On "Stephen Miller's seventh-grade term paper"

Our history lesson problem runs deep

On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, two days before Joe Biden was sworn in as president, the former president released a hack version of American history called “The 1776 Report.” With no source list and no citations, the 45-page document was strictly a laundry list of conservative talking points that included some nasty racist nonsense. (A sample? Appendix III: Created Equal or Identity Politics? Another one? Soft-pedaling the fact that the country founders owned slaves.)

Large portions were also found to have been lifted from Wikipedia.

Real, credentialed historians cried foul, and one of whom called the report “Stephen Miller’s seventh-grade term paper.” Pres. Joe Biden quickly canceled the commission.

If only that took care of our textbook problem. From a HuffPost report, the same nonsense found in the report can also be found in Christian textbooks that teach things like Pres. Obama gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement. From an Orlando Sentinel report, a series of textbooks sold by Christian publishers were reviewed by academics, who said:

The social studies books downplay the horrors of slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans, they said. One book, in its brief section on the civil rights movement, said that “most black and white southerners had long lived together in harmony” and that “power-hungry individuals stirred up the people.”

This didn’t start with Christian textbooks or the last administration. This has forever been the case. I’ve said this before, but: I grew up being taught the Civil War was really the War of Northern Aggression. My textbooks called it by its proper name, but the old bat at the front of the classroom held the grade book. I grew up in a sundown town, though by the time I came along, the sign had been destroyed by buckshot. The KKK met in a cave near my house, and I was told if I ever rode out there and found a truck or car parked nearby to keep on pedaling. I knew slavery was wrong. My Bible told me so, but a hillbilly devotion to dead ancestors prevented any careful examination of family war records. Before my time, townspeople lynched Black men in my part of Missouri. Then they’d desecrate the bodies, take photos, turn those photos into postcards, and send them out to friends.

I learned none of this in school, and I have spent my entire life unlearning the nonsense I did learn, and filling in the blanks that ought not to be there.

I am not alone in this. Surely we are at the point where we can do better, and just to kick things off, I’d start with this book, and then, for the hillbillies, I’d add this one. What if we just told the truth about our past? Imagine that.