I recently received a news story from my friend, D.J Pine, about a push by minority communities for more complete and inclusive American History.
Here’s a short excerpt:
American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads.
The lessons have left out a lot.
Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. At least several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War. And Asian-Americans had been living in California and Louisiana since the 1700s.
The Eurocentrism taught in mainstream U.S. history classes is very relevant to hunger and poverty in the United States – a country in which 14 million children are food insecure. The Eurocentric and patriotic way that United States history is taught convinces Americans that the minorities, the working-class, and the poor are inferior. This is the main cause of the myth of meritocracy in the United States. Because oppression is omitted from the history courses, and because the achievements of the minorities and the poor are downplayed and ignored, the American people – both poor and rich – falsely believe that the poor are just lazy, and deserve to be poor. It is this false myth that creates and falsely justifies racism and classism in America.
A great book about U.S. history and the misleading way it is taught is Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen.
-Scott Hughes