“No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”
History textbooks in US public schools have always been kind of a shit show. They like to frame slavery as a purely “economic institution” or necessity, which completely eliminates the human aspect of it–it keeps you from empathizing with what they went through since we definitely read no slave narratives. The complete genocide of American Indians is discussed only in terms of the greatness of manifest destiny, and if they talk about any cruelty, they only frame it as their cruelty to white people (as totally unprovoked) and between rival groups (to demonstrate their primitiveness). But never do those textbooks discuss how europeans came over and massacred them between their germs and guns, how they dug up their graves in their search for treasures, and how they completely drained them of any resources.
This newest push by a couple of states to literally rewrite history is putrid. No longer are they stretching the truth, they’re just outright lying–to the detriment of everyone. Racism is so deeply ingrained in the United States, it is practically impossible to separate it from the annals of our history as a country. We continue to take steps backwards. Much of the international community already has a skewed perception of the US, thinking that everything must be great because we’re such a wealthy nation, and we have Barack Obama (which is a thought process that many Americans put forth as well). But with his election came the re-emergence of virulent, hostile, open racism. People just got ugly.
This is an incredible movement to redefine and strengthen the idea of “American” as synonymous with WHITE American. People of color have little representation in the education system as it is. Completely eliminating our presence in American history is tantamount to saying we’re not Americans at all. And many people feel that way already–that there are different “Americas” for different people.
Anyway…just read the article. It’s actually kind of old.
like black butterflies 