The sheer capacity of harm done by Colombus and the Spaniards itself is overwhelming, but the fact that history books tell a completely different story demonstrates one of the biggest flaws today. Not only was the violence and brutality skimmed over, but scenes were painted about Native Americans that painted them as less than human, less than civilized: glorifying colonization Zinn\u2019s comment that \u201cthe easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress that is still with us\u201d really struck me as pure truth. This quote is a truth that reveals itself in history books, in many of the holidays we celebrate, and especially in the things we don\u2019t talk about.<\/p>\n
There are so many examples of this acceptance of atrocities:\u00a0 <\/span>the treatment of the mentally ill, the story we tell about Thanksgiving, the land taken from Native Americans. And even further are things we attempt to completely leave out. I was 19 years old when I learned about the United State\u2019s sterilization efforts. Our time of Eugenics only ended in the 1970s. My parents were just out of college then..\u00a0 American history books completely leave out the fact that America was huge on the sterilization of disabled people and was called to Germany to teach their methods… We talk about the holocaust, it is too large of an atrocity to accept, but that detail that America not only played a part initially but also participated in the sterilization of peoples without their consent is left out of the modern-day history textbook.<\/p>\n it is mind-blowing how little we know of our true history. Just thinking about how this is true for most countries, painting completely different pictures of who the victims are, hiding away the dark side of the past. This is where biases begin to form: when we are just beginning to learn in school. This creates negative biases around nationalities, religions, cultures of others, preventing genuine human connection cross-culturally. And few people have the opportunity to read things like this to gain awareness and work toward unraveling these biases and looking for that wider truth. So not only are people reading romanized histories of their own societal past (which I would argue hunters true human progress), but this creates dividing lines as we romanticize ourselves and falsely demonize others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The sheer capacity of harm done by Colombus and the Spaniards itself is overwhelming, but the fact that history books tell a completely different story demonstrates one of the biggest flaws today. Not only was the violence and brutality skimmed over, but scenes were painted about Native Americans that painted them as less than human, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4671,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4671"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}