What we teach children is also an easy way in which we can (re)write history. For instance, if children are not taught about the evil that slavery was, and the beyond-imagination hellish lives that the enslaved lived, then it is only a matter of a couple of generations before when that dark history is pretty much forgotten. By whitewashing away the horrors, we essentially brainwashed people!
We laughed when President Orange Fascist did not know anything about Frederick Douglass. But, I am willing to bet that even many good-hearted Americans did not know Frederick Douglass, nor do they know even now how he is different from Stephen Douglas. To a large extent, this is always the case--most of us carry on with our lives without knowing much, and usually it is not a problem. But, when "leaders" begin to spin alternative facts as history, we would not know fact from fiction unless we knew any better.
It is not any surprise that our collective ignorance has been revealed. Turned out that the brainwashing in schools had worked out perfectly.
As the country grapples with a racial reckoning following the killing of George Floyd in police custody, educators said that what has and what has not been taught in school have been part of erasing the history of systemic racism in America and the contributions of Black people and other minority groups.It is even worse in the old country where we were taught the British history of India. Here's a classic example: In school we were not taught about the First War of Independence, but about the "Sepoy mutiny," as the bastards referred to them! Despite the fact that I was schooled in an independent Republic of India!!! Whatever I know now was possible only because, as Mark Twain put it, I didn't let schooling get in the way of my education!
Here in my adopted country, the history in schools is pretty much a white supremacist take on the past:
“The curriculum was never designed to be anything other than white supremacist," Julian Hayter, a historian and an associate professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said, "and it has been very difficult to convince people that other versions of history are not only worth telling. They’re absolutely essential for us as a country to move closer to something that might reflect reconciliation but even more importantly, the truth."
LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, said the history curriculums in schools are meant to tell a story and, in the U.S., that has been one of a “progressive history of the country.”
“Really the overarching theme is, ‘Yes, we made mistakes, but we overcame because we are the United States of America,'” said King
The Disneyfication of history!
The New York Times offered an awesome corrective and an education through its 1619 Project. But, of course, tRump and his toadies believe that the NY Times is fake news and is a propaganda publication, which means that they perhaps never bothered to read even a word in that fantastic report. Is it any surprise that they continue to defend "their" history and heritage!
If you want a recommendation, well, Jill Lepore's These Truths is a wonderful place to start learning about American history. You need to know the correct history in your preparation to fight:
If Lepore is right and the nation is indeed the fight, liberals must understand what a fight involves. That is, you can’t fight performatively when the other side is fighting to win: that kind of fight simply won’t go on for very long. You have no option but to fight to win, too. You want to win because you are right and they are wrong; because you have a moral right to power and they don’t; because you are real Americans and they’re not.Fight on!
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