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Winner: Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award, Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award
Honorable Mention: Bourdieu Best Book Award
Shortlisted: Barrington Moore Book Award, Philip Abrams Memorial Prize, MSA First Book Award
Finalist: C. Wright Mills Award
How are histories of racial oppression dealt with in contexts of diversity? Chana Teeger tackles this question by examining how young South Africans, born into democracy, confront their country’s racist apartheid past in high school history lessons. Drawing on extensive observational, interview, and textual data, Distancing the Past vividly chronicles how students learn that racism is a thing of the past, even as they experience it in their everyday lives.
Teeger shows how teachers’ desire to avoid conflict between students mirrors a national focus on racial reconciliation, leading to the historical distancing of the recent apartheid past. This historical distancing allows schools to present a façade of transformation. Beneath the surface, however, the lessons reproduce unequal power relations at school and legitimize inequality at the societal level. In documenting these processes, Distancing the Past illuminates the subtle reconfiguration of racism in the era of civil liberties. It shows how acknowledging the racist past is not enough. When the past is remembered—but its legacies ignored—racism can continue unabated in the present.
Distancing the Past is a timely account of the remaking of race and inequality in the aftermath of de jure discrimination. It offers vital lessons for other societies grappling with their own racist histories.
— Prudence L. Carter, author of Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. and South African Schools
Chana Teeger deftly shows that the past can be embraced or held at a distance, and there are complex reasons for both approaches. This book is a tour de force of ethnography and memory studies!
— Jeffrey K. Olick, author of The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility
Elegantly composed, concisely written, lively, and provocative, Chana Teeger’s theoretically ambitious Distancing the Past examines education, collective memory, racial repression, and their intersection in post-apartheid South Africa. Based on impressive empirical research in two schools, the book provides crucial lessons on “color-blind” teaching for many contexts, including the United States.
— Joachim J. Savelsberg, author of Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles
Revealing how students are taught a color-blind perspective on race in history class just one generation after the end of apartheid, Teeger shows how any recognition of systemic racism is buried as historical artifact and viewed as “grudges” against white South Africans, despite evidence in students’ own lives to the contrary. A must-read for anyone interested in the production of race frames in schools. Highly recommended!
— Natasha Warikoo, author of Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools
In this brilliant ethnography Chana Teeger analyzes how young South Africans learn about apartheid and the history of the struggle to overthrow it in their high school classrooms. Expertly researched, beautifully written, and filled with deep insights into the nature of race relations and the teaching of history, this book should be widely read everywhere difficult histories need to be reckoned with.
— Mary C. Waters, coauthor of Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age
An inviting reading that many – especially educators and young university students in South Africa and elsewhere – should engage with as an invitation to take a moment to reflect on how teaching makes history.
While engaging with scholarly conversations, Distancing the Past is a relatively quick and easy read, accessible to a general audience. This book shows that the work of teachers matters.
The book is beautifully written. The prose is deceptively simple and evocative; Teeger has produced a work of astounding clarity of both research design and analysis...Beyond its obvious suitability for the classroom in courses across sociology, history, and education, the book speaks, with ease, to broader publics.
An illuminating and empirically thorough analysis of how the way in which histories of past injustice are taught shapes students' perceptions of social and political issues today. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars of education and racial socialization but also to those studying transitional justice and memory politics, as well as those who more broadly study the ways in which politics shape education and vice versa.
This well-written book emphasizes that history is not just a list of events but the foundation of our present.
The book is invaluable—precisely on point in elucidating not only the historical, but also the sociological and psychological anatomy of history teaching.
Overall, this is wonderful research. By examining how classrooms function, Teeger presents an important corrective to the assumption that ideologies simply exist, something too often presumed in sociological work on the contemporary politics of race and inequality.
Written in engaging, accessible prose, Distancing the Past is also suitable for undergraduates. I can already testify that it will almost undoubtedly spark reflection on how students encountered their communities’ past atrocities in the course of their own history education.
Teeger’s book is a brilliant, provocative, and beautifully written, albeit hard-hitting, analysis of teaching about apartheid in South African history classrooms.
A unique contribution to the sociology of education, race, and collective memory. It reveals how efforts to “teach the past” are never neutral but rather deeply embedded in present-day power dynamics and emotional investments.
1. Remaking Race and Nation Through History Education
2. Juxtapositions
3. Equivalences
4. Simulations
5. Consequences
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Methodological Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index