Perpetuating the past: U.S. high school history textbooks and systemic racism

ABSTRACT

While decades of scholarship demonstrate that U.S. history textbooks have incrementally told a fuller story of U.S. history, our review of nine prominent high school history textbooks illustrates how these texts perpetuate systemic racism and uphold the socially constructed centering of whiteness. Those contemporary textbooks’ accounts of 13 unjust government actions directed against different minoritized groups reveal three narrative strategies that continue to displace systemic racism from the nation's narrative: omitting refuses to acknowledge the existence of unjust actions; minimizing reduces the pernicious effects of those actions; and severing disconnects those actions from governmental culpability. We conclude with recommendations for how textbook creators might work against the systemic racism that has permeated the collective memory of the U.S..

KEYWORDS:

• Social construction
• collective memory
• U.S high school history textbooks
• systemic racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James P. Kelly

James Pepper Kelly is a doctoral student in the Communication Studies Department at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

Roger C. Aden

Roger C. Aden (Ph.D., University of Nebraska, 1989) is Charles E. Zumkehr Professor in the School of Communication Studies, Ohio University. His research, which examines public memory, places, and the rhetorical functions of individual memory, typically integrates rhetorical and qualitative methods of inquiry.