With my birthday coming up and a nationwide black history celebration in full swing, it’s probably no surprise that February is my favorite month.
Sure, there’s the abbreviated time span and less-than-pleasant temperature range, but I find it just as enjoyable to explore my people’s countless contributions to society as I do the tastes of my annual cake and ice cream feast.
History, like aging, is an unavoidable fact of life. Unfortunately, it can also become prone to exaggerations and falsehoods — which seem to be the goal of some conservative groups that are trying to revise, rewrite and, in some cases, outright remove certain aspects of the past from the lessons being taught in our public schools.
It’s a movement that seemed to be set afire when our first black president took the oath of office. Some of these proposed changes range from the politically correct (removing the “N-word” from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as if its proposed substitute, “slave,” is an improvement) to the downright hypocritical or openly hostile (such as GOP members reading the entire Constitution aloud in Congress last month, except for sections pertaining to slavery and the three-fifths compromise).
I guess it’s too much for some folks to admit that a country founded to enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” apart from royal rule didn’t start out offering that freedom to all its inhabitants.
As a student of history and the mother of present and future history students, I understand that there may be practical reasons for teachers to not delve deeply into every aspect of pertinent people and events, but that’s not an excuse to deliberately manipulate contents and omit unflattering information altogether.
It started again in earnest last spring, thanks to the Texas Board of Education’s efforts to euphemize and eliminate. Trying to rename the slave trade as the “Atlantic Triangular Trade?” Really? Trying to leave out the name of our nation’s 44th president, Barack Obama? Were they serious?
And how about erasing any mention of Latinos fighting to preserve the Alamo and of Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of separating church and state? Talk about a “whitewash.”
According to Matt Hinckley, a professor of history at Eastfield College, “Revisionism is an ongoing process by which trained professional historians apply new evidence to existing narratives. History is fixed — it does not change — but our knowledge of history is always changing based on what information we have.
“As historians uncover more information — letters, photographs, previously classified records, etc. — they evaluate existing knowledge in the face of that new information. Unfortunately, those with overtly political motives often selectively choose information to support their particular agendas. More troubling is that too many Americans listen to the amateurs instead of the trained professionals.”
I knew the practice was getting out of control when Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona actually signed into law a bill that prohibits ethnic studies from being taught in public schools — and when a group of Tennessee tea partiers stepped to their legislators with demands to change textbooks so that “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.”
Our children — whether they are black, white, red, yellow or any variant in between — must learn the totality of the events that have shaped them, no matter how ugly or uncomfortable those truths happen to be. If political dogma is taught in place of critical thought and discovery, how can they avoid repeating the same errors?
And for those who’ve been marginalized by society through no fault of their own, how much better can they become without having learned what they’ve overcome?
