When I was growing up in the US in the 1970s and 80s, I thought I had some reasonably good history teachers. Engaged. Caring.
But the US history curriculum I learned was biased. It was white US history taught in overwhelmingly white schools. You know the story arc: settling the land, civilizing the natives, glory to the founding fathers, Manifest Destiny, winning wars, becoming a rich super-power...
The main characters in the story? All white. The main lesson: the US is great.
Slavery – that is, centuries of forced labor, rape, and torture for millions of Black Americans – was practically a footnote, taught with a sense that, ‘yeah, it was bad, but it was a long time ago.’
We were told less about Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation for decades after slavery than about the civil rights movement that helped undo them. The message: shhh, it’s all fine now.
I can’t recall any teacher ever mentioning the thousands of lynchings in the 19th and 20th centuries, and no one ever taught us anything about events like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
With such imbalanced education of its young people, is it any wonder the country has failed to address the legacies of racism?
Since my schooldays, there have been efforts to develop more honest US history teaching, but it’s painful to now see how some US lawmakers are turning to censorship to try to block those efforts and enforce ignorance.
Laws have now been proposed or passed in 36 US states that restrict education about racism and other discrimination, and that distort or omit accounts of the history of specific racial or ethnic groups. State legislatures and local school boards have banned thousands of books.
These attacks on people’s fundamental rights to education and access to accurate information are an assault on US democracy itself.
To help fight back, Human Rights Watch has endorsed the Freedom to Learn Campaign. It’s a growing network of individuals and organizations opposed to censorship of essential content in education.
Because people have a right to know the truth about the history of their country, and the government should not be censoring it.
How else will we ever learn?
