All that whinging and hand wringing about slavery, taking the land from the Indians, and all that stuff is very annoying, especially when the assertion is made that our founding fathers had anything do to with all that. Even though they did. But still, it is very annoying to have the names of those who saw fit to found this nation besmirched by the so called “facts” of “history.”
And that is why the Tennessee Tea Party wants to make it illegal in the Mottoless State of Tennessee to teach the truth. Here’s the wording they propose:
“No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”
Emphasis fucking added.
According to one source, “Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”
And there’s a lot more where that came from.
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…Did they just say, with more words, “minority experience shall not obscure majority experience”? Do we get separate-but-equal textbooks now?
“Must suppress anything that makes the powerful look bad”
this is the message being sent loud and clear to me.
The question is, who really sent it?
Murdoch?
the Koch Bros?
That is exactly what they said: that the experiences, grievances, and suffering of people of color in the United States are worth less than how white men benefited.
As a descendent of slaves, I found papers showing where my 4th great grandmother and her 9 children/ grandchildren were all sold to different people after the death of their ‘owner’ in 1814. I really don’t know how you can make THAT story warm and fuzzy, or ignore that it ever happened.
I forgot to add WTF????!
I’m so tired of this shit. Now they are blatantly admitting to it and legislating it. No longer good enough, I guess, is “Dude that happened so long ago, what would you do about it now?”
I can’t begin to imagine the experience of the victims of this freaking bizarro reality. Slaves. What? Genocide. Never happened. Imperialism. Who?
I guess people will have to be swore in court now “…to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth…” since the whole truth is to be legislatively banned in Tennessee.
And people wonder why public education is so very important. You know these parents aren’t going to be teaching their kids how to think, so somehow has to…
Whaaa…?
I’ve… got nothing. I literally just spent five minutes spluttering incoherently at my computer screen. I would say, “The stupidity burns,” except that I get a bad feeling that it’s not stupidity behind this at all.
How can a majority of citizens have reached positions of leadership? They must mean members of some other majority group who reached leadership positions – as in women like Harriet Tubman, or right-handed people like Martin Luther King Jr? I’m sure that must be what they meant.
Because nothing is worse than made-up criticism about stuff that actually happened.
We are at war with Eastasia. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
all right! now that we are going to ignore our recent history, there is nothing stopping us from actually rewriting it.
should be a lot easier to get creationism into our classrooms now.
I need to invent a good set of swears specifically for this kind of thing in the US. In the mean time, I leave this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, about the effect of not teaching Civil Rights history:
http://images.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/TeachingtheMovement.pdf
Assholes.
lol, don’t teach the truth if it makes people who we idealize look bad.
Horrible. Here’s something funny. I was sitting in my living room on the Cherokee reservation looking at a children’s dictionary from the 80’s and it said CHEROKEE INDIANS. A tribe that used to exist in North Carolina many years ago.