#whitewashing american history

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is the first time I've clearly seen the actual revisions a state education department (Virginia) is making to a high school elective course on African American history (which focuses on that history in Virginia) because of a GOP governor's (i.e. Glenn Youngkin's) executive order prohibiting “inherently divisive concepts” from public schools.

This is a link to an archived article, so anyone can read the entire article. Below are some charts in the article that show the recommended revisions:

It is clear from the above chart that the reviewers want any mention of systemic racism and White privilege to be eliminated from the course, even though there is clear evidence that both exist.

It is also deeply concerning that any discussion of "implicit bias and stereotypes" is banned, even though those of us in the social sciences know that implicit bias and stereotyping exist. To prevent high school students from learning about these concepts is a blatant attempt to keep them ignorant.

Again, based on the chart above, the proposed revisions have done away with any discussion of the ubiquitous nature of racism or the fact that systemic racism exists. Instead the proposed revisions focus on (presumably overt) "discriminatory practices," while ignoring the subtle ways that racism has affected the Black population over the years, including the way it affected returning WWII Black veterans.

[See more under the cut.]

Furthermore, according to the proposed revisions, the term "White supremacist" cannot even be used. I wonder how the reviewers expect teachers to be able to describe the ideology of members of the KKK?

The reviewers also apparently want to pretend the University of Virginia wasn't involved with the Eugenics movement, since they took out a reference to it. In addition, the proposed revisions wouldn't allow the Eugenics movement to be called a "pseudo science." Are teachers supposed to claim it was "science"?

The reviewers also apparently want to forbid a discussion of how Eugenics was used in Virginia "to control African Americans," which indeed it reportedly was.

Furthermore, the recommended revisions falsely assume that redlining no longer exists, and that historical redlining no longer has an impact. Although it is not as overt as it once was, redlining does still exist in various forms and the impact of older redlining practices still have negative affects on Black populations.

From what I can tell, the proposed revisions have NOTHING to do with trying to stop students from feeling "uncomfortable" in classrooms. Discomfort naturally occurs for all of us when we learn about things that go against what we previously believed. But that is how people learn and grow.

And if the GOP wanted to stop "liberal" teachers from "indoctrinating" their students into "left-wing ideas," they would simply have legislated the presentation of two sides of an argument, AS LONG AS both sides were factually-based and rational. (For instance, there is NO factual or rational argument that the Holocaust didn't happen or wasn't as destructive as it was).

But the GOP politicians want to BAN the discussion of any view of history and society, however factually and rationally based, that goes against their whitewashed ideas of how history should be presented. In other words, the GOP wants schools to indoctrinate students into a right-wing way of viewing history and society that favors Whites.

This is incredibly regressive, and reminiscent of the United Daughters of the Confederacy's attempts to ensure "The Lost Cause" mythology was taught in schools.

[shinobicyrus]

A friend told me once about one of his professors back in college. She was from South America and taught history here in America. So as a historian, she was exited about a trip to Chicago because it's where the infamous Haymarket Massacre occurred; a bloody incident of labor agitation, police violence, rigged trials, and political persecution that is apparently very well known where she's from.

Imagine this historian's surprise when she found that most people living in the Chicago area have never heard of the Haymarket Massacre or the wider history of Chicago's labor movement. That it's a much more famous story in her country than in the place where it actually happened.

Whenever I remember this I'm really just struck by how much this encapsulates Americans' relationship with their own history.

[alwaysbewoke]

[odinsblog]

Few videos have ever so clearly illustrated the two worlds that exist in America. The fact that in one of these Jeopardy recaps, none of the white contestants could even identify Ketanji Brown-Jackson—the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice, seated in 2022—was as galling as it was informative.

These are supposedly some of the brightest people in the country, but they don’t even know some of the most cursory details of Black history—conversely, Black Americans are all but required to be aware of and know even thee most obscure details of white “culture” and European history if we want gainful employment and don’t want to be ridiculed or ostracized.

Generally speaking, white people already know precious little about the contributions and the importance of Black History and other non-European cultures, which is why when I see Ron DeSantis and other Republicans mandating laws that whitewash and erase Black history, it makes me realize just how extraordinarily EASY it is to do, because white America is already starting from a severe and intentionally maintained knowledge deficit.

[profeminist]

[2bpoliticallycurious]

This is an excellent commentary by Henry Louis Gates Jr. The link above is a gift link, so anyone can read the entire column, even if they don’t subscribe to The New York Times. 

Gates argues convincingly that what far right politicians like Ron DeSantis are doing in trying to control the history that is taught in schools is very similar to what was done by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in their promotion of schools teaching the “Lost Cause” and a rewritten whitewashed history. 

Gates also argues that there has always been rigorous debate within the Black community about many “ideological and theoretical framework[s]” regarding the Black experience in America. He believes these differences are discussed in African American Studies courses and raise important debates for the students who take those classes.

The one important thing Gates left out of this essay was that in the 1920s the KKK also promoted only teaching a history that praised the founders, much like the “patriotic” civics/history DeSantis and other GOP politicians are also pushing. 

Below are some highlights from the column [all emphasis added]:

Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.

“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” Governor DeSantis said. He also decried what he called “indoctrination.” [...] Even if we give the governor the benefit of the doubt about the motivations behind his recent statements about the content of the original version of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African American studies, his intervention falls squarely in line with a long tradition of bitter, politically suspect battles over the interpretation of three seminal periods in the history of American racial relations: the Civil War; the 12 years following the war, known as Reconstruction; and Reconstruction’s brutal rollback, characterized by its adherents as the former Confederacy’s “Redemption,” which saw the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, the reimposition of white supremacy and their justification through a masterfully executed propaganda effort.

Undertaken by apologists for the former Confederacy with an energy and alacrity that was astonishing in its vehemence and reach, in an era defined by print culture, politicians and amateur historians joined forces to police the historical profession. The so-called Lost Cause movement was, in effect, a take-no-prisoners social media war. And no single group or person was more pivotal to “the dissemination of the truths of Confederate history, earnestly and fully and officially,” than the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, of Athens, Ga. Rutherford was a descendant of a long line of slave owners.... Rutherford served as the principal of the Lucy Cobb Institute (a school for girls in Athens) and vice president of the Stone Mountain Memorial project, the former Confederacy’s version of Mount Rushmore.

As the historian David Blight notes, “Rutherford gave new meaning to the term ‘die-hard.’” Indeed, she “considered the Confederacy ‘acquitted as blameless’ at the bar of history, and sought its vindication with a political fervor that would rival the ministry of propaganda in any twentieth-century dictatorship.” And she felt that the crimes of Reconstruction “made the Ku Klux Klan a necessity.” As I pointed out in a PBS documentary on the rise and fall of Reconstruction, Rutherford intuitively understood the direct connection between history lessons taught in the classroom and the Lost Cause racial order being imposed outside it, and she sought to cement that relationship with zeal and efficacy. She understood that what is inscribed on the blackboard translates directly to social practices unfolding on the street. 

[See more under the cut.]

“Realizing that the textbooks in history and literature which the children of the South are now studying, and even the ones from which many of their parents studied before them,” she wrote in “A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries,” “are in many respects unjust to the South and her institutions, and that a far greater injustice and danger is threatening the South today from the late histories which are being published, guilty not only of misrepresentations but of gross omissions, refusing to give the South credit for what she has accomplished, … I have prepared, as it were, a testing or measuring rod.” And Rutherford used that measuring rod to wage a systematic campaign to redefine the Civil War not as our nation’s war to end the evils of slavery, but as “the War Between the States,” since as she wrote elsewhere, “the negroes of the South were never called slaves.” And they were “well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed.”

Of the more than 25 books and pamphlets that Rutherford published, none was more important than “A Measuring Rod.” Published in 1920, her user-friendly pamphlet was meant to be the index “by which every textbook on history and literature in Southern schools should be tested by those desiring the truth.” The pamphlet was designed to make it easy for “all authorities charged with the selection of textbooks for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions to measure all books offered for adoption by this ‘Measuring Rod,’ and adopt none which do not accord full justice to the South.” What’s more, her campaign was retroactive. As the historian Donald Yacovone tells us in his recent book, “Teaching White Supremacy,” Rutherford insisted that librarians “should scrawl ‘unjust to the South’ on the title pages” of any “unacceptable” books “already in their collections.”

On a page headed ominously by the word “Warning,” Rutherford provides a handy list of what a teacher or a librarian should “reject” or “not reject.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the Constitution other than a compact between Sovereign States.”

“Reject a textbook that does not give the principles for which the South fought in 1861, and does not clearly outline the interferences with the rights guaranteed to the South by the Constitution, and which caused secession.”

“Reject a book that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion.”

“Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.”

And my absolute favorite, “Reject a textbook that glorified Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, unless,” she adds graciously, “a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and vilification before 1865.”

And what of slavery? “This was an education that taught the negro self-control, obedience and perseverance — yes, taught him to realize his weaknesses and how to grow stronger for the battle of life,” Rutherford writes in 1923 in “The South Must Have Her Rightful Place.” “The institution of slavery as it was in the South, far from degrading the negro, was fast elevating him above his nature and race.” For Rutherford, who lectured wearing antebellum hoop gowns, the war over the interpretation of the meaning of the recent past was all about establishing the racial order of the present: “The truth must be told, and you must read it, and be ready to answer it.” Unless this is done, “in a few years there will be no South about which to write history.”

In other words, Rutherford’s common core was the Lost Cause. And it will come as no surprise that this vigorous propaganda effort was accompanied by the construction of many of the Confederate monuments that have dotted the Southern landscape since.

While it’s safe to assume that most contemporary historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction are of similar minds about Rutherford and the Lost Cause, it’s also true that one of the most fascinating aspects of African American studies is the rich history of debate over issues like this, and especially over what it has meant — and continues to mean — to be “Black” in a nation with such a long and troubled history of human slavery at the core of its economic system for two-and-a-half centuries.

Heated debates within the Black community, beginning as early as the first decades of the 19th century, have ranged from what names “the race” should publicly call itself (William Whipper vs. James McCune Smith) and whether or not enslaved men and women should rise in arms against their masters (Henry Highland Garnet vs. Frederick Douglass). Economic development vs. political rights? (Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. Du Bois). Should Black people return to Africa? (Marcus Garvey vs. W.E.B. Du Bois). Should we admit publicly the pivotal role of African elites in enslaving our ancestors? (Ali Mazrui vs. Wole Soyinka).

Add to these repeated arguments over sexism, socialism and capitalism, reparations, antisemitism and homophobia. It is often surprising to students to learn that there has never been one way to “be Black” among Black Americans, nor have Black politicians, activists and scholars ever spoken with one voice or embraced one ideological or theoretical framework. Black America, that “nation in a nation,” as the Black abolitionist Martin R. Delany put it, has always been as varied and diverse as the complexions of the people who have identified, or been identified, as its members. [...] As a consultant to the College Board as it developed its A.P. course in African American studies, I suggested the inclusion of a “pro and con” debate unit at the end of its curriculum because of the inherent scholarly importance of many of the contemporary hot-button issues that conservative politicians have been seeking to censor, but also as a way to help students understand the relation between the information they find in their textbooks and efforts by politicians to say what should and what should not be taught in the classroom.

Why shouldn’t students be introduced to these debates? Any good class in Black studies seeks to explore the widest range of thought voiced by Black and white thinkers on race and racism over the long course of our ancestors’ fight for their rights in this country. In fact, in my experience, teaching our field through these debates is a rich and nuanced pedagogical strategy, affording our students ways to create empathy across differences of opinion, to understand “diversity within difference,” and to reflect on complex topics from more than one angle. It forces them to critique stereotypes and canards about who “we are” as a people and what it means to be “authentically Black.” I am not sure which of these ideas has landed one of my own essays on the list of pieces the state of Florida found objectionable, but there it is.

[emphasis added]

There is much more in this essay that is worth reading. As I said before, the gift link above will allow you to read the entire essay. I encourage you to do so.

[edited]

[hesgomorrah]

evidently bonanza has grown on me a lot but pernell was right on literally all points lmao the scripts ARE clunky ben IS weirdly controlling of his three adult sons and they DO really need to stop doing brownface

[itsstillsweetiebythealtar]

I really need white Americans to understand that just because they all “played together as kids” does not mean that racism was not alive and well in your little precious hometown ffs

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 2, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

It’s commonly understood that Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral votes from three contested southern states in 1876 and thus took the presidency by promising to remove from the South the U.S. troops that had been protecting Black Americans there. Then, the story goes, he removed the troops in 1877 and ended Reconstruction.

But that isn’t what happened.

On March 2, 1877, at 3:50 in the morning, the House of Representatives finally settled the last question of presidential electors and decided the 1876 election in favor of the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, just two days before the new president was to be sworn in.

The election had been bitterly contested. Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden appeared to have won the popular vote by about 250,000 votes, but broken ballot boxes and terrorized Black voters in three southern states made it clear the count was suspect. A commission of fifteen lawmakers tried to judge which of the dueling slates of electors from those states were legitimate. In the end, the commission, dominated by Republicans, decided the true electors belonged to Hayes.

To make sure the southerners who were threatening civil war over the election did not follow through, leading industrialists and lawmakers made promises to southern leaders that a Republican president would look favorably on federal grants to southern railroads and would not fill government positions with Republicans in the South, giving control of patronage there to a Democrat.

But what did not happen in 1877, either before or after the inauguration, was the removal of troops from the South.

That legend came from a rewriting of the history of Reconstruction in 1890 by fourteen southern congressmen. In their book Why the Solid South? Or Reconstruction and Its Results, they argued that Black voting after the Civil War had allowed Black people to “dominate” white southerners and virtually bankrupt the region and that virtuous white southerners had pushed them from the ballot box and “redeemed” the South. Contemporaries had identified the end of Reconstruction as 1870, with the readmission of Georgia to the United States. But Why the Solid South identified the end of Reconstruction as the end of Republican rule in each state.  

In 1906, former steel baron James Ford Rhodes gave a date to that process. In his famous seven-volume history of the United States, he said that in April 1877, Hayes had ended Reconstruction by returning all the southern states to “home rule.” In his era, that was a political term referring to the return of power in the southern states to Democrats, but over time that phrase got tangled up with what did happen in April 1877.

During the chaos after the election, President U.S. Grant had ordered troops to protect the Republican governors in the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses. When he took office, Hayes told Republican governors in South Carolina and Louisiana that he could no longer let federal troops protect their possession of their statehouses when their Democratic rivals had won the popular vote.

Under orders from Hayes, the troops guarding those statehouses marched away from their posts around the statehouses and back to their home stations in April 1877. They did not leave the states, although a number of troops would be deployed from southern bases later that year both to fight wars against Indigenous Americans in the West and to put down the 1877 Great Railroad Strike. That mobilization cut even further the few troops in the region: in 1876, the Department of the South had only about 1,586 men including officers. Nonetheless, southerners fought bitter congressional battles to get the few remaining troops out of the South in 1878–1879, and they lost.

The troops did not leave the U.S. South in 1877 as part of a deal to end Reconstruction.

It matters that we misremember that history. Generations of Americans have accepted the racist southern lawmakers’ version of our past by honoring the date they claimed to have “redeemed” the South. The reality of Reconstruction was not one in which Black voters bankrupted the region by taking tax dollars from white taxpayers to fund roads and schools and white voters stepped in to save things; it was the story of an attempt to establish racial equality and the undermining of that attempt with the establishment of a one-party state that benefited a few white men at the expense of everyone else.

Certain of today’s Republican leaders are engaged in an equally dramatic reworking of our history.

When Florida governor Ron DeSantis last March signed the law commonly called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, he justified it by its title: the “Parental Rights in Education” law. It restricted the ability of schoolteachers to mention sexual orientation or gender identity through grade 3, and opponents noted that its vagueness would lead teachers to self-censor.

Under the guise of protecting children, DeSantis echoed authoritarians like Hungary’s Victor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who claim that democracy’s principle that all people are equal—including sexual minorities—proves that democracy is incompatible with traditional religious values. Promising to take away LGBTQ Americans’ rights offered a way to consolidate a following to undermine democracy.

DeSantis sought to shore up his position by mandating a whitewashed version of a mythic past. At his request, in March the Florida legislature approved a law banning public schools or private businesses from teaching people to feel guilty for historical events in which members of their race behaved poorly, the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act.

In July the Florida legislature passed a law mandating that the books in Florida’s public school cannot be pornographic and must be suited to “student needs”; a state media specialist would be responsible for approving classroom materials. An older law makes distributing obscene or pornographic materials to minors a felony that could lead to up to 5 years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Unsure what books are acceptable and worried about penalties, school officials in at least two counties, Manatee and Duval, directed teachers to remove books from their classrooms or cover them until they can be reviewed.

In January, DeSantis set out to remake the New College of Florida, a public institution known for its progressive values and inclusion of LGBTQ students, into an activist Christian school. He replaced six of the college’s thirteen trustees with far-right allies and forced out the college president in favor of a political ally, giving him a salary of $699,000, more than double what his predecessor made.

On February 28, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, the man behind the furor over Critical Race Theory and one of DeSantis’s appointees to the New School board, tweeted: “We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.”

Then, this Tuesday, the board voted to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the school. DeSantis has promised to defund all DEI programs at public colleges and universities in Florida.  

The attempt to take over schools and reject the equality that lies at the foundation of liberal democracy is now moving toward the more general tenets of authoritarianism. This week, one Republican state senator proposed a bill that would require bloggers who write about DeSantis, his Cabinet officers, or members of the Florida legislature, to register with the state; another proposed outlawing the Democratic Party.

DeSantis and those like him are trying to falsify our history. They claim that the Founders established a nation based on traditional hierarchies, one in which traditional Christian rules were paramount. They insist that their increasingly draconian laws to privilege people like themselves are simply reestablishing our past values.

But that’s just wrong. Our Founders quite deliberately rejected traditional values and instead established a nation on the principle of equality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they wrote, “that all men are created equal.” And when faced with the attempt of lawmakers in another era to reject that principle and make some men better than others, Abraham Lincoln called it out for what it was. “I should like to know,” he said, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?”

To accept DeSantis’s version of our history would be a perversion of our past and our principles.

But it is not unimaginable.

The troops did not leave the South in 1877.

[Photo: Matthew Brady, Rutherford B. Hayes taking the oath of office, March 4, 1877, Library of Congress, public domain.]

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tomorrowusa]

Ron DeSantis and his Florida GOP machine want schools in the state to teach that slavery was beneficial.

The curriculum includes framing labor skills African Americans developed while enslaved as potentially ‘applied for their personal benefit.’ Florida’s newly adopted K-12 curriculum for African American history is drawing censure from community leaders, elected officials and the state’s largest education organization for what they complain is a glossing over of shameful chapters in America’s past. [ ... ] Critics, however, argued the curriculum — which includes framing labor skills slaves developed as potentially “applied for their personal benefit” and a disproportionate conflation of violence against Black citizens with violence by them — as a “big step backward.” “How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from?” said Andrew Spar, President of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest union with more than 150,000 members. “Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them, (and they) deserve the full truth of American history, the good and the bad.”

According to DeSantis rubber stamp Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., slavery produced a lot of great skills in people.

For pre-Civil War lessons, middle school students must be taught “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” per a new benchmark clarification.

The new DeSantis curriculum partly blames the victims of past crimes.

The curriculum also notes that high school teachings about several instances of mass killings, including the 1920 Ocoee Massacre in which a White mob murdered at least 30 African Americans for attempting to vote, should include instruction on “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” “That’s blaming the victim,” said Orlando Democratic Sen. Geraldine Thompson, who worked to pass a 2020 law requiring instruction about the Ocoee Massacre.

Republicans apparently don't want the snowflake descendants of slaveholders and KKK sympathizers to feel sad.

The DeSantis whitewashing of history is part of his overall plan to pander to the far right in order to win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. It tells us a lot about the current state of the Republican Party and the extremists whose opinions hold sway within the GOP.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Florida reviewers of AP African American Studies sought ‘opposing viewpoints’ of slavery

This excellent article from the Miami Herald, looks at some of the previously unreported objections Florida had to the AP African American Studies course.

“It’s not really about the course right? It’s kind of about putting down Black struggles for equality and freedom that have been going on for centuries at this point in time and making them into something that they are not through this kind of distorted rightist lens."

--Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor, Brown University

When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.” But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments. For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.” In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been “removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe” and how those “plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americans.” In response, the state raised concerns that the unit “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.” “There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Pattillo is one of several scholars the Herald/Times interviewed during its review of the state’s comments about the AP African American Studies curriculum. “It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come. There is no other side to that in African American studies. If there’s another side, it may be in some other field. I don’t know what field that is because I would argue there is no other side to that in higher education,” Pattillo said. Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor at Brown University, said the evaluators’ comments on the units about slavery were a “complete distortion” and “whitewashing” of what happened historically. “It’s really trying to go back to an earlier historical moment, where slavery was mainly depicted by white historians through a white perspective. So to say that the enslaved and the sister African nations and kingdoms and white colonizers and enslavers were the same really misrecognizes the fundamentals of the situation,” Weheliye said. [emphasis added]

The entire article is well worth reading, and I encourage people to do so.

[bitchapalooza]

Transphobes talk about how "kids are being brainwashed with transgender ideaology" as if they dont brainwash kids with faulse/whitewashed american history and teach kids from a young age to drop everything and recite a pledge in honor of a faulsely heroic country that likes to hide its wrong doings even from the person whos supposed to be in charge of it

[minniti]

love mexican men in cowboy hats. vaquero tuxedo excellence.

[odinsblog]

“When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And of course, I believed it. I didn't have much choice. Those are the only books there were.

I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads. Under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing.

If one has got to prove one's title to the land, isn't 400 years enough? 400 years, at least three wars. The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question now?

What we are not facing is the results of what we've done.

What one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our history until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we the American people, we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other.

Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.”

—James Baldwin, debating William F. Buckley at Cambridge Union Society, February 18, 1965