The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Hamilton Rosales: Teach real history of United States
By Ed Hamilton Rosales
Published: May 30, 2021, 6:01am
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Parents and teachers in Clark County are in a battle about the need and desire to teach truth to history, and to judge standardized measurements of success in an equity light.
The far right has taken to calling out “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, as an aberrant, hate-filled, divisive agenda meant to hold white Anglos accountable for all failings of this country.
To the point of CRT in public schools, I see no benefit to continue the lie that America was founded on the blood, sweat and tears of European settlers on this American soil. In truth, the sweat came from chattel slaves captured and carried to the continent against their will.
In truth the blood came from the murder of millions of Indigenous Native and Meso Americans who for millennia stood the same ground they were forced to carve up in the name of the European settler.
The tears came from the families who lost loved ones simply for being brown and Black.
Anglos made no effort to reward the hard lives lived nor the loss of those same lives when stood up for equality. In actuality when a brown or Black person stood up for their own welfare, they were brutally beaten, hanged, quartered and then shot (just to make sure they didn’t rise up).
And to be clear, this still happens to this day. We see it in police murder of Black men and women in Clark County, Washington and the entirety of the United States.
Last year we endured a summer of “community conversations” with the Clark County Council after Chair Eileen Quiring (now Quiring O’Brien) declared that systemic racism wasn’t real in our county. That drew the city of Vancouver into community listening sessions and a three-part attempt to claw the truth out of Quiring, who simply disengaged and wasn’t present for the Zoom meetings. (She kept camera and voice off for each session, so how can we know if she really wasn’t just out of office?)
Now white privileged right-wing parents are storming school board meetings, defacing schools and demanding a reversal of education that seeks truth and equality in the practice of teaching the students what our real history was, not a whitewashed attempt to prove our greatness by hiding the truth of the colonial takeover at the cost of human life that lies beneath our history here in America.
This is what absolute fear of loss of power looks like. Fear of losing the power held by oppression and the fear of loss of the privilege given them by centuries of oppression of “others.”
Books will be written about the white nationalism of our country, just as the books were written about the Nazis and the public’s blind fealty to them; just as it is now in our country.
Meanwhile, we brown and Black folks will continue to work to preserve our humanity. We will continue to be murdered at the hands of white power. We will continue to populate our country — at a rate that scares white men and women.
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