According to many Republicans, the history you learned in the @maddow A-block about all-white primaries, or the history many of y’all learned in episode 1 of Watchmen, should be illegal for teachers to teach in schools. All your kids should learn are historyesque bedtime stories.
History, to them, is not designed to inform you about the roots of this country. The purpose should be to placate white Americans’ belief in the purity of the country’s founding. There shall be no villains. Only heroes and “Tonto” and “happy” slaves.
Because they fear that if children know the full story of this country’s founding as a slave Republic, the decimation of the indigenous, “redemption” and lynching and Jim Crow, it might make them stop believing the bedtime stories. So why do they fear that, I wonder?
History is meant to inform, and to make improvement possible. Why are Republicans freaking out about the teaching of history from something other than the point of view of the European men who founded an experiment in freedom and liberty but only for themselves?
History is not an indictment of present people. It’s just history. But once you know it, it makes you responsible for dealing with its effects. Better I guess to imagine that the slaves were happy and singing in the fields, the “natives” welcomed the pilgrims with a corn lunch...
Chinese immigrants built the railroads but didn’t need to feel like they belonged and the whole West was never Mexico, so “remember the Alamo” wasn’t about a bunch of slavers fighting a country that had outlawed slavery. Just let folks feel good. Bedtime stories...
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