OPINION: Two Republican candidates for president provided further proof that American history has never been taught correctly or truthfully, and with the attempts to erase or whitewash our history, things will only get worse.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more
As governor of South Carolina, Haley removed the confederate flag from the state capitol in Columbia in 2015, but only after the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof murdered eight Black people at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Black activist Bree Newsome Bass took matters into her own hands, climbing the flagpole and tearing down the flag, in any case.
One of the founders of Mother Emanuel was Denmark Vesey, who had led a thwarted slave revolt in Charleston in 1822 and was executed. The church was burned to the ground because of its affiliation with Vesey.
According to Haley, the confederate flag stood for “service, sacrifice and heritage” until Roof “hijacked” it. Haley is also a woman of Indian descent whose father taught at Voorhees College, an HBCU, and who attended a white “segregation academy” — a private school formed in the 1960s to resist integration and keep out Black children.
Haley is not a white woman, the confederate flag never stood for anything good, and the Civil War was all about whether white Southerners could continue to chain Black people up in their backyards. Some people may think it doesn’t matter. But don’t let them fool you, because history matters. They say that history is told from the standpoint of the victors, and those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.
As the Gullah-Geechee people say, If oonuh ent kno weh oonuh dah gwine, oonuh should kno weh oonuh come f’um. Translation: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you come from. And as the Akan (Ghana) proverb says, Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi, which means “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.” History tells the narrative, giving us an understanding of what happened in the past to help us make sense of the present and solve the many problems we face.
If you think history is not important, look no further than the culture war taking place in America, the book bans and memory laws that criminalize the teaching or reading of Black history in schools. Right-wing textbooks describe slavery as “Black immigration.” In Florida, they are teaching students that Black people benefited from slavery. White supremacist groups such as Moms for Liberty are leading the charge to plunge our children into ignorance of history, but this is nothing new.
Over a century ago, the pro-confederate groups who were responsible for building confederate statues across the South reshaped textbooks, emphasizing the Lost Cause and glorifying a white supremacist view of slavery and Reconstruction. United Daughters of the Confederacy made pro-confederate and pro-KKK propaganda a part of the textbooks. In the last century, textbooks across the South followed a white-friendly narrative that sidelined Black people, depicted them as happy with their second-class status, downplayed slavery, and presented enslaved Black people as indentured servants. “It should be noted that slavery was the earliest form of social security in the United States,” read a 1961 Alabama history textbook.
The impact of this indoctrination and miseducation is clear. A Southern Poverty Law Center study found that schools are not teaching students about slavery, and students have no clue about the impact of the institution on America and race relations. Only 8% of high school seniors knew slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Fewer than half knew that slavery was legal in all the colonies before the American Revolution, and most did not know that a constitutional amendment ended slavery.
And the current attacks on Black history will only make students more ignorant of their history. There is much at stake. Hiding the crimes of history by whitewashing the textbooks is an attempt to silence calls for reparations and restorative justice. If slavery did not exist — if the books tell us nothing wrong was done — then they will have you believe there is nothing or no one to pay. And the Civil War was about Southern heritage or taxes or something like that.
David A. Love is a journalist and commentator who writes investigative stories and op-eds on a variety of issues, including politics, social justice, human rights, race, criminal justice and inequality. Love is also an instructor at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, where he trains students in a social justice journalism lab. In addition to his journalism career, Love has worked as an advocate and leader in the nonprofit sector, served as a legislative aide, and as a law clerk to two federal judges. He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He also completed the Joint Programme in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. His portfolio website is davidalove.com.
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