The Unseen Truth, page 19
To teach geography was to contour lines of racial sight. It became an exercise in where to look, and how. Scripts and visual lessons from academic geography are key for understanding how a complex negotiation about racial hierarchies—a tessellation between narratives to determine racial identity—became commonplace, daily, and urgent. Geography teaching manuals had instructors use near-dramaturgical lines of prepared dialogue with students to standardize observations about race.
In these scripts found in geography teaching manuals, often startling in their stark transmission of the racial bias of the era, we see an emphasis on the full repertoire of visualization—from observation and imagination to recollection and scripted, performative display—in order to teach students to make evaluative statements about the world. As a popular elementary geography textbook emphasized: “there is scarcely an important lesson in geography” that does not “[call] for the splendid constructive power of imagination.”70 (The term “constructive imagination” is one Wilson used in his discussions about the vision necessary for the segregationist modern age.) However, what was framed as merely the quality of reverie, the imagination, was in fact a tactic for sustaining taught narratives about the racialized world. Critical for this were discourses centered around figuring and the idea of the Caucasus.
Consider the atlases used in the nation’s schools produced by author, publisher, and inventor Levi W. Yaggy. In 1888, school superintendents, the US Department of the Interior, and the National Education Association, then led by Harvard president Charles Eliot, lauded the inclusion of Yaggy atlases in American schools as a pedagogical improvement.71 The delivery of Yaggy atlases and maps were part of the collective effort to develop the instruction of geography, which was then a central component of secondary education and foundational for teaching literacy. In many states, to teach required competency in geography instruction.72 In rural schools without a library, Yaggy’s maps, including one showing the distribution of the five races of man on the globe, were seen as invaluable.73 Though it may be impossible to say what atlas is open on the teacher’s desk in the 1899 Johnston photograph, the Hampton curriculum reveals that its teachers were using textbooks including Geography by Alexis Everett Frye, along with textbooks by Ralph Tarr, Frank McMurry, and Henry Gannett, and crucially, maps by Yaggy.74
Teaching about the Caucasus and white racial superiority was couched as an exercise in selective observation in Yaggy’s geography lesson plans. Immediately after instructing the students about the geology of the earth, for example, comes instruction about racial classification. This discussion centers on Yaggy’s 1887 map The Five Zones, Showing in a Graphic Manner the Climates, Peoples, Industries & Productions of the Earth (Figure 4.8).
Teachers were directed to first discuss the Caucasian race, “the group just above the center of the map.”75 (There has been no discussion of the Caucasus as a geographic region thus far in the lesson.) Under the banner “Caucasian,” spotlit in white (from the reserve of the printing process), five figures are placed at the center of the page, nearly at the center of the globe, striated according to the central torrid zone, the temperate climatic zones, and the two frigid zones.
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Every race except Caucasian has been lifted off the planet, and nested, floating, at the corners of the page on Yaggy’s map. The teacher is instructed to tell students: “They are the most handsome, active, wise and powerful people in the world. Their color is white, the shape of the head round or oval; hair soft and of various colors.”
The script then states that the teacher should tell students, “The first race is the Caucasian. The Caucasian people are spread over a large part of the Earth.” The students are not told where Caucasians are. Co-opting the logic of colonialist language, they are told what Caucasians are doing—spreading over the world with presumptive ease. Yaggy’s large climatic chart—distributed through its Chicago-based school-supply company and hung in schools—telegraphed this spread. The regime of racial ideology is color coded. Light blue indicates the extent of Caucasian distribution in northern Africa, South Africa, eastern and southern parts of the United States, and the edges of the continents of South America and Australia (Figure 4.9).
4.8. L. W. Yaggy, “The Five Zones Showing in a Graphic Manner the Climates, Peoples, Industries & Productions of the Earth,” in Yaggy’s Geographical Study Comprising Physical, Political, Geological, and Astronomical Geography (Chicago: Western, 1887).
The teacher is asked to conclude the lesson with a memorization exercise about Caucasians. “It will help to remember these different features if I write them on the blackboard,” the instructor states. Memorization was a key feature of nineteenth-century pedagogy, as Ruth Elson has noted in her study of more than a thousand of the most popular textbooks of the period.76 “In all but the most experimental schools of the time the child was generally required to memorize such characteristics as the rank of each race in the accepted racial hierarchy.”77 Yaggy’s instructional manuals for teachers show that the narrative scripts—the discursive, evaluative method for geography lessons—naturalized racial, evaluative judgment.
4.9. L. W. Yaggy, “Climatic Chart of the World. Showing the Distribution of the Human Race and the Animal & Vegetable Kingdoms,” from Yaggy’s Geographical Portfolio (Chicago: School Supply Co. / C. F. Rassweiler & Co., 1893).
The casual description of supremacy differs from the instruction that immediately follows about other races. In the exercises, students are introduced to geographies from Russia to Western Europe with the framing statement, “Caucasians live here,” followed by lessons largely about continents with only a few countries differentiated, a pattern replicated in many maps from the period.78 (There is a lesson on “Asia” and one on “Africa,” for example.) For Native groups, teachers are instructed to say nothing about where they live now, save the genocide-dodging statement: “Before the white people came to this country, it was the Indian’s home.” There is no indication of where they are physically located. The teacher’s omission of this history resettles the land. In the section on the “Negro,” the teacher states, “These people mostly live in Africa. There are, however, quite a number in our country.”79
At this point, the instructions indicate to stop and ask: “How many of you have seen a Negro?”80 In no other case is the teacher instructed to do this. In the construction of the question are normative claims about who has the right to look, and who should be rendered as a human subject. Here the embedded presumption is that the normative race of the American student—the observer—is white. By not using the word “met,” but “seen,” the question frames a “Negro” as an object of inspection, and forever “elsewhere (on the margin, the underside, outside the normal).”81
After the show of hands about who “has seen a Negro,” the teacher does not immediately discuss their features, as the lesson plan called for in other cases. “They first came to this country as slaves,” the teacher says before launching into a description of “the Negro,” referring to the map. The manual instructs teachers to “make all exercises of this kind conversational, simple, and familiar,” leading to the reading of figures in what Allan Sekula considered both an “analytic and synthetic” interpretative mode.82 In these lessons, casual comments by students were codified as objective knowledge about social development, race, and society.83 This very casualness of the script was part of how education “socialized” students to accept racial domination, as Wynter terms it, saluting educator Carter G. Woodson.84
In subsequent decades, none other than author, psychiatrist, and activist Frantz Fanon would centralize a near inverse of the question “How many of you have seen a Negro?” in Black Skin, White Masks (1951), his landmark critique of the structures of racial oppression, visuality, and domination under colonialism. In it, Fanon meditates on a time when a young white boy pointed to him on the train and said, “Look, a Negro!”85 The boy stated it three times. Fanon had done nothing but sit there. “I made no secret of my amusement,” he writes. But then the boy utters, “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” After he “throws himself into his mother’s arms,” he exclaims that Fanon, described with a racial epithet, is “going to eat me up.” “Scared! Scared!” he wrote, reflecting on the event. “Now they were beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter had become out of the question.”
The moment, Fanon notes, is a critical one of subject formation for both him and the white boy. It typifies how what Fanon calls the “white gaze” has the capacity to fix subjects, making them “overdetermined from the outside.”86 Scholars including Gavin Arnall, Homi Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, and David Scott have framed developments catalyzed by globalization as a prompt to reconsider Fanon’s seminal arguments.87 Fanon’s focus on the gaze, and his “ ‘image’ of colonialism” cannot be understood, however, without consideration of a prior moment when figuring registered a transformation of vision into assessment.88
The question in the Yaggy textbook, “How many of you have seen a Negro?” constructs the reproduced, collective gaze that Fanon seeks to dislodge. The teacher’s prompt is a precursor to presumed agreement. The students are being invited not to recall a memory, but to create one.
The teacher’s invitation is not to scan a figure, but to figure—to assess how a “Negro” was to be seen. The meaning of these maps was “processual” and “constantly reaffirmed.”89 The transformation of vision into assessment and the creation of racial hierarchies were correlative acts.
These were not rare atlases. They were pervasive. The vast adoption of Yaggy school atlases throughout the United States deserves emphasis here. Counties in Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin, among many other states, all purchased these atlases for classroom instruction in the 1890s.90 These acquisitions were supported and promoted as a curricular improvement by the federal government. Between the Spanish-American War and World War II, there was no federal governmental agency dedicated to producing atlases, so what it chose to supply to schools takes on heightened significance. These expenditures quantify the conditioning and reproduction of racial hierarchies in classrooms throughout the United States.
It is easy to stay fixated on how breathtakingly stark the shift is from pedagogy to propaganda in these geography lessons. This sort of indoctrination is benignly labeled. It is simply called an “exercise.”91
As poet Terrance Hayes wrote, “Never mistake what it looks like / for what it is.”92 These maps only look like ordinary school displays. What they became were tools of ideological conditioning about the so-called order of the racial world.
Cartography scholarship makes the point that maps are subjective (the distortions of continent sizes through the commonly used Mercator projection are a good example); instructional geography pedagogy makes the more acute point that they were, indeed, part of the history of racial propaganda. I use the term propaganda deliberately as it would become used by leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois to reference media—and he meant nearly all media—that could both manipulate and convince a group that an ideology was the truth. The scripted instruction in schools of the increasingly requisite subject of geography betrays its intentional use to support the ideology of racial domination under the guise of conveying information about the world. As Trouillot reminds us, many “first history lessons” come “through media that have not been subjected to the standards set by peer review, university presses, or doctoral committees.”93 Yet these maps came with the very authority of such reviews, supported by the federal government as they were, and, as we will see, mounted as public displays at institutions such as Harvard University.
The ideology of racial supremacy that was being taught in many US geography textbooks is indisputable when one considers the compositional figurative regimes that developed and consolidated ideas about white supremacy, studied by Donald Yacovone.94 These messages were part of what David Roediger calls, via the language of Du Bois, “the wages of whiteness.”95 As Elson notes, racial ideology was “latent in all the schoolbooks, in stories, descriptions, even arithmetic problems, and most important of all in the Geographies.”96 These texts also became part of what Alexander G. Weheliye notes was the “continual visual reinforcement” required to continue the project of racialization.97 In spatial design, compositional emphasis, and textual narratives, maps not only modeled the reifying racist hierarchy of savagery—consider how the African diaspora and civilization were defined by “rational, liberal, and moral Europeans (and their Northern American descendants)”—but also would cement it as a natural feature of the social terrain.98
What geography instructional texts in the nineteenth century objectively show is a blunt, consistent engagement year after year with ideologies of white superiority, so much so that one wonders how it was even possible to teach some geography textbooks in segregated schools for black and Native students.99 For example, the text of a popular 1901 geography teacher’s manual by Tarr and McMurry states in the section on the “Distribution of Races” that
the leaders are the whites who, having learned the use of ships in exploring distant lands, have spread with a rapidity never seen before. Also, being more advanced than the others, the white races have readily conquered the weaker people and taken their lands from them. They now dominate the world (see Fig. 60), the only division that has held out against them being the Mongolians, whose very numbers have in large measure served to protect them.100
This statement is repeated from 1901 through the 1917 version of the textbook, with only slight modification: it becomes emphasized with italics, and placed farther back within the textbook. The main shift was changing the line from “now dominate the world” to “rule almost the whole world.”101 It is a fixation on even a slightly diminished ability to claim racial power. That it is registered in these textbooks over the years indicates the precarity about the stability of assembly based on white racial dominance.
The review section concludes with a series of questions about racial types intended to reinforce the school lesson. The final question makes the main point of the exercise clear: “To what extent are the Caucasians leaders among the races? Give reasons.”102
However sophisticated our contemporary discussions about the history of cartography, however well understood they have become as a social formation, however clear it is to us now that the standard Mercator projection of the world is structured around a Euro-American centric view that distorts proportions, one thing is clear: these maps were promoted and used as objective tools. In the classroom, in society, and in scholarship, they were disseminated as essential information for the public. As Wynter put it in her analysis of US textbook history, the effect was “that of inducing the White students to believe that their ancestors had done everything worth doing in … the past, and at the same time, to induce the Black students to believe that their ancestors had done nothing worth doing.”103
It would have been common, as Jarvis R. Givens notes in his landmark study of black pedagogy, for the high-school social studies textbook formally adopted by the state of Louisiana by the 1930s, Henry Elson’s Modern Times and the Living Past, to open with the following frame: “Almost the entire book will be devoted to the doings of the Caucasian race,” or more specifically, “at least nine tenths of the book must be given to an account of the Indo-European branch of the race, as the Indo-Europeans have dominated the world for the past 2500 years.”104 (Not only are the peoples of the Caucasus not white, but a vast majority of the languages of the Caucasus are not Indo-European.105) The variation, transformation, and compositional decisions of these maps and geography teaching manuals in the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century, under the guise of teaching skills of “description” and observation, shaped cultural attitudes and racial beliefs about the world.
Teaching Negative Assembly
These maps are not surprising in their blunt figurative recapitulations of racial hierarchies, but in how they expose attempts to mask and overcome doubt. They instructed readers on where not to look. Atlases and geography textbooks circulating in the United States were filled with narratives of disavowal about the relevance of the Caucasus region as a geography for racial formation.
For example, in the Ralph Tarr and Frank McMurry textbook Geographies, Third Book: Europe and Other Continents with Review of North America (1901), one of the earliest to incorporate human geography, students were taught, “By far the largest and most civilized of the four divisions of mankind is the white or Caucasian race,” yet the text also included an offkey refrain, “Their original home is not known. Some believe it to have been in the plateau of central Asia, others in the northern part of Africa.”106
This line about not knowing the “original home” of the Caucasian race warrants scrutiny because it was repeated in these textbooks and home atlases for over seventeen years.107 For some, the foundational idea of the Caucasus at a time of white supremacist rule and ideology became what Toni Morrison might have called “a kind of Procrustean bed, an intellectual trap, because it’s such an attractive portrait that it encourages what ought to be eliminated.”108
