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To: H-OIEAHC@H-NET.MSU.EDU -- A more general comment to those on the list who still don't believe it's problematic to use words like "nigger" and "white trash" in lecture -- To the extent that you think it necessary for you to use such terms to enable your students to understand how planters thought about blacks or poor whites, it is because (at least subconsciously) you know that these derogatory terms continue to have the power to hurt people. Or to put it in slightly different terms, the power of such a performance (lecturer speaking in the voice of gentleman planter) comes from an exploitation of the continuities between past and presence. Which, of course, tends to undercut the idea that the past is so alien that students have to be grabbed by the throat to be dragged into it to understand what was going on. Again, I wouldn't edit primary sources to remove language that would be considered objectionable today -- I'm perfectly willing to let the past speak for the past. And I think we can talk about the past as past -- so these texts and their language should be discussed and analyzed and quoted from. But I think that is fundamentally different from re-enacting the past (or, more accurately, a highly selective offensive part of the past) in the classroom. In the hundreds of undergraduate lectures I've attended, I can remember a grand total of one that involved the professor assuming the persona of a generic historical character. Professors typically aren't actors and this isn't how we routinely lecture. So I think there's something suspect about donning the mask just to say things that we know we couldn't/shouldn't say in our own voice. And, thus far, nothing that's been said here leads me to believe that the past is being reproduced in its own terms in such performances. What I hear is that the past is being reproduced in gentleman planters' own terms. Honestly, this technique strikes me as cheap sensationalism at best and I don't see how it contributes to historical understanding. In fact, I think it's likely to backfire. The lesson most undergraduates will draw from such a performance -- those planters were very retrograde/racist/elitist -- doesn't really represent a great leap forward in their historical understanding, much less one that couldn't be achieved in other more responsible ways. And I wonder the extent to which their familiarity with those terms and their assessment of the kinds of people who use them today will cloud undergraduates' vision of what followed from those attitudes then. (I suspect they hear hatefulness and a sense of license -- rather than contempt/dismissal and no sense of transgression in those terms' use). A slave narrative and a slaveowners' diary (or a code of law or advice literature on slave management) provides a much richer picture of elite white racial attitudes than a professor assuming anothers' voice and referring to 19th c. blacks as "niggers" ever will. Sue Hemberger
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