column: Counting with the ghosts of our racist past | Opinion

[ad_1]

As the country grapples with the amount of racial history that should be included in school curricula, I have decided to reflect on some significant historical gaps in my education.

For example, I didn’t hear of the Middle Passage until Roots (1977) shows how Africans, taken from their ancestral homes, were crammed into boats like firewood and shipped to America. .

Nor did I learn that the treatment of slaves, especially the brutal details of family break-ups, lashes, lynchings and the occasional murder, was even worse than that described in Uncle Toms Cabin.

Rather, I learned that slavery was essential to the economies of South and North and to America’s overall prosperity. I learned that many slaves were happy with their plantation life and often worked for kind and generous whites.

I did not learn how the KKK coordinated and maintained for many years a reign of terror, depriving freed men of the right to vote, torching their churches and businesses, driving them from their homes and murdering thousands of people. people.

I have not learned that the governments of reconstruction under President Ulysses S. Grant protected freed men and women, created public educational and social welfare institutions for blacks, guaranteed them the right to vote and facilitated ‘access of former slaves to commercial and political careers.

Instead, my textbooks presented the theory of Reconstruction Revisionism (the Dunning School), namely that the South was being shaken by opportunistic carpet merchants from the North taking advantage of a destabilized and suffering South.

I learned nothing about the New York City riots of 1863. Crowds of mostly Irish immigrants assaulted any black person they saw on the streets, ransacked and torched their homes, looted their stores, torched the four-story Colored Orphan Asylum, lynched dozens of black men and then brutally mutilated their corpses. The death toll could rise to 1,200.

Nor did I learn that many stable and prosperous black communities were destroyed through the combined efforts of rich and powerful white businessmen, political allies, and often former Confederate soldiers.

In Colfax, Louisiana (1873), a white mob massacred between 62 and 81 black citizens. Challenging the results of the 1872 election, the mob chased the newly elected black officials to a local courthouse, which they set fire to, shooting anyone who tried to escape. White citizens then take power.

In Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), a campaign for white supremacy mobilized a crowd of 2,000 white men who overthrew the rightfully elected local biracial fusionist government in Wilmington. Dozens of blacks have been murdered, their homes and prosperous neighborhoods burnt to the ground. The crowd claimed their whiteness overshadowed legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protection under the law that black Americans were guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 was the worst incident of racial violence in American history. City officials conspired with the mob of white citizens and staged a ground and air attack that destroyed more than 35 city blocks of what was then called Black Wall Street. As many as 300 black people have been killed, 10,000 forced from their homes and property damage estimated at the current equivalent of $ 32.65 million.

These massacres received minimal media coverage, and the press they received blamed the black rioters.

Winston Churchill, paraphrasing George Santayana, said in a speech to Parliament: Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Quite true. But here, important events from the racial past of the Americas have been deliberately erased from public records and historical memory. This memory gap has had the effect of allowing the repetition of similar violence, generation after generation.

Now that the ghosts of our racist past have resurrected, thanks to persistent critical inquiry and iPhone cameras, we must finally learn their lesson: Stop the repetition. Face the truth and face it.

The suppression of all forms of human behavior is counterproductive. Denying that problems exist only takes them further and further away from our consciousness, making them harder and harder to solve. Will learning the truth further divide the races? Make America Hate? Or will it instead free us, free us to honestly deal with our racial issues in a meaningful and constructive way?

I did not hear of any of the racial events mentioned above when I was in school. If I had, the details wouldn’t have made me hate all white people or hate my country. It would have reinforced what I was learning in my religious studies that we are all capable of evil, of sin. But we can be forgiven and redeemed if we confess and change our behavior.

Every nation in history has been tainted with moral blemishes, just as all human beings have done shameful things in their lives. Why deny it? Don’t most of us try to learn from our mistakes to become better people?

Likewise, our nation should learn the lessons of an honest encounter with its troubled racist past. We cannot do this, however, if we remove existentially significant moments from our history, our daily lives, and our schools.

[ad_2]