Red State Snowflakes?

 

Red States are afraid of letting their children learn some inconvenient and painful facts about our past because some of it may make their little darlins uncomfortable.

So they've passed laws against teaching American history. 

Get that? Red states have passed laws to make it illegal to teach American history that is unpleasant to read!

Slavery and racism is baked into our American history, and no amount of laws passed by these authoritarian red state governments will ever keep their children or anyone else's children from learning about it. Their anti-American history crusades are nothing more than good old fashioned book-burning, only without the books. They're burning the truth by outlawing the teaching of how our nation was founded and its Original Sin of slavery, followed by years of racism, terrorism, and murder by those who took the law into their own hands in order to deprive our African-American, Native American, and other minorities their natural born civic and human rights.

Those red states can pass their anti-American history laws, but they will not be able to stop their children from learning the truth. 

 "We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. " -- John F. Kennedy 

 “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” ― United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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"In recent weeks, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho and Texas have passed legislation that places significant restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms and, in some cases, public universities, too. Tennessee House Bill SB 0623, for example, bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” 

In addition to this vague proscription, it restricts teaching that leads to “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people.”

Texas House Bill 3979 goes further, forbidding teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.” It also bars any classroom from requiring “an understanding of the 1619 Project” — The New York Times Magazine’s special issue devoted to a reframing of the nation’s founding — and hence prohibits assigning any part of it as required reading."

A woman who taught social studies for 31 years writes:

"I taught high school social studies for 31 years. While unaware of critical race theory, in my classroom we covered the arrival of the first slaves in 1619, Virginia slave codes of the mid-1600s, the slave trade, the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Law (s), the Black Codes, red-lining, the fights during Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and more. We also covered the Pequot Massacre, the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, and more. 

I tried to emphasize that America is an idea we often fail to live up to but continue to strive for while recognizing past injustices. Sadly, as the years of my career rolled by, I came to question the veracity of the idea that knowing history prevents repetition of similar mistakes. It struck me that most people live in the bubble of the immediate present - not knowing or caring about the stories of the past. 

It seems to me that only strong, enlightened leaders can guide the public to "the better angels of our nature." The tragedy we are now faced with is that many of our leaders capitalize on people not knowing about the past; only caring about fear and ignoring context. What history does show is that we are in serious trouble."