The social composition of our class is a good representation of the progress and shortfall of American history.  More than half the class are women, which can measure some progress in the cause of gender equality since the mid 19th century.  When it comes to race and ethnicity, however, our class reflects terrible shortfall, since African-, Asian-, and Hispanic-Americans (as three examples) are underrepresented when compared to their proportions in the general population.  From my perspective, this shortfall costs your preparation for the workforce and for citizenship, since it makes it difficult to create sophisticated conversation and discussion in the class when a full diversity of voices and perspectives is not present.  There is no way for me to compensate for that lack, not because I happen to be a white male, but ultimately because that kind of conversation and discussion must come from among and between students, inside and outside the classroom.

Nearly every time I have taught this class there has been a young white man upset that so much of the narrative of American history seems to cast white men as the oppressors (“you are always blaming white men for everything bad that happened”).  That young white man seems eager to claim victim status for himself (victim status seems to be a great prize of modern life, strangely enough), and I always wonder why he takes the past so personally, with so much jealousy and guilt and resentment in his voice -- so much so, in fact, that he conveniently has forgotten or ignored all the complexities, contradictions, and dissensions that I have tried to raise throughout the course.

My own perspective is that it has been and continues to be an incalculable and abiding tragedy that so much of human history and American history has featured the aggressive and often violent enforcement of patriarchy and racism, undeniably by white men ... in theory like myself.  Yet perhaps the first step in putting history into the past is to face it honestly, directly, candidly, humbly, rather than to hide one’s head in the sand, or to wallow in the swaddling comfort of guilt and anger.

Infinitely more important, however, is the matter of identification.  Who or what does one identify with?  I personally don’t identify with George Washington or Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln just because they happen to be white men like myself.  I prefer, instead, to imagine people different from myself, because I find that unsettling and challenging, and I personally am happiest when I am unsettled and challenged.  I am interested in George Washington, for instance, because he is very much unlike me, not because we both happen to be white men.  That unlikeness is the same reason why I am interested in, say, Prudence Crandall or Frederick Douglass.

Meanwhile, as is likely obvious to you already, I prefer to identify not with people, so much as with concepts.  That’s why history feels so alive to me -- not because of dead white men or dead anyone else, but because of living concepts like equality and justice that shaped struggles in the past and also struggles around me in the present.

So what do you think?  Who/what do you identify with?  Why so?.....