I was inordinately shocked and appalled by the comments made on Hakeem Jefferson’s column Feb. 11 lamenting the elevation of African-American history to the same level we give white history. One could almost believe we never pay special attention to the historical contributions made by Caucasians but instead have, as a society, become bogged down in some sort of campaign of white-man demonization. Silly me, but I remember quite vividly being taught the history of the United States and of Europe in high school and college and that white historical actors were at the forefronts of those narratives.
I agree with Jefferson that our history should pay more attention to the contributions made by people of other races than white and that this is not something for which we should set aside a month, leaving the other 11 to revert to our normal historiography. History education should celebrate all races because all races have made an impact on the country.
It pains me that people are somehow resistant to this. What harm is there to be had in taking time to pay attention to the historical journeys of other peoples or to incorporating those stories into our national history? Why must our history be a progression of white faces? It’s true that the historical experiences of other races are not always a particularly happy story and that this may be embarrassing for many white people, but, as a white man, I firmly believe that it’s important for us as Americans to recognize those histories so that we understand how we as a country came to be where we are today.
In the 1970s, a white history teacher in Mississippi wrote a new textbook for teaching Mississippi history in that state’s schools, which was universally rejected by its various school boards. When the case had been taken to court, the state argued that the book focused too much on racial matters and contained “disturbing” images of a lynching. When asked by the judge if lynches had not actually occurred in Mississippi, the defendant responded, “Yes, but it happened so long ago. Why focus on it now?” The court ultimately found for the teacher and his textbook.
We have certainly come a long way since the ’70s, and the stories we teach don’t all have to be about lynching. But those stories have to be as much part of our national story as the story of the civil rights movement, as much as the story of the Founding Fathers. The history we teach ourselves and our descendants cannot be the flat, characterless, conflictless story that we all-too-often find in our history textbooks. We have a duty to tell the whole story, to recognize the historical experiences and contributions made by all peoples and to tell those stories equitably.