‘Ignorance of the Past Will Not Save Us From Its Price’: a Duke Scholar on Teaching the History of White Supremacy

For a quarter century, Tim Tyson has taught students at Duke University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison about America’s troubled history of white supremacy, and the unfolding — and unfinished — story that continues today.

In 2017 Tyson published The Blood of Emmett Till, a historical account of Till’s 1955 lynching in Mississippi. There are lessons — how Mamie Till-Mobley harnessed the power of black Chicago and turned it into a megaphone for antiracism, how the presence of unions and Chicago’s political machine spurred a nationwide civil-rights movement — from which he hopes the next generation of students can learn.

He paid particular attention, then, when last month a photo emerged of gun-toting University of Mississippi fraternity brothers smiling next to a bullet-riddled memorial to Till. The senior research scholar at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies was disgusted and disappointed, but he wasn’t surprised. In 2015 a Duke student hung a noose on the campus. For decades the gravestones of civil-rights leaders have been vandalized. And Till’s memorial, which will be replaced by a bullet-proof version this fall, has been a repeated target of gun violence. “I’ve seen things like this a lot,” Tyson said.

In order to understand America’s current situation, with mass shootings carried out in the name of white nationalism and a president prone to racist outbursts, Tyson said it’s imperative that citizens confront the lingering presence of white supremacy, not sweep the struggle under the rug.

The Chronicle spoke with Tyson about Till, harnessing political power, and how teaching this fraught history can help the nation understand, and alter, the present.

What was your reaction to seeing the Ole Miss photo?

Well, this is not even original. So I can’t say I was surprised, though I was deeply disappointed.

There’s been a preposterous lie that somehow college campuses are rife with this oppressive political correctness. And that some kind of homogenous, mandatory, self-congratulatory enlightenment has been imposed on the student body. But stuff like this happens all the time. Some fraternity somewhere has a slave auction, some fraternity somewhere has a black-face comedy show. At Duke we have had fraternity boys yelling out the window at black women passing by, spewing all kinds of racist contempt.

This is sort of the most rank — to pose with weapons beside a marker to a 14-year-old boy who was butchered in the name of white supremacy and to think that’s really daring and funny. It seems like a depth of cruelty and indifference that I have not quite seen before.

Where does that lack of empathy come from?

People like these fraternity boys at Ole Miss having a good time, being contemptuous and hateful — they’ve absorbed those values. They’re not the first students I’ve seen do things like this, though it’s about the nastiest expression of it I can remember. They feel they’re being iconoclasts, and they feel like they’re being daring and breaking social conventions, and they think that’s very funny.

But really, they’re being conformist, at least within the larger society. They’re expressing that kind of white-supremacist contempt for human beings. They don’t have to necessarily come to grips with the depths to which they’ve sunk. This is all my speculation based on watching college students for 25 years — and particularly white male fraternity guys, who seem to have a kind of herd mentality and groupthink that encourages them to do things that are nastier than what they might do on their own.

I’ve been pondering this history and its echoes for most of my life — I’m 60 — and I’m still learning and growing, and it’s given me a life richer than I ever could have imagined 40 years ago, when I was the age of those boys who desecrated Emmett Till’s memory, harming themselves, no doubt, more than anybody else. The price of ruthless indifference is to live in a much smaller and greatly impoverished inner life. We are not punished for our sins but by them, as my father used to say.

What have you learned in those years of teaching and studying this history of white supremacy?

You know, I used to teach an introduction to Afro-American history every semester to 200 or so undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin. One thing that was standard issue among a huge swath of the students was they could not believe they had not learned any of this in high school. Just jaw-dropping astonishment at the facts of the matter, at our actual history. I also noticed a kind of cycle: There’s this astonishment and confusion, and then there’s guilt. White students feel guilty, as if this somehow could possibly be their fault. But guilt very quickly sours into resentment.

I remember once I was teaching “Introduction to Afro-American History.” I’m teaching about the Atlantic slave trade, which is a horror movie. It’s a hard, hard story. And I’m watching this guy. He’s wearing the fraternity-boy uniform, baseball cap on backwards. I can see his face is kind of contorting. I think I detected some kind of horror he had about our history. But then this other thing happens. He starts to get agitated. I’m watching his face a little bit and wondering what’s going to happen. His hand shoots up — it’s not really a time when I was asking for questions — and what he says is, “Yeah, but affirmative action!”

He had gone through the whole cycle of horror, guilt, resentment, and then anger, really, wanting to say we’re not going to do anything about this. That was quicker than usual.

How do you get through to students within that cycle?

History. Clarity. Candor. Kindness. Humor. No finger-pointing or self-righteousness. Historical examples of how generations of Americans have addressed these evils and challenges, sometimes with great success, especially if they can build an interracial coalition strong enough to force structural change. We used to take students on a bus from Madison all the way down to the Deep South and meet a lot of movement veterans and see the places where things happened. When they’re right on that place, or when they hold the original document in their hand, there’s something about the way history becomes not just another narrative. There’s a deeper sense of reality. I think that’s a very effective teaching tool.

I make it clear that I am just a recovering white supremacist myself, like virtually all of us, black or white or any shade. When you step out of the posture of denial and moral self-defense, step beyond the racial clichés and ponder what kind of society you want your children and grandchildren to grow up in, you can find all manner of interesting and helpful stuff in your own head. Few, if any, of us are beyond hope.

How has the system of white supremacy evolved since Till’s death?

There’s still this indifference to the fate of poor black children in this country. People have learned a lot. I’m not trying to say nothing has changed. But in terms of changing things in an effective and material way that can actually alter the course of these young people’s lives, there’s been a lack of political will. White supremacy is a political project that America is and shall remain a white man’s country. And that political project marches on.

Conservative white students fortify themselves against thinking clearly about America’s racial predicaments by essentially saying, “It’s not my fault and hence not my concern,” even if you make it clear that you don’t think it is their fault; white liberal students prove their own blamelessness by assuring themselves and others that they are on the side of the angels, pure of heart, not “racist.” No one cops to their own ingrained white supremacy, even though white supremacy is the water and we are the fish, and it’s unlikely that we are not at least a little bit wet.

Everyone is engaged in what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the politics of self-exoneration. Meanwhile, we lack the political will to do anything except to feel resentful or virtuous. And it seems to me that when the children are in the canoe, drifting toward the falls, it is not so useful to argue who left the boat untied rather than talk about how to address this peril. And while poor children and children of color are at special risk, the truth is that we are all in that canoe. History shows that no one’s innocence can exempt them from the consequences. Ignorance of the past will not save us from its price.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Will Jarvis is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @willyfrederick, or email him at will.jarvis@chronicle.com.