing up who wasn’t white. She was mixed race, her dad was black and her mom was white. She and I used to play together a lot. I’m not sure why my mother was okay with us, why she was friends with the family, but I guess the whiteness of the mom made the family safe as far as my mother was concerned. I know my friend was really sensitive about being mixed race. She didn’t feel like she fit in anywhere, she was too dark for whites and too white for blacks. At one point in high school she saw my livejournal account and asked me to take it down because she was offended.

I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t.

I told her that she shouldn’t be offended, I was just posting historical things. We drifted apart, for a lot of different reasons.

None of this is to say that I believed in white superiority or hated blacks or anything like that. I just obliviously dismissed stories of racism as playing the race card. I was uneducated about the true story of racial inequality and hate and the continuing structural racism that exists today. I was never allowed to read To Kill a Mockingbird as a child because my mother said it was racial propaganda designed to stir up race hate. I thought Nelson Mandela was a terrorist because the only times I heard my parents mention him were in negative contexts. A friend asked me within the last year if I knew who Jackie Robinson was and I had no idea. My boyfriend, now my husband, was the first person to tell me about the LA Race Riots. That they even took place.

Even this year I still clung to the idea that Southerners weren’t racist, they had slaves, but they weren’t really racists. There must be some misunderstanding. There’s just misunderstood regional pride. White people have moved on now anyway, we don’t allow slavery any more. People just play the race card when they don’t want to face that they didn’t get a job because they weren’t as qualified, etc. That minorities use their race as a weapon to get ahead.

I was blind to my privilege because I was born with the skin tone I have.

Then there was the murder of Trayvon Martin. I was angry and sad. I saw it as a crime that was at the very least made more likely because of Martin’s race, and at worst as racially motivated. But my awareness was still embryonic. It was after that that I decided that I should read To Kill a Mockingbird and find out what it was all about. I was shocked. I thought it was an exaggeration for monetary profit on the part of the author. I wish that had been true.

A few months later I read a newspaper article about the conviction of the ringleader in the murders in 1964 of the civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. I was horrified. I read the comments on the article and I didn’t know what one of the commentators was talking about when he referenced Emmett Till, murdered in 1955 at the age of 14. I felt sick to my stomach as I read accounts of what happened to him. A 14 year old boy was beaten and murdered for daring to flirt with a white woman, at worst for being obscene (if you were to believe what local white people said of him).

I now realized that To Kill a Mockingbird really wasn’t exaggerating.

It was all to true to reality. Then I followed more links and saw the records of more deaths, schoolgirls blown up in a church, men and women murdered sometimes just on the side of the road because of their race, men and women both white and black murdered because they were peacefully protesting inequality.

There was a whole world of pain that I was utterly unaware of.

When I was in middle school and high school I vaguely remember that my older sister who had married at 18 and left our home say things about racial inequality. My parents would say that she was just full of white guilt, and that it wasn’t right for us to feel guilty about the crimes that some white people committed against those of other races. I had never investigated for myself, to my shame.

I was perpetuating racism without being aware of it. And I would have been more in tune with reality if I had been taught about racism and black people with any depth. If my knowledge of blacks in American history hadn’t been limited to knowing a lot about George Washington Carver and that Rosa Parks was tired and said no. If I hadn’t been told that Harriet Tubman was making the problems worse by encouraging runaways, which was clearly in violation of things like the book of Philemon.

But I was taught a white centric view of American history and life.

I feel deeply handicapped in dealing with life today because there was so much racism in my family of origin and I am so far behind in what I should know about what minorities, especially blacks, have been facing at the hands of a white dominated society.

I’m grateful in so many ways that I was educated at home. But because of the issue of race, I would never be a homeschooling parent.

Adult Children of the Quiverfull Movement on Race

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on May 10, 2012. This post is part of Libby Anne’s “Raised Quiverfull” interview series, where young adults from families influenced by the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements answer questions about their upbringing. 

Q: What role did race play in the Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull community in which you grew up? Were there any black or hispanic families? Were they treated differently?

Joe:

In the church I grew up in, there was never a non-white member – ever.  The church was not overtly racist, though they had issues with illegal immigration, but the services were very boring and would not have fit into a culture different from a bunch of white dudes and one off key old lady singing How Great Thou Art from a hymnal, accompanied by a piano, then sitting through a two hour sermon that sounded the same every Sunday.  But I attended a public grade school and high school where it was proudly noted that we had over 57 different nationalities represented.  My best friends throughout my school years were all African America, Asian, and American Indian.

Latebloomer:

The homeschooling community was extremely white, but we did know several black and Hispanic homeschooling families, with varying levels of involvement in CP/Q.  I don’t remember noticing any racism at the time.  The cold-shoulder treatment seemed to be saved for families that were not fully committed to homeschooling, regardless of race.

Libby Anne:

The families we associated with were all white. I honestly can’t think of any minority Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull families – or even any minority families in our homeschool groups (which included ordinary conservative Christian families in addition to those who followed the teachings of Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull). That said, my parents were emphatically anti-racist, and if a black Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull family had come into our community I don’t think it would have been a problem for them at all.

Lisa:

While my parents said that all human beings were perfectly made by God and equal, my Dad didn’t like us mixing with the black families. There were two families we had closer contact with, and my parents were very friendly, but we weren’t allowed to play with them. I think that was because my Dad didn’t want us to consider one of them as a possible spouse. He was against interracial marriage. I remember a nice lady who was married to a Mexican, she was treated differently, as were their son. Not that anybody said anything, but she was never invited and people avoided talking to her too much.

Mattie:

Where we lived in CA was a very rural area, so there were mostly white, blue-collar folks in our homeschool group. There were a lot of Hispanics in our church, but we were the only homeschoolers.

When we moved to VA, there was a lot more diversity in the homeschooling community, but those adhering to the ideas of the Quiverfull movement were primarily white and upper-middle class. People didn’t treat each other differently and race was pretty much irrelevant.

Melissa:

I do not remember knowing anyone who was black. I met a few mixed white/Hispanic families in the community. I don’t think race was a huge issue in my family in particular, my dad had attended many black gospel churches as a child, and had a sort of nostalgic affection for black spirituality. We were around people in the homeschool movement who felt that the confederacy should have won the civil war and that the loss of that war had led to a major downslide in Christianity in America. I was never 100% clear on what my parents’ position was in that regard.

Sarah:

I had no racially diverse acquaintances in my childhood, but to be fair, I didn’t really have many acquaintances at all. For a brief time I was friends with a Hispanic girl down the street, but I wasn’t allowed to go to her house, so she soon got bored of me. My dad went to an African American Baptist church in Chicago when he was a kid, and he always spoke fondly of his memories there. We never really discussed race, but I remember my dad telling me that interracial marriage was not a sin. It wasn’t until my late teens that I had any interaction with people outside my race or religion. It took me a long time to learn how to interact comfortably with diverse groups of people. I’ve always felt that that was one of the major flaws in my upbringing.

Sierra:

My church was solidly multiracial. Black families were not treated any differently from white families, as far as I could tell. The church did fetishize the Spanish language and would commonly ask Hispanic men to sing praise songs in Spanish before the service. We also attracted a Korean mother and daughter. The main difference between white and nonwhite believers in my church was homeschooling. Racial minorities did not homeschool, probably for economic reasons. My church regarded racial diversity as a positive sign that God’s Word was universal, but maintained a strict policy against interracial marriage.

Tricia:

White, middle class Protestants were we all. It was a very segregated world. I never even had a black or Hispanic friend growing up, and there were no opportunities to cultivate such a friendship.  I definitely feel like I missed out in that regard. Exposure to other groups and cultures can be so enriching, and I had very little of that. The church I attend now is racially and culturally diverse, and coincidentally so is the neighborhood I currently live in, and this exposure to a wider world has been like a breath of fresh air, even though I can have a difficult time connecting– mostly because I don’t know how. It’s getting easier with time, though.

How We Removed Anything That Might Make America Look Less Godly: Liz’s Story

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Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Liz” is a pseudonym.

I don’t know if my story about race is what you are looking for. I am a white southerner and have never had a close friend of another race.

In my small circle of homeschoolers and other like-minded, ultra-conservative Christians, I don’t think I ever saw a person of another race.  

Oh, except for adopted children. They were the only exception. I distinctly remember a family coming to our church and two of the children were biracial.  I can’t remember if anything specific was said, but I had the impression that this was somehow shameful.  They weren’t adopted, I guess that makes a difference.

What I distinctly remember is my dad giving us talks about the problems with interracial dating/marriage.  He would say that he didn’t have a problem with it and had even dated a black girl once, but that the cultural differences were so large that he felt it did not make for a good marriage.  Now that I think about it, I find it odd and slightly laughable that the only racial conversations we ever had were focused on the civil war or marriage. I’m not even sure why he discussed this with us since he had to “approve” anyone who wanted to date us anyway. He could have easily weeded out anyone of an “inappropriate race.”

The idea of having just a friendship with someone of a different race was never even discussed.

My schooling was very clear on a few key facts about race.  Let me preface this by saying, this is not what I now believe at all, but it is what I was taught:

  • One, the civil war was not about slavery, it was only about states’ rights.

Slaves were actually treated very well and many were not capable of caring for themselves anyway so their white masters were just benevolent care takers.  Slavery would have slowly ended on its own if Abraham Lincoln had just respected the states and stayed out of it.  I remember reading one of the American Girl books about Abby (a black slave girl) and being disgusted that it was so “historically inaccurate” in its portrayal of her life as a slave.

Needless to say, I am ashamed of many things I believed as a child/teenager but I was only believing what I was taught.  

  • The other key point that was drilled into my head about race was that even though slavery was wrong, the civil war was a long time ago and it was high time that black people just let it go.

Of course us calling everyone North of the Mason Dixon line a Yankee wasn’t something we should all let go of. I did not know anything about the civil rights movement.  It was not until I was an adult in college that I realized many of the horrible things that had happened had occurred in the lifetimes of my classmates’ parents and grandparents, not over a 100 years before. Other things had occurred in my own lifetime.

I was shocked and horrified.

No wonder these things hadn’t just been “let go” (as if even the years of slavery should be “let go” anyway no matter how many years have passed). I had been taught for years that black people were entitled and unforgiving (again the irony of southerners still holding quite the grudge against the entire northern half of the country is not lost on me).

It only took a semester of history in college for me to realize how biased and simply wrong my education had been. I had never read a real history book (The Light and the Glory anyone?)  I soaked in every bit of my history classes and went on my own research binges.  I found that there had been terrible race riots in my own rather small hometown–they even made my college textbook.

This was not the first time I was disillusioned with my homeschool education, but it is probably the deficiency I am most ashamed of.  

  • The other race issue that was often discussed in my border state, was all of the “illegals”.

It was made clear that it had nothing to do with their race, only that they were coming into the country illegally.  However, when a white woman came to our church who had also fled her country into the U.S. illegally, the church gave her financial support to continue her fight to stay in the country.  Any person who looked hispanic was considered an illegal alien until proven otherwise.  Not to say this was or is a homeschooling phenomenon. I am a public school teacher and heard a conference between middle school girls about another girl they were purposefully ostracizing because they believed her family was “illegal”.  I have had more than one class discussion about the use of racial slurs in my classroom.

One thing that continues to baffle me is that my parents are very intelligent people.

They both had a public education, which regardless of how good or bad at the very least covered the Jim Crow era. They lived through the civil rights movement. My dad has a college degree and my mom attended 3 years of college.

Where in all of that did they become so brainwashed by the religious and homeschool leaders to think it was okay to simply ignore that part of our history?

Why was it considered right and okay to gloss over or completely remove anything that might make America look less godly or right?  

I also realize that it is likely they were also taught a different but highly biased version of that point in our history (they graduated in the early 70s). But then again, isn’t it the obligation of an educator to overcome their biases, learn, and teach the truth?

I certainly consider it so as a teacher myself — and I am not claiming or trying to be the god-ordained teacher of every subject my children will study.