I used to think of history as a series of facts and dates with some areas of argument, mostly due to my high school education convincing me that\u00a0history textbooks and teachers were infallible. Since coming to college and studying work like Dr. Hayter’s, I have learned to critically analyze every piece of writing and find the argument that the author is trying to convince you of. For example, I had always learned that MLK was the main cause of desegregation with little to no help from others.\u00a0I had never learned about the background work behind the movement and the extreme amount of planning and thought that it took to accomplish, which seems incredibly ignorant in retrospect. To know that so many people, especially black women, were historically ignored simply because they did not appeal to white people is extremely frustrating but easy to believe. MLK was an incredibly well-spoken, highly-regarded pastor and man, which automatically gained more of a white following than any black woman could. In this sense, he was the strategic choice for the face of the movement, but the work of other people in the movement should not be ignored as it currently is. Taken into today’s events, I wonder how the BLM movement will be remembered and historically told. Will people in 50 years know that 3 black women began the movement to protest another murderer walking free, or will they see it as a series of riots across the US? I guess that will depend on who is writing the history, but it is interesting to consider.<\/p>\n
On a very different note, I liked that Dr. Bezio mentioned that the people of the past are not so different from the people living today. I always picture historical figures living in black and white or gray-scale worlds, like they are depicted in movies through color-grading, but this is obviously not true. There are key differences in core beliefs and daily practices, but the body and mind of an ancient Egyptian are nearly identical to my own. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I find it incredibly strange to think about it this way, and I’m not entirely sure why. I want to distance myself from historical figures because their lives seem so much different from mine, but in reality, we are mostly the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I used to think of history as a series of facts and dates with some areas of argument, mostly due to my high school education convincing me that\u00a0history textbooks and teachers were infallible. Since coming to college and studying work like Dr. Hayter’s, I have learned to critically analyze every piece of writing and find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7151","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\/7151","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\/5104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7152,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions\/7152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}