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(FinalCall.com) – Education and history are vital to the success of any nation or people. But history is more than just the unbiased collection of facts and events: Were the founding fathers of America patriots and the sons of liberty or terrorists and traitors to the British crown? Was the Constitution a magnificent expression of the rights of man and blueprint for representative government, or a deeply flawed document, given its enshrinement of slavery and labeling of Black slaves as three-fifths of a human being for the benefit of their masters? Was the development of the United States “manifest destiny” or a genocidal pogrom executed on the indigenous people who lived here?
History and the lessons of history depend of the point of view of the one writing the history and the impact of historical events on a particular person or group. Or as an old proverb goes, so long as the hunter writes the history, the lion will always be the loser.
Throughout America’s history, mis-education has been the order of the day for Black, non-White and even poor Whites in this country. Despite a history written in the blood of the darker peoples of the earth, the United States has declared herself the bastion of liberty and freedom and a shining city on a hill to be honored and emulated.
But the truth is from the murder of the so-called Indians, to the enslavement of Africans, to the deportation of Mexican Americans in the 1930s to Mexico and placing Japanese Americans in concentration camps in the United States during World War II, the darker people in the country have suffered untold abuses and still suffer.
The truth of that suffering, however, shocks the sensibilities and damages the psyche of those who wish to cling to outdated and false notions of the past. So the recent efforts in Texas to whitewash textbooks by painting more favorable pictures of America and the banning of ethnic studies classes designed to give Black, Latino and Asian students self knowledge in Arizona can’t erase the truth of the past–or the present.
American history, or White American history, has always been celebrated and lauded from Confederate heritage commemorations to recent disclosures that a University of Texas dormitory was named for a Ku Klux Klan leader, or news that a teacher in a public school outside Birmingham, Ala., had students study geometry by plotting the lines of gunshots for a theoretical assassination attempt on President Obama or two separate schools in Georgia where teachers allowed students dress in Ku Klux Klan type robes as part of their lessons.
This mis-education, which stunts the intellectual and spiritual growth of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and other non-Whites, injects the poison of White supremacy into White youngsters and makes it difficult to function in a world where the majority of people are not White.
Teaching children lies doesn’t help this country. While it may assuage the sick egos of Whites in power, it will not stem the downfall of this nation–a nation that itself is steadily growing more and more non-White itself.
