Quote (thundercock @ Nov 2 2021 10:25pm)
We had this discussion recently where we both agreed that children should be taught history without glossing over the ugly side of it. I think the most important takeaway from learning history is that it IS nuanced but you don't want to miss the forest for the trees. One aspect of whitewashing is when you use a set of facts to weave a narrative that isn't correct. A great example of this is the Lost Cause narrative which continues to see success today. Anyway, Goomshill's analysis on Native American history is what gives the game away. If you pollute the waters enough, you'll come to the conclusion that "both sides are bad" and leave it at that. We should not teach history in a way that lends itself to false equivalences. That's not to say that we shouldn't teach the atrocities done by Native Americans but it needs to be in the context where most people see a forest and not the Gobi Desert.
And this is the product of decades of anti-americanism, the self-flagellatory belief that white people are the root of all sin and everyone else are the innocent victims of white oppression. The idea that one side is good and one side is bad, and there's no inbetween, and everything has to be put into a dichotomy of sinners and saints. And that is the definition of whitewashing. And that's precisely what's going on in schools under critical race theory. They consider it 'polluting the waters' whenever inconvenient facts and statistics show up to contradict that narrative. That its some kind of false equivalency if anyone dares to suggest that Native Americans spent a great deal of their history slaughtering each other and raiding settlements of white people. When kids grow up thinking every lynching victim was black because that's all they were ever taught, and teachers wouldn't dare want to mention anything that might give a suggestion otherwise because it would pollute the waters.
Its the difference between teaching history, and not teaching history. The people who want to teach history want the facts laid out in the open, the good the bad and the ugly, to inform people and let them make their own opinions. The people who don't want to teach history want only a subset of the facts, or 'alternative facts' that revise the inconvenient stuff, so as to reaffirm their own beliefs. And of course, anyone who has actually studied history can see the parallel between what CRT wants and what every totalitarian belief system has taught in human history, be it church inquisitions or communist reeducation. I'd want to say that the novelty here is that its aimed at teaching self-loathing to a people, but that's already been in vogue with the church before too.