In history, one constantly has to pay attention to who writes a source and what their interests are. This is not a value judgment. All sources have their limitations to some degree or another. This is why we engage in counter-reading. We are skeptical about anything that serves the author’s agenda but we readily embrace anything they say that harms their agenda. In my education classes, which are based around Critical Theory as opposed to critical reasoning, we are being taught something slightly different. We should not only look for the voices behind texts but also whose voices are being suppressed as if authors engage in oppression by the very act of writing. This sets up the concept of master and counter-narratives.
From the perspective of Critical Theory, it is the job of the teacher to promote counter-narratives to rescue students from the grip of the master narrative. Any teacher who tries to simply do what history teachers have traditionally been supposed to do, mainly teaching facts and how to critically analyze them is guilty of silencing minority voices. It should be understood that, from the perspective of Critical Theory, minority voices are not really literal minorities but the purveyors of Critical Theory themselves, who are supposed to serve as the voice for authentic minorities who have been silenced. By silencing what is meant is that others have failed to fully embrace the assumptions of Critical Theory. In essence, Critical Theory is an attempt by those in power to justify their privilege and suppress anyone who disagrees with them by pretending that their opponents are the master oppressors while they are really the victims attempting to advance their counter-narrative.
The true power of a master narrative can be seen in its willingness to unabashedly claim the moral high ground of a counter-narrative for itself with every expectation that you can intimidate your opponents into acquiescence. The true master claims to be a victim. If you can claim to be a victim then you implicitly earn the moral right to do all the sorts of terrible things to others that only masters are able to get away with. Real victims know that they do not have power and that it is useless to even speak up and claim to be a victim because the real oppressors will simply use it as an excuse to abuse them further. Morally sane individuals recognize that they are a mixture of oppressor and victim along a spectrum as are their opponents. They try to morally improve themselves in a variety of ways including trying to see things from their opponent's perspective.
If you wish to understand the logic of a real master narrative, consider the example of the novel and film Gone With the Wind. On the surface, Gone With the Wind’s narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction is an obvious master narrative. The heroes are literal slave owners and the book is a defense of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. All of this is true but it misses the fact that the true diabolical genius of the book is its ability to sell itself precisely as a counter-narrative.
According to the Gone With the Wind narrative, which I find abhorrent and should not be the premise for any history class, once upon there lived a class of white Southern planters. They were a noble group with an interest in the finer things of life like manners and art as opposed to money. These planters were of such an elevated nature that they were capable of "ennobling" even the blacks who worked for them as slaves as this made the blacks part of the South's "uplifting" culture. The planters looked after their slaves as if they were "their own children." Then came the Northern Capitalist industrialists who cared nothing about culture but only for money. The Northerners built a mighty war machine and crushed the peaceful South. In order to justify their pillaging of the South, the Northerners claimed that they had come to liberate the slaves from the oppression of their masters. Many of the blacks believed these lies and turned against their "kind" masters who had treated them so well. In truth, these blacks were not being liberated. On the contrary, they were being enslaved to the relentless power of Capitalism.
The need to preserve a sense of aristocracy as something above money is critical for understanding the role of the Terra plantation in the novel. Scarlett O'Hara struggles to hold on to Terra in the face of Northern tax collectors even though it does not make economic sense. The fact that Terra is not that valuable is precisely the point. As long as Scarlett can hold on to Terra, she is still an aristocrat, someone who can love a piece of land as something that will continue to exist after she is dead, regardless of the dollars and cents involved. Similarly, Ashley Wilkes is tempted by an offer to get a job in New York. Ashley is a smart guy and would certainly do well for himself. The problem is that going to New York would mean that he is no longer an aristocrat but instead just another guy trying to earn a buck with no sense of the larger sweep of history.
The "poor oppressed" Southerners, "robbed" of their "rightful" place of wealth and influence struggle to bring justice back to the land and join the Klan. In the novel, Scarlett is warned that she should not ride around by herself conducting her business because they are likely to be attacked by one of the free blacks that the Northern occupiers have allowed to run wild. If this happens the Klan, which all the "good" white men of the town have joined, would be honor-bound to retaliate. Scarlett gets attacked and the Klan is "forced" to go after the camp of free blacks. They run into an ambush and Scarlett's second husband gets killed. This leads Scarlett to agree to marry Rhett Butler as Ashley still insists on being faithful to his wife Melanie.
At one point, Scarlett is forced to confront the "master" narrative head-on in the form of Northerners whose ideas of the South come straight from Uncle Tom's Cabin. Scarlett responds that the novel is full of lies and that they never abused their slaves. She should be believed as she has actual "lived experience" with slaves, unlike the Northerners who have only read about the South in books designed to convince them to hate Southerners. The stakes are high. Either Southerners really did treat their slaves well or at least justly or it was right for General Sherman to pillage his way across Georgia, freeing the slaves and repaying their owners for their crimes.
It is hardly obvious how Critical Theorists can dismiss the Gone With the Wind narrative out of hand as a master narrative. The narrative is not really that different from the standard Critical Theory narrative. All you have to do is change the labels. Southern plantation owners can be revolutionary intellectuals and the black slaves can be workers who need to achieve critical consciousness. This is accomplished by the workers joining the intellectuals in a farming commune to labor for the "common good." In both cases, the enemy is Capitalism, the notion that people should be empowered simply because of their ability to make money as opposed to elevating those who can transcend such petty interests.
To say that Southern planters were rich and therefore must represent the master narrative fails to hold up. Loads of horrible things happen to Scarlett and she spends much of the middle part of the book trying to keep everyone around her, including her former slaves, fed and with a roof over their heads. Much of Scarlett’s power as a character is derived from her ability to do this while not losing sight of the higher things in life as embodied in Terra. This is critical because it allows us to forgive Scarlett for the pretty terrible things she does to succeed like stealing her sister's fiance (the one who gets killed riding for the Klan) and using convict labor provided by the Northern occupation. In truth, Scarlett being rich should not exclude her from being a counter-narrative. If you can watch Oprah Winfrey interview Meghan Merkle, two of the most privileged beings who have ever lived, without it being obvious that they are perpetuating a master narrative then you should have no problem seeing Gone With the Wind as a counter-narrative.
From the perspective of Critical Theory, the real crime of the Gone With the Wind narrative is not that it oppressed blacks but that it empowered the "wrong" sort of people. How dare Southern planters claim to be victims and use that argument to justify holding on to power. The people who should be in charge are leftist intellectuals who have educated themselves about the nature of oppression through the lens of Critical Theory. They are therefore the sort of morally superior individuals who are well-suited to decide who is a victim and who is an oppressor. This is such an obvious fact that if you disagree it can only be because you are an oppressor.
A proper history education should liberate students by giving them weapons to intellectually challenge those authority figures who seek to rule over them. It is important to expose students to brilliant and evil books like Gone With the Wind so that they can learn to see a master narrative at work. What makes Gone With the Wind a true master narrative is precisely its ability to pretend to be a counter-narrative. The heroes are "victims" who are not in the positions of power that they are naturally entitled to. This gives them the right to strike back at the "oppressors" who wrongfully hold a position better than what they deserve. If my students wish to recognize who is ruling over them, the first thing they should look for is who claims that their status of victimhood is an unchallengeable fact and that anyone who voices any skepticism is automatically a master oppressor.
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