A Very Brief Vindication of the American Child, Dolls, and Critical Race Theory
How can we secure our children's future if we are too afraid to teach our past?
I was two years old in 1998, when Pleasant Rowland, educator and entrepreneur, sold her company for $700 million to Mattel.
Years prior, Rowland had set out to create a doll suitable for her nieces and ended with a dearly beloved empire of high-quality dolls. It was -and is to this day- a cultural and capitalistic success. The American Girl company produced just this - dolls that were Americans with deeply researched historical backgrounds representing different eras in American history. Rowland made a bet that young girls (and children in general) were smart enough to grasp the ideas of historical cause and effect in the backstories. With each new doll and attendant, period-appropriate accessories, American Girl was banking on the imagination and empathy of children, twin resources that connected them with characters vastly different from themselves.
The Smithsonian Magazine, in a profile on the long-standing impact the dolls’ stories had on American children who played with them, mentioned how it was the universality of childhood that connected the past to the present. The dolls and their stories stood out in the toy market, set apart from the more infantile Cabbage Patch Kids and the seemingly contextless, older Barbie. The deeply emotional and factual connections the American Girl doll offered were accepted and consumed with a kind of rabid loyalty. The popularity and profitability of this near magic formula inspired multiple live theatrical offerings, tours, movies, and multi-story flagship stores across the country. To this day, when I talk to full-grown adults about their old historical dolls, I hear how the narratives that accompanied them fundamentally and positively changed how they viewed their participation in America. American Girl made a profit selling dolls, but they stole hearts selling diverse versions of the American Dream.
In June 2021, the Florida School Board also made a bet about children. So did our state Governor. It seems that neither party believes that children have the empathetic and intellectual capacity to understand contextual facts about American History. They decided to amend 6A-1.094124, on Required Instruction Planning and Reporting. You can read it for yourself here. In plain language, it’s about making sure that children cannot be taught history with materials that encourage students to understand the role race played in the formation of the United States. Specifically no instruction of the educational bogeyman - Critical Race Theory- is allowed in Florida public school classrooms.
To many Floridians, the words “Critical Race Theory” sound scary or confusing. I know people who assume it must be some kind of Marxist Trojan Horse or some other imported philosophy set to degrade the minds of the innocent. To others, it sounds too complex to bring before children. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines it here, but my imperfect description of it is that it’s simply a framework for understanding American history, the American legal system, and the formation of many of our institutions regarding the ways socially constructed ideas of race impacted them.
This is similar to how historians use Feminist legal frameworks to understand how historical ideas of gender impacted society and government. It attempts to examine the way race as an idea was wielded in history and how that affects our present day.
Some theorists in academia have ideas for how to overhaul the injustices perpetrated and protected by those ideas. There are a lot of different perspectives and debates, but they all swirl around the same, undeniable facts of history. To study the facts of American History is to study the indisputable ways race was constructed and the violent, brutal ways that construction was enforced for the economic, legal, and social supremacy of certain Americans. To study American history is to know about the Americans who challenged those constructions and the people who defended them. Racist causes have racist effects. This was true yesterday and remains true today. There are people much smarter than me who know how to present these facts to children. Facts that don’t make much sense if the context is removed or watered down. Facts that are key to helping future citizens understand their present and chart a course for a more just and equitable future.
I saved this quote from a newspaper of the Governor’s remarks to the members of the school board before the vote. “Some of this stuff is, I think, really toxic,” DeSantis told the school board. “I think it’s going to cause a lot of divisions. I think it’ll cause people to think of themselves more as a member of a particular race based on skin color, rather than based on the content of their character and based on their hard work and what they’re trying to accomplish in life.”
I wonder if the Governor is aware that historically many Americans did not get a chance to freely build a life based solely on their character or hard work. I wonder if he knows that a lot of history is the story of how people’s skin color, class, gender, and physical body mattered. I wonder if he thinks we can still properly teach our past if we imagine those realities away. I wonder if our Governor believes what Henry Kissinger said, that history is the memory of states. Unfortunately, this kind of memory flattens and justifies everything and anything in some inevitable march to glory. It suggests a destiny that our hard work and character cannot change.
I wonder what we stand to lose when we forget (as Howard Zinn aptly counters) that history should be the memory of people. Differences in geography, age, class, gender, race, and education, were critical components that explained and shaped the particular American experience of the very people who made up the state. America was and is a rich, complicated home to all sorts of people. As a child, I was entirely capable of understanding that American history was about American ideas. It was about how people saw each other at different points in time, and about what people believed they owed each other. What is undeniably apparent is that the answer to that latter question often depended on who you were or what you were perceived to be. Humans understood as “women '' experienced a very different America than humans understood as “men”. Whether you could be another man’s property or not could depend on whether you fell into a social category of “Black” or “White”. If you were Native, a child, a man, a woman, a widow, an orphan, or an enslaved woman, you experienced America in a particular way.
At the end of the day, society is essentially the aggregate of people living together in some kind of ordered community. Government is about how that community is ordered and who is owed what by each other. History is at best the study of the past chronological events, customs, and people who made up that community. The Governor has spoken about privileging fact over narrative. But refusing to allow teachers to explain how historical narratives held by historic figures justified and created what followed is not privileging fact, but instead some kind of fantastical American past.
I am far out of the age group for Florida’s education system. I couldn’t tell you what a typical history class in one of our public schools looks like. I’ve never been in one. In my homeschool world, the early history books were concerned with the mythology of my country’s virgin birth, with complexity and conflict scrubbed out. The history lessons I eventually did take were touted as Socratic and experimental. They were the kind of boutique classes parents demand for their carefully educated children shipped off to feeder schools up North.
I’d be the first to say that that curricula would be outrageously difficult to flippantly foist on the underpaid, overworked, underappreciated Floridian public school teacher valiantly teaching 30 fifth graders. I am not an educator, and I only know that the public school educators in my life are some of the hardest working and kindest people I have ever had the privilege of meeting. I don’t know the first thing about crafting a better curriculum. I however would like my Governor to look to the private sector for a moment here (as his party encourages us to do). I want to talk to him about dolls.
A visiting family friend once found us children laboriously making our way up the hill and across the backyard basketball court. We were dragging colorful beach towels loaded up with dolls. Every few feet we would stop and set up camp. This was not a one-off diversion she witnessed, but part of an elaborate ritual for a very popular game of our making, OREGON TRAIL. Necessary to this game was a basic working understanding of the trials of the people in the 1800s making this journey. The uneducated were quickly debriefed and handed a doll.
While OREGON TRAIL was the most popular game, there were several other standout moments we liked to role play with great gusto. TITANIC SINKING explored the dramas inherent in class differences, extremes only. We could be the wealthiest of heiresses enjoying a dinner party on deck before plunging into despair, shocked as our wealth failed to protect us from the arrogance of engineers and nature’s elements. Or we could be at the bottom of the ship, the poorest members of society yet again expected to pay the difference and bear the brunt of oppressive class structures. AMERICAN HOMESTEAD, where we were mid-1800s Swedish immigrants, had us thinking about the struggles of a new land, starting over and encounters with Native Americans. FACTORY SURVIVORS/RICH VICTORIANS was another scenario of class and social strife, where we used our upper-class Victorian dolls and their poorer friends to imagine the different conditions for children consigned to be exploited in factories or pampered in wooden cabins on holiday. UNDERGROUND RAILROAD was a darker game that we eventually had to stop playing because it made our cousin cry every single time. We used the enslaved dolls and would flee from slavery, running over and over again the moment of escape and the days of hiding afterward. Real American dreams and nightmares centuries older than ourselves stitched these dramatizations together. In our childlike minds, lots of conflicting things could be true at once.
As the years rolled on, American Girl Doll kept publishing books and historical dolls, churning out new opportunities to expand our imaginations and take our parents' money. We kept playing, our games growing more complicated and nuanced, our understanding deepening with our age. Older versions of ourselves played out the lives of 1970s immigrant Vietnamese girls and their encounters with feminism. We were White girls who started newspapers and felt the economic defeat of the Great Depression. We were enslaved girls who learned how to read and witnessed Reconstruction. We hosted English refugees amid WW2 blackouts. We watched California become a state, protested for white women to get the vote, and learned how to construct a teepee. This doll company imperfectly managed to get me and several of my friends to empathize with over 20 different kinds of historical Americans. In reality, we were an assortment of lily-white Southern girls, Trinidadian German mixed kids, and Caribbean cousins. These games had all of us consider the effect that social identity had on any given life at any given time. It mattered that Josephina spoke Spanish and was brown. It mattered that Addie was Black and enslaved. The difference between best friends Samantha and Nellie? Wealth and access to capital! The difference between Kirsten and Felicity? Generational land ownership and immigration laws!
The historians enlisted by American Girl Doll came up with an effective teaching tool to show us that these fictional citizens were human beings navigating an ever-changing and developing country, just like us. That they were born into a society that had specific ideas about what was owed to whom and why just like us. Each narrative charted the growth of and challenges faced by girls in their time. The central message was that society’s story about who you can be and what you can do can be challenged. Book after book showed what various girls were told what they could be because of who they were. And in each story, those girls articulated those limiting narratives and then changed them.
This move to connect present-day children with the historical ways people lived in the past doesn’t make kids hate their country or their skin color. It doesn’t encourage them, as our Governor worries, that your future and identity lie in your skin color as opposed to the content of your character. It doesn’t cause divides to point out the way minor physical or biological variations were historically weaponized to excuse American policy or traditions. It merely exposes those divides and gives us a way out of them.
I want to believe that Governor DeSantis is truly concerned with stopping the division of children. But he’s supported a policy change that actively robs American children of the opportunity to learn and empathize across time, space, skin color, class, and gender with other Americans. This vote only serves to entrench the disaffection that comes when nothing about the past can explain the struggles we face today.
Age-appropriate history that understands the centrality and necessity of context is not only possible, it’s necessary. Our Governor and many others verbally support the concept of personal agency. How are we supposed to personally understand, address, and change the inequalities and racism in our neighborhoods and states if we ignore or deny our past? How can we each take responsibility for our response to our American inheritance? And how can we have the courage to change if the historical examples of courage are distorted or hidden away?
I would like us to bet on the American child. That they are braver and smarter than our school board thinks. That their empathy and imagination can be exercised to prepare them for their inheritance. I want them to know that they too are active participants in a society of their making. I want them to see examples of this in class.
For all the political, religious, and social differences we Floridians have, I think most of us want our children to live out their dreams unfettered and in safety. We want their character and hard work to be rewarded, and not whittled down by any form of injustice or violence. We can vote, support, and ask for comprehensive, age appropriate history lessons that caution and encourage our children. We can empower these future citizens to critically assess the past and plot their future. We can name the restrictive and crippling rules we place on our history and hold them to account. We can get involved with the local school board and ask our teachers how we can best support them. We can educate ourselves to bear a proper witness to the incredible courage, sacrifice, loss, and humanity of those who came before us.
Maya Angelou once said that “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
And as Samantha Parkington, my first ever American Girl doll said, “It is time to change the old rules. And that’s what makes it a wonderful time to be growing up.”