Inherited Narratives and Historical Silences

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a two-part column.

I grew up in France and realized at a young age that the only two things I was really good at in school were history and English. Naturally, I combined both interests and became obsessed with the United States. I listened to US music, watched US movies, and learned US history.

When Justine Truc arrived to attend graduate school in the United States, she quickly realized that the cultural shock went beyond learning about college football. Courtesy Justine Truc

Eventually, that fascination brought me to Auburn University in Alabama in 2017, where I spent a year studying African American history and writing my master’s thesis on Black Lives Matter. During that year, I realized that studying a country’s history and understanding its culture were two very different things. On my first day in Alabama, during a shuttle ride from the airport to campus, the driver (a white man) asked what I studied. When I mentioned my research topic, he paused before replying, “That’s not really something we talk about down here.” I wondered what this surprising response revealed about my new home. But it didn’t occur to me at the time that it might also reveal something about the country I had just left.

Like many French students, I grew up hearing that France was the country of the Rights of Man. The national motto—Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—was everywhere. France has long been reluctant to classify people according to racial, ethnic, or religious categories, a tendency reinforced by the 1978 Loi Informatique et Libertés, which severely restricts the collection of such data. It is much easier to believe a society has moved beyond racial divisions when those divisions are rarely measured and often framed as someone else’s problem. Many of us absorbed the comforting idea that our so-called color-blind republic was somehow insulated from the racial tensions that seemed so visible in the United States.

Living in the United States eventually forced me to confront a more uncomfortable possibility: perhaps France’s silence on these questions did not mean they had been solved. Perhaps racism was not an inherently American problem.

I grew up hearing that France was the country of the Rights of Man.

I revisited that lesson when I moved to South Carolina in 2021 to pursue a PhD in American history and started teaching American undergraduate students. I arrived once again convinced that years of studying the United States had prepared me to teach its history, but I was wrong.

While teaching a unit on Jim Crow and segregation in an introductory US history course, one student asked what the word “lynching” meant. I paused and asked if anyone could help answer the question, but the room stayed silent. I was stunned. My surprise was shaped by my own education. French schools did not shy away from difficult histories. In middle school, my history class watched archival footage from Nazi concentration camps, including graphic scenes of victims being buried in mass graves. There were no trigger warnings and no opportunities to leave the classroom.

Yet there were also major gaps in what we were taught. For example, I learned about lynching in the United States long before I learned much about France’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. I completed most of my schooling without learning that ports such as Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle had profited enormously from slavery. Perhaps it is always easier to identify the silences in someone else’s national narrative than in our own.

Teaching in South Carolina challenged more than my assumptions about what history that university students had already learned. It also forced me to rethink what I expected from the classroom itself. In France, relationships between students and professors are generally more formal with a clearer sense of hierarchy and a greater respect for boundaries. The distinction between tu and vous—informal and formal forms of “you”—reinforces that distance. My students in South Carolina, by contrast, emailed me at midnight hoping for a quick response, showed up to class in pajamas, and called me by my first name. At first, I wondered whether they were taking their education seriously. Eventually, I realized I was not observing a lack of respect or interest but simply a different culture.

Differences in classroom etiquette proved superficial compared with the cultural divides that emerged in regard to religion. One semester, I led discussion sections for a European history course that frequently touched on Christianity and the Bible. What should have been an easy assignment for this European became humbling. I learned that many of my students knew biblical figures and stories far better than I did. I often felt like I was cramming for an exam my students had already aced, reviewing names and stories before class and hoping I would not accidentally combine two prophets into one entirely new biblical character. Discussion frequently began with “At my church . . . ,” “I was raised Catholic so . . . ,” or even “I wasn’t raised religious, but . . . .”

Many of my students knew biblical figures and stories far better than I did.

I had never before experienced students introducing themselves through their religious backgrounds in an academic setting or who interpreted the Bible not as historical text but as part of their lived experience. My students were far more willing to discuss their religious beliefs than anyone I knew in France, a nation that likes to think of itself as a secular republic. The struggle between the state and the Catholic Church shaped public education and left many students, myself included, with the idea that religion belonged largely outside the classroom. Whether that secular ideal has ever been fully achieved is debatable. But I inherited that history without thinking much about it.

In the United States, I learned too that the influence of religion extended well beyond classroom discussions. It became apparent in what many of my students had (or had not) been taught in their K–12 education. A lesson on Darwin’s theory of evolution for a History of Science and Technology class produced an even bigger surprise. I asked how many students had learned about evolution in middle or high school, and only about half the room raised their hands. It turned out that their exposure to Darwin varied considerably depending on where they had gone to school. More than one student told me that they did not and would never believe in evolution.

I had never considered evolution controversial, and not teaching it sounded far more controversial to me. As a historian-teacher, I was not trying to change their minds. My goal was to teach the history of scientific ideas, not referee theological debates. Still, I found those conversations fascinating.

After a while, I stopped being surprised by what knowledge students came to my classroom with. I also stopped assuming that my own education had somehow been more complete or objective than theirs. As teachers, we often focus on what students should know. My years in South Carolina taught me that it can be just as important to focus on understanding where that knowledge comes from, and just as importantly, what has been left out. Teaching American history in the United States did not simply expose me to a different culture. It revealed the contours of my own. And the more time I spent in the classroom, the more I found myself wondering about something else: What exactly was a French historian doing teaching American history in the first place?