In the late 80’s, I entered a Masters program for working educators run by a member of the Turtle clan of the Iroquois nation. The program’s focus was multiculturalism, long before the DEFCON one hot potato the word has become. One of the first reads was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, written in 1980. I was aware that the pilgrim story was mostly fancy, that our treatment of the indigenous was abominable, that the Civil War was not the War of Northern Aggression as it was tagged by some. I supported MLK day, but still thought of Cinco de Mayo as a great excuse for tequila in pretty much any beverage. In short, I was a semi-literate student of our past.
I was not aware of how the Tainos were brutally tortured, murdered, and essentially exterminated after Columbus “discovered” them on the way to an America he never saw. Nor how the Wampanoag were wiped out after enduring enslavement and murder by “pilgrims”, mostly by the single most effective weapon brought from the old world: disease. It seemed radical to face the reality lurking in the shadows of “traditional” history, which lost much of the false luster accrued from the rejiggering based on the audacity of the brave American revolt which birthed our founding documents, before mainland colonialism was green-lit and perpetrated in ways terrible and depraved.
History is again in the hot seat, and we’re hearing from folks on the right who can’t countenance any departure from the classic “all things to all men” point of view, despite the rampages “manifest destiny” embodied in the theft of indigenous lands and the accompanying genocides. It’s beyond ironic that while the Biden administration finally recognizes the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people, we have congresspeople who can’t abide the stories of our own, this while the war over ‘wokeness’ is even being lamented by the left, as Bill Maher and James Carville make clear.
Blunt tools like the now-expunged 1776 Report are attempts to turn back the controversial 1619 Project, which may have stretched to pronounce slavery a motive behind the war w/ Britain, but not the role of chattel slavery itself in the advancement of capitalism. Yet as indisputable as racial unrest in this country is, Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican senator, gave us a clean bill of health pertaining to systemic racism. It isn’t hard to convince a population grown accustomed to choosing their own facts about a still-raging non-partisan pandemic that real skeletons in our closets don’t exist, some which may include those of their own ancestors. History is neither a Yelp review nor a theater critic’s opinion- it doesn’t support sacred cows or false narratives.
What we tell our young and each other about our past is no less fraught now than in 1860, though today’s warfare is primarily cultural. Except when it isn’t. “Say His/Her Name” isn’t just a slogan, and if you’re a Black man out at night or a BLM protester in front of a car, you might become part of a growing lyric. Despite the recidivist revisionism of our national story, The People’s History today is still above-the-fold news, in congress, state capitols, and our city streets. The Pulitzer Center which supports journalism produced a school curriculum based on the 1619 Project. On cue, Republican legislators in five states — Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Dakota — filed virtually identical bills to cut funding to any school or college that uses the material. Mark Twain’s words ring true: “History never repeats itself but it rhymes.” What rhymes with willful ignorance?