America MUST Learn From Its Flaws

I've already said my thoughts about the Republican attacks on teaching history - their fear about how racist our past has been and how that racism defines us now - but it helps to hear from another voice like Rude Pundit, who spells things out in a more blunt but effective manner: 

When I was applying for jobs in academia years ago, I figured that, depending where I was applying, my whiteness and maleness would work against me or in my favor. It never occurred to me to resent the idea that I might lose out to an equally qualified non-white person or a woman because I believe that diversity in education is an imperative to maybe, perhaps one day overcoming or at least ameliorating the effects of racism and sexism. On more than one occasion, some other white guy would ask me if I was upset that I might lose out on a dream job because of affirmative action or diversity hiring. 

And my answer was always the same: "I'm not angry at people today for getting jobs. I'm not angry at people today for considering race and sex as factors. I am pissed off as hell at all the stupid, racist, sexist white men in the past who fucked it all up." 

See, what gets me, time and again, is trying to conceive of all the people whose genius, whose talent, whose abilities were never even given a chance because of the actual laws and the unspoken rules of white male domination and oppression. If you really think about it, that loss is overwhelming. It's incalculable. And it is frankly entirely rational, entirely normal, entirely expected that trying to wrap your head around it is going to make a white person feel like shit. 

Frankly, we white people should feel shame. We should feel anger. And rather than deny those feelings, rather than repress them and revolt against them, we should embrace them, learn from them, and grow from them. Otherwise, we'll just keep doing all the things that make future whites ashamed and angry, perpetuating the very system that we're pretending we've defeated... 

History is not some distant memory, some tale to be told over dinner or a campfire like a fable of old. History is living, reaching from the past affecting the actions we take today as we attempt to redefine our futures.

If what you get from that is that white people are bad and that you don't want to feel bad, that's on you. For chrissake, as a white person, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the fact that the country wouldn't exist without the enslavement of one race and the genocide of another, both done by white people? Why wouldn't I feel like shit that the white-run government didn't enforce the very laws that it created to bring about equality between the races? Why in the world wouldn't I feel like shit about lynching and terrorism by whites against Black people? As someone who grew up white in the south, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the Supreme Court-endorsed apartheid that prevented Black people from prospering for a hundred years after slavery? Why wouldn't I feel like shit about policies like red-lining and banking discrimination and environmental ghettoes? We're now talking about things white people have done in my lifetime, not 400 years ago. 

Goddamn, you'd have to be so deep in denial, so delusional, so sociopathic to not think that whiteness has been used as a weapon against non-white people. Don't tell me not to feel like hell. Tell me how you agree that we need to accept it, teach it, learn it, and change it...

The Republicans - driven by their cultural conservativism and their religious puritanism and their greed - dare not confront that past because it exposes the sins they are committing now in their pursuit of permanent political power. They cannot share that power with others they deem inferior by race and by gender and by creed. So they wage war on our nation's own history, to purge it of our sins like Rosewood and Tulsa and Sand Creek and Camp Logan and Port Chicago and the Trail of Tears.

Rather than learn from those horrors, the wingnut Right would have us all forget it... so they can repeat those mistakes in the here and now.

We're seeing the results already of the conservative witch hunt against teachers exposing racism: A Tennessee school board fired a teacher for quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates' works. Say hello to the modern update of Jim Crow, America. You're not reading this in your history books, you're reading this on today's Twitter feed.

Republicans don't want us to learn, Republicans don't want America to reform and refocus and improve. They don't want to do the smart, simple thing that Rude Pundit and I agree our nation needs to do:

A truly great country doesn't have to keep saying it's great. A truly great country can handle more than one idea about itself. A truly great country is one that recognizes its mistakes and treats them as the chance to become, what's the phrase, "a more perfect union," as our flawed, racist, but, yes, wise founders said.