No Text

Even though the President of the United States has declared the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement  "a symbol of hate" and a threat to the country, the nation nevertheless is having a racial reckoning.  Look at the composition of the demonstrations in most American cities and it's apparent that many white folks get it.  They need no explanation.  Yet this begs the question of why so many people in the US don't really know their own history.  I'm of the opinion that the answer is right in front of us.  Just look in our history books.

For years the conventional wisdom held that history was best taught from history books.  Those cumbersome texts we all carried around at some point were really worthless when it comes to accurate history.  I know I'm generalizing, but as one who taught the subject at one time collected and many texts as I could, the real history of this country was seldom found in those volumes.
From the time I first walked into a classroom until I locked my classroom door for the last time, I made my own curriculum and eschewed most textbooks.
So what's wrong with them? For starters, they ignore many of the significant events of America's struggle with race relations. And why?  Because the sad truth is that this had been a country founded on genocide, racism, slave labor, and the suppression of civil rights for all its citizens.  If you have to read this continually, from the age of colonization through the last few "endless wars," you might start to feel differently about all the star-spangled messages we constantly receive about "American Exceptionalism."
Our history lies in primary sources.  What if our students could read and discuss the documents that hold the honest truth.  Then they'd see the 3/5th clause in the Constitution.  They would read a real Green Book or the letters of a young soldier mired in the mud of Vietnam.  You get the picture.
Fortunately, today there are resources like the Zinn Education Project, the Choices Project, and The Jim Crow Museum that make teaching textless not only possible and preferable but much easier than the old days before we had the internet.  I vividly remember putting together handouts I typed while trying to hold open diaries, documents, and letters.  I made slides and tried to get photographs copied for years.  There is something particularly satisfying about letting students form their own opinions from reading and viewing primary sources.  This allows them to do the work of historians.  That, in turn, teaches how complex the work of history can be.
In the last few months, with the increased time spent at home due to the pandemic, I've been culling my collection of primary sources.  I plan on passing along many to other educators who get that the text is merely a point of departure.  A classroom, with ample displays of primary sources, along with student work) can go on teaching without the teacher.  I like that idea.