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Ethereal Fairy Natalie's avatar

Yes, that was sad, but not unpredictable.

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JakobFabian01's avatar

If I was a teacher in Arizona or Tennessee, I like to think that I would have enough self respect to teach history exactly as before, but with a few appended "statements of impartiality." For example, after teaching the grim facts of slavery exactly as before, I would append the following statement:

"However, the state requires me to tell you, in the name of balance and impartiality, that many people, nearly all of whom just happen to be white, continue to believe that slavery was not evil or wrong but actually good and civilized. There's a word for these people that I'm not allowed to mention, but you can look it up on the Internet."

I would be less confident about what to do about the accusation that I was causing white children to feel some "guilt and anguish." I suppose I could try to defend myself by arguing that if conservative children don't experience a little guilt early on and learn to handle it, they may be traumatized by much stronger guilt later, an experience that has already caused thousands of white evangelicals in their Twenties to leave their church and become atheist pagan socialist hippies.

Maybe my best defense would be sarcasm.

In all seriousness, if we whitewash the history we teach to make white children feel no guilt, we will at the same time make nonwhite children feel that they don't matter. This is absolutely unacceptable.

I wish I could be more confident that the Supreme Court will recognize in these stupid, bigoted laws a clear and obvious attack on the First and Fourteenth Amendments and will strike them all down.

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