American History In Whitewash

The Emerging Trend Toward Whitewashing History

MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews became livid

over Tea Party Queen Michele Bachmann’s mangling of history, asserting America’s founding fathers “worked tirelessly” to eliminate slavery. This, and the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives’ insistence on omitting Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution from their politically-staged reading—complete with a thumping of Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. when he objected to the omission of that passage, which obliquely defines blacks as three-fifths of a person, from the record—seems to form a groundswell of conservative revisionism intended to deliberately whitewash this nation’s shameful record on human and civil rights. The worldview of pampered housewives, shiny new minivan and wallet full of plastic, is a product of an indulgence of their maternal instinct to protect their children. Many if not most of these women protect their children from reality to the extent that the child encounters a brutal reality check later in life as he or she discovers that. In the real world, yes, we do keep score. By contrast, most black mothers I know—both privileged and struggling—tend to lean more toward preparing their children for the world we actually live in, as opposed to the color-coded Pollyannaish arena of Palin’s core constituency.

Nothing commentators like Matthews or the dearly and suddenly departed Keith Olbermann say seems to phase the Palinites or the Tea party crowd following Bachmann. No matter how provably inept, anti-intellectual, intolerant, churlish or incompetent these politicos are proved, time and again, to be, the right (or at least their wing of it) simply shoots the messenger, turning a blind eye and deaf ear to these reactionary wing-nuts who actually make a virtue out of ignorance. Matthews was incensed—I mean, more than usual—and I thought, at several points, he was going to walk off his set and quit. Like Mr. Matthews, I am flabbergasted. I cannot fathom the logic, I cannot figure out a single reason why—beyond giving in to base histrionics—anybody takes people like Palin and Bachmann seriously. Honestly: if there was a class, I’d take it. I really want to understand how rational, thinking people, like my buddy, end up supporting these folks. It has to be me, I must have missed an exit somewhere.

It’s easy to dismiss Bachmann’s ridiculous whitewashing

of American history as just her being stoopit. That’s my leading theory. But the fact nobody at the event challenged her, that it seems only Matthews is devoting any air to it at all, chills me to the core. This nation, that I love, that I hop we all love, enslaved people for nearly the first hundred years of its existence. Now, I’m not saying we should run around all day being mad about that. I’m not exactly sure what modern African America’s position on America’s shameful past should be other than to hold America to it’s core principles and core promise and work together with all races to make the future brighter than the past.

But, saying the past didn’t happen is a lie. A deeply offensive one. And, what chills me to the bone: conservatives are doing it more and more and getting away with it. Mostly out of ignorance: I mean, war movies were all John Wayne and bloodless bullet hits until Steven Spielberg had the clout to make Saving Private Ryan the most chillingly realistic anti-war film ever made. Ryan told a deeper truth about Omaha Beach, repudiating thousands of films before it which—following the Mommy and Me rule—presented war as something heroic and relatively safe. War is neither.

Slavery was awful.

Our founding fathers did noth-ing—absolutely nothing—to end it. They institutionalized it by writing it into our founding documents. Documents the House of Representatives shame-lessly gilded when performing their staged, selective reading of it. And I’m sitting here won-dering: is this how white people actually think? Is this the story they are teaching their children? That John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, James Madison and John Jay “worked tirelessly” to eradicate slavery? That’s the scary part: not that Bachmann or her speech writer is simply clueless, but that this is the story being told by the soccer moms. This is the American history being taught to children: slavery was bad but George Washington fought for their freedom.

The true story of slavery is brutality, exploitation and routine sexual assault of minors. No one can say, with any certainty, that George Washington raped African girls, but African girls were Washington’s property to do with as he pleased. There were no laws, no protection, from slave owners routinely doing as they pleased with their human slaves. This is a truth not being told to children for obvious reasons, but turning Washington into Batman is a hideous lie. For that reason, I sincerely hope Bachmann or her speech writer is simply stoopit. The alternative is an accidental revelation of a shameful and shocking revisionism going on among conservatives, the bed time stories they tell their kids about this nation’s history. Which would explain a lot about their routine dismissal of conservative racism, including the irrational and unbridled hatred of this president. They tuck their kids in a night telling them slavery wasn’t all that bad and making super-heroes out of child rapists. Blacks, by extrapolation, are ungrateful whiners holding a grudge, living off the public dole and looking for a big payout for something contemporary whites played absolutely no role in or benefitted from.

There are people who actually believe that, Many of them wearing PALIN 2012 campaign buttons and carrying huge signs of the president painted up like The Joker.

Christopher J. Priest
20 February 2011
28 August 2011
editor@praisenet.org
TOP OF PAGE

Slavery In
The United States

---

According to historians David Brion Davis and Eugene Genovese, who won major awards for their work on slavery, treatment of slaves was both harsh and inhumane. Whether laboring or walking about in public, people living as slaves were regulated by legally authorized violence. Davis makes the point that some aspects of plantation slavery took on a "welfare capitalist" similarity. Genovese claims that because the slaves were the legal property of their owners and at an utter disadvantage in the power relationship, it was not unusual for enslaved black women to be raped by their owners, members of their owner's families, or their owner's friends. Children who resulted from such rapes were slaves as well, because they took the status of their mothers, unless freed by the slaveholder. Over time as white men continued to take advantage of women slaves, the result was numerous mixed-race slave children and adults whose appearance was white. If free, such people would have been legally accepted as white under contemporary state laws, because they had more than half to seven-eighths white ancestry. The most famous example of such mostly white slaves were the alleged children of President Thomas Jefferson by his mixed-race slave Sally Hemings, who was three-quarters white by ancestry. Europeans who visited Virginia in the 18th century commented on the numerous mixed-race slaves.

However, the Nobel economist Robert Fogel prompted controversy by disagreeing that slave-breeding and sexual exploitation destroyed black families. He argues that the family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery, it was in the economic interest of slave owners to encourage the stability of slave families, and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals at an age when it would have been normal for them to leave the family. Eyewitness testimony from former slaves does not support Fogel's view. Frederick Douglass, who grew up as a slave in Maryland, reported the systematic separation of slave families and widespread rape of slave women to boost slave numbers. In addition, court cases, such as that of Margaret Garner or Celia, a slave in 19th-century Missouri who killed her master when pregnant the third time by him, dealt with women slaves who had been sexually abused by masters.

Except As Noted, Text Copyright © 2001-2014 PraiseNet Electronic Media. All Rights Reserved.
Creative Commons CC BY-NC (Text Only)