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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4539,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5472","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\/5472","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\/4539"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}