I thought that the first article was really interesting. Though it can be shocking, I like learning about how the history that I thought I knew is all wrong. (#thanksJepson) It’s especially interesting because I am from Virginia and we have to learn a lot about the Native Americans that inhabited Virginia before Europeans arrived and screwed everything up. I always thought that Europeans had come to North America and created Jamestown without really interacting with the people already living there. Looking back, this was a naive and clearly wrong description of what happened, but we were taught a very whitewashed version of history that I am still trying to fix in my mind. I thought the numbers that the first article gave us were crazy. They said that 10 million people inhabited the area that is now Mexico and after Europeans arrived and basically waged war, that number went down to 1 million. And a lot of those 1 million native peoples still alive ended up dying from disease brought over from Europe. I was never taught the negative effects of colonialism until a lot later in my education and even then it was still more rose-colored then what actually happened.
I think that the idea of whitewashed history is also seen in the second article. though I am from northern Virginia and not Richmond, I still had years of state history education and I had never even heard of anything that this article was talking about. It talked about how African American people registered to vote quicker and more than white people and that made the white people upset. They were afraid of the African American population ‘controlling’ the city. To retaliate against the increase in African American voters, white people tried to annex areas with predominantly people of color. They tried to group them all together so they could minimize their power. In school I never learned about any of this, I was taught that the VRA was passed and everything was sunshine and rainbows for the most part. There was some violence but they did not tell us about this systemic abuse of power that happened. And I’m sure that Richmond was not the only city that had issues like this. I just think it’s shocking how history is recorded and whose story it depicts, because it definitely does not tell everyone’s story.
I liked your on-going point that education is a large determinant of what children (and frankly each generation) learns about history of this country and our states. I think it is probably the largest contributor to the systemic racism because our younger generations are learning a highly reduced and even misleading version of history that only includes the perspectives of those who came out on top. That’s the main point of Zinn’s article – to look and explain history from the perspective that is not often observed.
I had never heard of anything mentioned in the second article, because I’m from Texas. Most of our history is about Texas or the big events (Declaration, Civil War, Louisiana Purchase, etc.). But I do agree that even that history was whitewashed or at the very least rose-colored. I think both articles brought the issues of remembering and retelling history accurately and without major bias. We are taught the side of the winner without the ugly parts and I think these readings prove that happens for large scale population genocides or small scale civil right oppression.
Coming from someone that is also from Virginia, I think that I experienced a bit of a different teaching of the Europeans coming to the North America. I am from a part of Virginia that is called “The Historical Triangle.” I live in Yorktown (think battle in the Revolutionary War) but I am only about 15 minutes away from Colonial Williamsburg and another 10 minutes away from Jamestown. Living so close to these historical sites, I got A LOT of history about it them and have been to each of them MANY times. While I was taught about the interactions with American Indians to an extent, I was never taught about the full effect Europeans had on them. We learned which tribes were in our area and some of the conflicts that arose between them and the first settlers at Jamestown but then the focus would quickly shift to the expansion of European settlements in the Americas. I think it is interesting how, despite living so close to these places, while I got a bit more of a teaching on the interactions, I still got next to nothing.
The way we treated American Indians were horrible, and it isn’t the only group we have mistreated. Slaughtering (for the most part) has ended, but racism and exclusion has not.
Your post really speaks to the deficiencies in our education system, and the difficulty in properly teaching history to children. How can we better education young people while still accounting for their immaturity and the sensitive nature of the topics? It’s a tough question, but we have to find a better balance between educating and protecting.
It really is interesting how much of the history we have learned in school has been white-washed and try to prevent us from seeing the horrible sides of how the United States was founded. The same applies to our founding fathers, to an extent MLK (his wife was also played a huge role in civil rights but was never given credit), the pilgrims, and a lot of other histroical figures.