Keith Parsons: History Should Make You Uncomfortable
Wednesday, 30 August 2023
I’m proud and pleased that my friend Keith Parsons keeps offering such fine guest essays as Letters… . He should launch his own Substack, but I’m grateful he has not.
Dr. Keith Parsons
History Should Make You Uncomfortable
by Keith Parsons
A year or two ago, normally staid and boring school board meetings were loudly disrupted by angry protestors incensed that students were allegedly being indoctrinated with the tenets of a previously obscure academic theory, Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT had been around since the seventies but was largely unknown outside of law schools and graduate seminars. It is a complex theory combining a number of elements. One of its most distinctive claims is that racism should be primarily construed not as an individual character flaw, but as systematic injustice deeply infused into laws, customs, and practices across the institutions of society. An example of this baked-in bias would be how black homebuyers and other persons of color are treated differently by mortgage lenders, not due to the individual bias of lenders, but to the “impersonal” algorithms employed:
However, the school board disrupters were not interested in algorithms. One of their main complaints was that teaching the history of racism, racial violence, and discrimination was likely to make white children feel ashamed and guilty. To protect the allegedly fragile feelings of white children, right-wing politicians have responded in two ways. One way is to retell the history to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative in America’s racial history. Where there is no positive, it is made up. For instance, the State of Florida has adopted new academic standards for the teaching of social studies:
https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf
Most notoriously, under these guidelines students are being taught about the “benefits” of African American slavery:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/desantis-florida-slavery/
More generally, laws are being passed, like HB 1775 in Oklahoma:
https://legiscan.com/OK/text/HB1775/id/2387002
These laws use vague language to proscribe any teaching that will make students feel discomfort, anguish, or other psychological distress due to their race. The vagueness is intentional. It is designed to make teachers avoid racial topics altogether out of fear that they might say something proscribed. Conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly used to call liberals “snowflakes” to deride their supposed hypersensitivity—whining for trigger warnings, safe spaces, and protection against microaggressions. I guess the makers of these laws see us all as snowflakes now.
History should make you feel uncomfortable. If it does not, you are not being taught history, but self-serving lies.
American history has its great, heroic parts. Here is one: The old documentary series Victory at Sea was first shown in the early fifties, just a few years after the end of WW II.
The energetic narration, the archival footage, and the magnificent music of Richard Rogers made for an often-thrilling experience. In the episode set during the Battle of Okinawa, the American fleet is under savage, relentless attack by wave after wave of kamikazes. Sailors manned their 20mm and 40mm guns, desperately trying to kill their enemy before he could sacrifice himself to kill them. Sometimes the attackers would go down in flames, but other times they would bore right through the intense antiaircraft fire and smash into the ships. There were horrifying scenes of corpsmen tending the horribly burned and mutilated and of priests giving last rites to the dying. The fleet, though badly mauled, survived to win the battle.
Yes, it is great that the young men and women of my parents’ generation came together with their allies to fight and, at terrible cost, defeat monstrous evil. Yet to revel in the glorious parts and to refuse to acknowledge the atrocious parts is to dishonor the memory of those who fought so hard and faced such dangers to preserve a world in which truth could still be told and justice could still be practiced.
We have to be willing to face the hard truths, and if this makes us uncomfortable, as it should, then this discomfort can motivate us to face the evils of our day and win our own victories. We know that our country had chattel slavery until 1865. We know that there followed another hundred years of Jim Crow, which was essentially slavery by another name. We know that the American government pursued genocidal policies against the American Indians. We know these things to be true, and we know them to be atrocious and that nothing, absolutely nothing can mitigate their horror. The attempts to downplay or reframe these events would be laughable if they were not so utterly despicable.
I recently saw the outstanding movie Till. I also noticed in the news that the site of Emmett Till’s murder has now been made a national monument. The story of his lynching is well known. A teenager living in Chicago in 1955, he visited relatives in Mississippi.
Emmett Till
He supposedly whistled at a white woman, and was abducted, beaten, mutilated, and shot by white men who were later acquitted by an all-white jury. Till’s mother insisted that her son’s casket be left open so that everyone could witness the extreme brutality that had been inflicted on her son.
These events did not occur in ancient times. They were not committed by Atilla the Hun. They occurred less than seventy years ago and some of the people who experienced them are still alive. To refuse to come to terms with these and thousands of other lynchings that took place—and continue to occur in places like Brunswick, Georgia and Minneapolis, Minnesota—is an act of moral cowardice. Does thinking about such events make you uncomfortable? Good! It should make you uncomfortable. If murderous racist violence does not disturb you, then your moral character is seriously defective.
We Americans tend to think of ourselves as exceptional, and in some senses we are. What makes us a nation is not ethnic or religious identity. It is not blood and soil or the semi-mystical reverence for the motherland. America was founded upon a set of ideals, the ones stated in the founding documents and reiterated with supreme eloquence in the Gettysburg Address. Of course, the full realization of these ideals has been and is an ongoing process, but driving this process is the realization that, as Spencer Tracy’s character says in Judgment at Nurenberg, “In the end, a nation is what it stands for.”
Though we may be exceptional in some ways, like every nation, America has its angels and demons. To ignore the demons is to give them power, to allow them to fester and flourish. Satan was called “The Prince of Lies” and politicians who whitewash history are doing Satan’s work. Further, children have a right to know the truth, and those who would shield them from the stark truth devalue and insult those children. Truth is painful, but the consequences of ignorance are much worse. Those who work to keep children ignorant of painful truths do not deserve positions of leadership.
Note: Anyone may copy and publish what I or my guests write, provided proper credit is given, that it’s not done for commercial purposes, that I am notified of the copying (you can just leave a comment saying where the copy is being published), and provided that what we write is not quoted out of context or distorted.
Very, very nicely put, sir. Recall a lot of grief directed largely by right wing pundits at sports and other school programs that were awarding many participants some form of recognition, lest individuals not earning a strong finish be “uncomfortable”. How remarkable that anything causing discomfort, based on reflective thought, human decency, and historical fact, is subject not just to ignorant screeds, but also legislation intent on promoting willful ignorance.
Must Floridians of a certain extremist [saying “ conservative” would be mislabeling] political party continue to promote intellectual lobotomies?