When I see some of the highest officials in the US government deny the existence of systemic racism, I know they have no knowledge of American history. They are ignorant, there is no other way to say it. Anyone with any accurate knowledge of the history of this country knows about the institutional attempts to exclude various ethnic groups from all the blessings of liberty. The documentation is there for all to see. The primary sources are rich in detail.
As a history teacher, I always considered textbooks more as primary sources rather than the secondary sources they are. That's because textbooks throughout the decades provide a revealing look into both the interpretation and inclusivity of our history. These days any text worthwhile contains both narrative and primary sources. In fact, the Advanced Placement history exam usually is based on historical interpretation of various documents.
But for the uneducated, history is a narrative. It begins, usually with the Founding Fathers, and ends with the latest war. It's names and dates, battles, and presidents. How naive. But the current crop of politicos rarely goes beyond any basic knowledge. They cling to the George Washington and the cherry tree brand of story-telling. How else could they make statements, like the current Attorney General has, that systemic racism hasn't existed at all?
As a young teacher, I collected history texts so that my students could see how history is written. Occasionally at a flea market or yard sale, I'd come across a real antique, or a narrative so biased that I just couldn't pass it up. When teaching about racism, it's important to deal with images in the mind. Occasionally those images held by the dominant culture are so racist, so intolerant, that they are all that is needed to open up a mind.
I offer these pages from an 1896 US history text in describing the Battle of Little Big Horn:
It's clear that the author has no interest in an unbiased representation of the people and events of this famous event. That this was from a book bought and distributed by a school system in California shows how an institution is complacent with the prevailing racist views of the day. Is this important? Or rather why is this important? Discuss.
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