No hiding from our misdeeds of the past

We Americans have willfully ignored or tried to forget the travesty of our capture and enslavement of African peoples beginning in 1619. We have also omitted from our history any mention of the genocide we carried out against tribes of Native Americans who had long inhabited this land before we arrived. Earlier, though, in 1519, prior to any of the above transgressions, other European arrivistes ruthlessly perpetrated another wrong involving a different indigenous group. In that year, the ships of Spaniard Hernán de Cortez arrived on the east coast of Mexico.

The Aztec inhabitants mistakenly believed Cortez was the god Quetzalcoatl, the return of whom had been prophesied by their religion. The result of that erroneous belief was the subjugation and enslavement of the people of the Aztec Empire for hundreds of years. Now, in the 21st Century, some effort is being made to shield schoolchildren from the plain truth that these crimes against humanity were almost exclusively committed by light-skinned people who came to North America

from Europe. The reason? The tendency of many arrogant humans to dismiss persons not like themselves as somehow lesser than them as well as pure greed. Many North Americans think we should hide the more sordid elements of our past lest we make our young people “uncomfortable.” Balderdash! Young folks must be told of our transgressions, and that telling should make them uncomfortable, lest they further besmirch our history by repeating such vile acts in the future.

— Michael Herman, Chico