Why whitewash history?

 

Bill Knight column for 7-5, 6 or 7, 2021

 Talk of Tulsa, Juneteenth and Critical Race Theory made me realize my schooling was incomplete.

There are still chances to learn, like a new exhibit at the Springfield and Central Illinois African American History Museum, “Something so Horrible: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908,” when a mob of 5,000 Whites over two days destroyed Black homes and businesses, and attacked Blacks; 16 died.

The 1921 Tulsa Massacre – a White mob of about 1,000 killed 300 Blacks and wounded hundreds, and destroyed the Black business district and countless homes, displacing thousands – reminds us that racism wasn’t just in the Deep South.  I’d assumed that as a Illinois pupil in the 1950s and ’60s, hearing about 1964’s Civil Rights Act and 1965’s Voting Rights Act. We read about Reconstruction and its “carpetbaggers,” but not how Congress tried to reconcile post-war North-South friction by sacrificing ex-slaves to Jim Crow discrimination. We heard about Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, but not that many Blacks fought in the American Revolution, and that in the Old West one in four cowboys was Black.

(I also wasn’t told about Eugene Debs or the deportation of Wobblies, the Ludlow Massacre or Haymarket Riot, or Marine Gen. Smedley Butler exposing the 1933 “Wall Street Coup” to overthrow Roosevelt, all until I read histories by Dick Gregory, James Loewen, Howard Zinn and others.)

Today, some Right-wingers want to erase some history by killing Critical Race Theory (CRT) and thoughts about how past mistakes contributed to today’s situation. Attorneys General from 20 states wrote the U.S. Department of Education opposing CRT, and 25 states and cities have considered attempts to prevent teachers from discussing how racism affected the country.

Last year, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget calls for cancelling diversity training, and Trump issued an Executive Order (since rescinded) banning “divisive concepts.” The Right-wing Heritage Foundation created a toolkit for lawmakers wanting to attack education, and the fearmongering started, stoked by Fox and Seattle conservative Christopher Rufo, who admits he’s more concerned about anti-racism training than CRT, saying he targeted it because of the name, tweeting his intention to “recodify” the term [and] turn it toxic.”

University of Illinois professor Adrienne Dixson said, “We have to be really wary about legislating ideas. What they’re doing is saying, ‘You can’t know this’.”

CRT isn’t a formal course of study. It’s less about names and dates than effects of other generations and actions, about the systemic impact of the past, and what previous wrongdoings have been kept, even accidentally.

“CRT is not an ideology that assumes white people are bad,” said Michigan State’s Dorinda Carter Andrews. “It’s a practice that provides language and a lens for examining racism at institutional and structural levels.”

For some 40 years, it’s been discussed in some graduate or law schools. (“There’s no evidence that CRT has been taught in any public school,” reported Stephen Kearse in Pew Research’s Stateline news service.)

Besides, history has never been all good or all bad. It’s complicated.

“History doesn’t exist to make us feel good,” said David Olusoga (who produced BBC’s documentary “Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners”). “History is just history.”

Level-headed conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote, “Part of being a conservative is taking history seriously. I don’t think it’s possible to be a conservative without believing that racism is, in part, structural.”

Even Texas Republican Bryan Hughes, arguing for banning CRT, conceded that some suffer injustice “much worse [than others]. There’s no getting around that.”

The stain of slavery and thievery of land shouldn’t be whitewashed; who benefits from falsehoods and distortions? Distracting from issues such as January’s insurrection, voting suppression or police violence, some Republicans hope CRT is a campaign issue.

In Springfield, that museum (1440 Monument Ave.) is open 12-4 p.m. Thursday – Saturday; Beverly Peters’ lecture on the incident is at 1:30 p.m. July 31 (call 217-391-6323 for reservations). If you can’t go to Springfield, go to a library and check out Illinois poet, biographer and journalist Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Race Riots,” an 82-page book recounting a similar tragedy that occurred in 1919, between Springfield and Tulsa, killing 34, injuring hundreds and damaging houses in Black neighborhoods.

Sandburg wrote, “The race question is national. No city or state can solve it alone. There must be federal handling of it.”

Meanwhile, extremists insist Americans can’t learn from the past (strange coming from some who embrace racist Civil War figures, much less a Nazarene carpenter). But despite lawmakers’ lies and attempts to silence teachers, people will defy double standards and discover facts.

As “The Volatile Mermaid” recently tweeted, “When you don’t want to teach kids about slavery but want to preserve Confederate monuments, that’s called ‘Hypocritical Race Theory’.”