A brief thread for #scholarstrike. Even as historical method remains critical for many of us working on race & inequality in America, let’s not forget the white supremacist roots of history as a discipline founded on the idea that some people change over time & others don’t. /1

Here’s how a popular late-19th C textbook put it: “history proper concerns itself with but one highly developed type of mankind…. the Caucasians form the only truly historical race.” /2

19th C historians claimed that “true” history—or “history proper”—was progressive and that only Caucasians were driving it forward. The idea that history changes over time is rooted in this assumption. /3

But does it, really? Case after case of violence against communities of color and Black lives shows repetition and reiteration, not change over time. /4

Linda Tuhiwai Smith: “We assume that when ‘the truth comes out’ it will prove that what happened was wrong or illegal… We believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power.” /5

It’s about power making and remaking itself in reiterative cycles of violence and control. Again borrowing from Smith, history as a discipline is NOT innocent. /6

I wrote about this here https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/religion-and-american-culture/article/historyless-heathen-and-the-stagnating-pagan-history-as-nonnative-category/DA7E632BCB10C1A72DC6D95AE113783B; see also this article on Donald Yacovone, who is working on “How textbooks taught white supremacy” https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/harvard-historian-examines-how-textbooks-taught-white-supremacy/. #scholarstrike /end