mekka okereke :verified:
Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
You know the drill by now. I don't like talking about Black history. Americans know Black history. I want to talk about white American history. In other words, racism, and the erasure of both positive achievements of, and injustices suffered by, non-white people. That's what people don't know.
Try this: Ask your white US friends what the statue of liberty celebrates.
Now ask your Black friends. Or French folk of any color.
Kit Rhett Aultman
@alexthepres @ramsey @mekkaokereke It can be very town-by-town up in the north Georgia hills, but because the hills made bad places for plantations, some of the towns have a heritage of rejecting the authority of the Confederacy and that's trickled down in their cultural history. I forget which town, but it's near Blue Ridge, has some historical markers explaining the town's refusal of the cause.
Alex
@ramsey @mekkaokereke was this rural or suburban Georgia where you went to middle school?
Ben Ramsey
@mekkaokereke I was in middle school in Georgia in the early 90s when the state legislature decided to change the state flag to remove the confederate flag from it. We had design-the-new-flag activities in school and talked about why the old flag was racist. We all thought it was the right thing to do—in the hills of north Georgia! If they had that discussion today, I don’t think the flag would change. We’ve gone backwards.
mekka okereke :verified:
I used to live in Texas. I would get so mad at dudes I knew that downplayed the confederate flag, until I realized that their textbooks literally lied about the reasons for the civil war!
Showing them the articles of secession blew their mind. Some stopped rocking the flag. ??
Imagine how much less racist the US would feel if 10% of all confederate flags just disappeared. Disappeared!
mekka okereke :verified:
I don't want to talk about Black history yet. I want to talk about why if you grew up in the North or West, your high school history book likely talked about the "Articles of Secession,"
but if you grew up in the South, those parts are removed and lied about.??
Disinformation.
You can literally go and read the "Declaration of Causes of Seceding States," primary documents written by confederates themselves, on why they are Seceding.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980128034930/http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
Some schools refuse to teach this.
mekka okereke :verified:
??Is the confederate flag racist? Why did the civil war happen? Where were you born?
??Not racist! States' rights. Alabama!
??Super racist! Slavery, murder of Black folk. NYC
Can you be mad at Alabama dude when their history textbook (from the same publisher!) lies about this?
The same publisher prints two different versions of the same highschool textbook about the causes of the civil war: one closer to the truth, used in Northern states, and one that lies about the cause, taught in the South?
mekka okereke :verified:
People that got "As" in AP history, that didn't know this, are running to their favorite search engine right now to try and fact check this. Let's wait for them... ⏳
Why do US people not know their own history?
Before folks ask, "Why was I not taught this in school?!" Look at what DeSantis is doing to AP history in Florida. You know exactly why you weren't taught this in school. Because it's easier to get you to accept mistreatment of Black people, if you don't know white American history.
mekka okereke :verified:
An abolitionist designed the statue. A group of abolitionists paid for the statue. There's a plaque at the feet telling everyone what it's for. They named it the Statue of Liberty. It's arguably the largest anti-racism monument in the US, and the most recognizable anti-racism monument in the world...
Except people don't even know it's an anti-racism monument. They think it celebrates the huge influx of white immigrants from Europe that came to the US.
mekka okereke :verified:
Hint 1: It's called the statue of *liberty*. Not the statue of immigration or statue of independence.
Hint 2: Broken chains on the feet.
Hint 3: Idea for the statue started in 1865. What else happened in 1865?
Hint 4: What the sculptor said it's for? OK that's not really a hint!
Daniel 🏕️
@kbg @mekkaokereke yeah, this one caught me by surprise when I moved from Colorado to Texas for my Junior year in high school and took American History. I was like “WTF?”
Keith (karmajunkie)
@mekkaokereke just as a data point i grew up in south mississippi in the 80s and 90s. for most of elementary school i was in catholic school and we learned about them there, though i can clearly remember one teacher in the fifth grade who insisted the civil war wasn’t about slavery (why it was important to make this point so forcefully to a fifth grader is another matter). they were taught in my public high school, but glossed over.
certainly the states’ rights myth was taught more vocally.
A L Katz
@drahardja @kbg @mekkaokereke It was not the case anyway. You can comb through every single Confederate state's secession docs. You'll find "slavery" all over the place. "States rights?" Nowhere.
Dave Rahardja
@kbg @mekkaokereke Every time someone brings up “states’ rights”:
mike805
@mekkaokereke What they never point out is, slavery is not only evil, it's also stupid.
The South was so backward they could not maintain their own locomotives post-secession. The high tech industry was all in the North.
They did build a powder mill, by commandeering a Northern-made steam engine to power it!
The cotton picking machine was invented in the 1920s but not used until after WW2, because Black people were still effectively indentured before WW2. They were paid in fake money.
Paul Cantrell
@mekkaokereke @deirdresm
As these “not ready to talk about Black history yet” posts resurface in my TL, still hoping you’ll publish them as a standalone site or a book or a blog or something. I know for example that my parents would really really appreciate them — but would be just too bollixed by the UI navigating them on Masotodon. If there’s some way I and/or other here more expert in web design can help…please ask! These are too good and too necessary to fade into the social media past.
dpflug
@CGTKyle
Taught it "wasn't about slavery" in high school in Tennessee in 2000. "It was a range of reasons: states' rights, economic reasons, taxation, etc. Slavery had very little to do with it."
Thankfully, we had a student who studied up and brought notes to class, then tore into the teacher publicly.
@kbg @mekkaokereke
Kyle Burke
@kbg @mekkaokereke I was taught that it "Wasn't about slavery" in elementary school in Michigan in the 80s or 90s. It was because the South seceded from the Union.
I don't know whether this was a rogue teacher or whether it was part of the local curriculum.
Thankfully I had a historically-minded friend that filled me in.
Eeeee Woooo
@mekkaokereke IIRC In 2018 when my kids were in high school, our school district (Frederick MD) finally banned the display of the confederate flag. No more belt buckles. Or whatever. #SoLate
mekka okereke :verified:
Folks don't even know the reasons of the civil war or that the flag designer said "Let this be the flag of white supremacy!"
I bet 50% of them would drop it on learning.
NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Sr removed confederate flags from his car after learning about its true origins from a Black friend. His son, Dale Earnhardt Jr. vocally supported NASCAR banning the confederate flag. 👍🏿
Yes, some racists still like the flag after learning about it. But there are way fewer of them.
ThatAuntie
@mekkaokereke Teach, teacher!
Imagine spending a whole year of 7th grade in Texas History and NEVER learning that, in La Batalla de Puebla (The Battle of Puebla), Gen. Zaragoza and his Mexican troops defeated the French who were on their way to help defend the Confederacy.
THIS is why we celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Not for tacos and margaritas.
I learned this 30 years after turning in my Texas History book.
Bob Wyman
@mekkaokereke
People "Remember the Alamo!" but don't remember that the reason Texans wanted independence from Mexico was because Mexico had prohibited slavery.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/10/myth-alamo-gets-history-all-wrong/
TheJen is fucking pissed
I grew up in Texas schools in the 70's, 80's, and graduated in 91. We were required to take whole history classes in middle and high school that was nothing but "Texas history". Stephen F. Austin and the old 300 (which included one of my ancestors) James Bowie, the last stand at the Alamo and the defeat of "Santy Anny", on and on. I even went on to win a whole-ass state level UIL history competition for a play I wrote about it.
I did not learn until I was a big grown up girl the real reason.
Star12Mt
@phenidone @andrewhinton @mekkaokereke @kerileighmerritt My kid did a whole paper on redlining when they were in high school a decade ago. I'm embarrassed to say that that's the first time I really learned about it, definitely wasn't in my old midwestern curriculum
William
@andrewhinton @mekkaokereke @kerileighmerritt
This whole discussion seems a bit weird from the outside (Australia). We don't study too much US history in highschool other than the big wars, but the explanation given for the Civil War is straight up "because slavery".
We get the Tulsa bombing too but not redlining or related things like putting freeways through prosperous black suburbs.
Andrew Hinton
@phenidone @mekkaokereke Sort of the former — I just vaguely remember learning in high school & college that historians were divided about “central cause” vs “one of several causes” or “second order cause”.
Actually this article from @kerileighmerritt explains it well https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-we-need-new-civil-war-documentary-180971996/
William
@andrewhinton @mekkaokereke controversial which way, as in "how could they say it was slavery" or "how are they unclear that it was totally about slavery"?
Andrew Hinton
@mekkaokereke I remember in Ken Burns’ 90s documentary, slavery is posited as the prime cause by a Black scholar, which is framed as *a* perspective, not *the* perspective. And it *felt controversial* to me as a relatively well-educated 23 year old from the south.
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