Ignoring the Lessons of History

THROUGHOUT RIGHT WING AMERICA, the land of delusion, poorly educated politicians, aka Republicans, are passing laws, or trying to pass laws, requiring history teachers to omit or distort history in order to avoid injuring the feelings of apparently super sensitive snow flakish pseudo patriotic conservatives. Essentially, the whitewashing involves de-emphasizing or even ignoring the persistance of racism in American history and culture, then and now, ignoring the fact that racism has always been and remains a core American value, on both an individual and institutional level. The teaching of African-American history accurately and factually, teaching it properly, risks inspiring undiserable feelings of "guilt" among pure lily white impressionable American children, it seems, guilt due to the inconvenient behavior of their immediate ancestors, ancestors of the students, and the Republican politicians. In the new hagiographic self serving, dishonest version of history, systemic racism was vanished in the United States sometime shortly after Appomattox, or if not entirley then, then surely by the time "Plessy vs. Ferguson" was handed down, or maybe Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education, or at the very latest in the nineteen sixties when systemic racism was outlawed for good, with the civil rights movement and legislation. Take your pick. Hell, didn't we turn Martin Luther King's birthday, or the Monday closest to his birthday, into a national holiday, and don't we have a statue in his honor in plain sight on the mall in Washington D.C.? Never mind the fact that while MLK was alive, every conservative in these United States hated his guts, and continued the hatrad long after his death by a right wing bullet. All these options are far preferable from the pseudo patriotic, hagiographic right wing perspective, to reality, the reality that both systemic and personal racism are as alive and well in America as ever, deeply, exclusively entrenched within mainstream American conservatism. For their nefarious purposes, conservatives have invented and popularized something called "critical race theory", by which they mean the reserach, teaching, and study of racism in America from a perspective critical of mainstream American society, using critical thinking but false reasoning, in a theoretical manner, meaning, that it (racism) doesn't actually exist in America, but exists only in theory. That's the essential conservative viewpoint; that racism once existed, but no longer does, at least not unless and until some rabble rousing trouble making radical liberal has the temerity to start talking about it. Actually, what does not exist is "critical race theory", which is only a vaguely intellectual sounding phrase, meaning nothing. What does exist is pervasive racism in America, personal and systemic, among the conservative community, and millions of conservatives who want to hide their racism behind a thinly veiled veneer of pseudo patriotism and a shocking wilingness to ignore actual history, and to rewrite it to suit their nefarious interets, almost after the fashion of NAZIs and confederate lost cause crusaders.