Frank Dahl, way back in his Aug. 23, 2021, letter to the editor, claimed that critical race theory, or CRT, is “an obvious effort to divide us and brainwash … our kids.” I have thought about this for months and I have been writing this response ever since. I am a baby boomer who grew up in Idaho and California in the 1950s and ‘60s and attended school when our colorful and dramatically illustrated history textbooks celebrated Christopher Columbus and the rest of the English, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and armies, where the texts commemorated America’s fight for independence and the creation of our nation, when Manifest Destiny was taught and the romance and hardship of the thousands “settlers” moving west in covered wagon trains was featured, and when the Civil War was lauded for Lincoln’s words and the virtue of the North and its generals and the proud Southerns and its generals.
Our textbooks simply did not attempt to teach us the complexity of our history of discovery and appropriation, of Europeans somehow believing it was their land to take, including the extent of the Indian wars and the decimation of the myriad Native American cultures across the continent and the taking of Native lands through the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, the horror of importing Africans since the 17th century to work in Southern fields and the aftermath of Reconstruction and the quick birth of Jim Crow laws, our history of relying on the men and women of other countries, including the Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese, and the throw-away nature of our treatment of all persons of color and our belief in these peoples as somehow not equal to European homo sapiens, not to mention the initial discriminatory attitudes toward the Jews, Italians and Irish, to name a few, as they emigrated to America.
But the truth is that there is simply no basis for the belief that any race or ethnicity is any less than any other, and it is simply religion, nationalism and a belief in cultural superiority that has made our U.S. history what it truly is. As Americans in the 21st century, we should embrace every attempt to factually present how it was that we enslaved some, slaughtered others, and imported foreign labor to support our desire for wealth and land and expansion.
It is a shameful past, but it is the truth, and we have to live with and learn from that history. Why is our true history, the good — our role in both World Wars, for example — the bad, and the ugly so hard to accept, and why at this point would any American not want the truth of our history to be taught, so that the complex cultural and political issues we face every day in our country be fully and comprehensively understood? Here at the beginning of 2023, our history should not divide us: it should instruct us in how to work to govern together for the benefit of all and support the daily struggle to eliminate inequality.
— Randall Burns
Anchorage
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