Racism is part of American history. We shouldn’t be afraid to confront it.
Americans recently celebrated Independence Day and the birth of our nation. A few months before that, we observed Memorial Day. Today, many Americans gather to watch the Olympics, rooting for our nation’s athletes.
Though none of us was alive during the Revolutionary War, many of us never personally fought in an American war and only a rare few are Olympians, we observe these holidays and events to recognize our nation’s collective sacrifices, achievements and ideals.
Indeed, these national observances are intended to renew our unity and fortify our resolve to pursue our nation’s first principles.
President Abraham Lincoln expressed this national purpose in his Gettysburg Address during the Civil War: “to be dedicated … to the unfinished work;” to be “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
But today, while we enthusiastically enjoy America’s power, wealth and status accumulated through history, many of us deny any collective responsibility for the exploitative, unjust and immoral means by which some of it was attained. So while many may feel patriotic standing during the national anthem, they deny the patriotism of those kneeling to protest national injustice.
And while we see no trouble in teaching our children, for instance, that America helped our allies defeat Hitler’s Nazi Germany or win the Cold War, many now oppose teaching students about America’s long history of racism. This selective form of collective memory has created a heroic, national narrative, but one short on reality.
If we identify ourselves as Americans, then we are part of
both its historic accomplishments and atrocities, victories and losses, ideals and shortcomings. And it also means we remain obligated to further its “unfinished work.”
Yet several Connecticut communities wish to censor the education of our children and whitewash our national identity. They object to the use of words like “diversity, equity and inclusion” in the classroom or teaching “ethnic studies,” claiming they amount to student “indoctrination.”
Some of the same people who decry “cancel culture” advocate canceling free speech.
I must say, as a former Connecticut public school teacher for 30 years, I always believed education was about teaching students to expand, not limit, their
minds and to think for themselves rather than according to their parents or communities.
Ironically, censoring these words from the classroom and prohibiting, for instance, teaching critical race theory (which posits that racism has become systemic in our institutions), only further indoctrinate children into the jingoistic myths and denials that have perpetuated racism in America for centuries. And as philosopher George Santayana wisely warned: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
And, unfortunately, we have repeated it, for the past 400 years and counting. What began with colonial enslavement of Africans led, like links in a causal chain, to legal slave states in the newly
founded United States, which spurred the rise of the Confederacy and the Civil War.
This was followed by the political sabotage of Reconstruction, the institution of Jim Crow laws, the violent opposition to the civil rights movement and, not coincidentally, to today’s voter restriction laws to combat widespread fraud that has been alleged.
Further, the more recent waves of discrimination against Muslim, Asians and Latinos suggest we have never collectively accepted the racial, cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of America. We have never accepted that the so-called “other” is actually “us.”
Indeed, here in Connecticut, we have read headlines about students in Storrs, Wilton, Fairfield and Canton, to name a few communities, expressing racist attitudes in public or online.
Yet they and their parents all assure us that they are not really racists at all. Indeed, those who object to teaching students about racism seem to have no explanation for its ongoing presence.
How do we explain to ourselves the torch-bearing white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protect Confederate statues? This was an attempt not to preserve history but to deny it: namely, the Union victory and everything it represents.
Only at our own peril can we ignore echoes of history when former President Donald Trump, on Independence Day 2020, denounced Black Lives Matters protests as “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”
Evidently, he and many others consider the white supremacy of the Confederacy to represent “our history” and “our values,” and he considers Confederate insurrectionists, “our heroes.” And in the context of American history, his support of white supremacists makes the riot he fomented at the Capitol, by what he called “a loving crowd,” all the more chilling.
But perhaps most troubling for both our children and our nation is the echo of his words in those citizens who vociferously oppose teaching students about racism in America.
With all evidence to the contrary, they evidently believe that racism remains only in the past. But perhaps we’d all be better advised by William Faulkner’s succinct but lasting history lesson: “
The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”