What Are They Afraid Of?

An excerpt from the Salt Lake Tribune - 

Leonard Pitts: Sometimes you wonder what they’re so afraid of

The powers that be have conspired to protect white people — and prevent Black people — from knowing our history. 

By Leonard Pitts, The Miami Herald

Not that the subject has ever been easy. No, as has often been noted in this space, this country has been positively Herculean in its effort to remain ignorant of African American history. From schools trying to ban it to state laws restricting it, to textbooks telling lies about it, that history is something we have long resisted.

But if the subject was never easy, it has seldom been as fraught — as filled with political heat — as it is now. The New York Times Magazine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” in which reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones had the temerity to reframe America’s story through the lens of slavery, seems to have tapped something primal in some of us; something that has moved them to spend two years condemning it; something that has states like Texas, Tennessee and Idaho rushing to pass laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory (which seemingly all conservatives fear and none can define); something panicky that is emphatically not explained by academic arguments over points of factuality.

For the record, I consider myself pretty well-informed about Black history. But it is not lost on me that most of what I know was learned on my own after my formal education ended, that I somehow managed to graduate an elite private university knowing next to nothing about it.

Even at that, I was more fortunate than some. School only left me uneducated. It left them miseducated, i.e., taught things that were not true. In an inspired feat of enterprise journalism, Michael Harriot of The Root recently dug up the high school history textbooks that would have been used by many of those who grew up to deny the reality of systemic racism or seek to restrict the teaching thereof. The results are enlightening.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2021/05/16/leonard-pitts-sometimes/