Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Whitewashing of American history is akin to Holocaust denial

In Germany, education about the Holocaust is mandatory in public schools, not only in the form of classroom instruction but also through tours of concentration camps or Holocaust museums for most students.

The purpose of this instruction is preventive. German society correctly surmised that providing children with the facts about the Holocaust is the best way to arm them against racial hatred and keep them from falling into the traps of their forebears who were seduced by Nazism and subsequently enabled the extermination of 6 million Jews. It’s also a statement to the global community that Germany takes responsibility for its atrocities and stands against racism and right-wing nationalism.

Contrast this to the Republican Party’s efforts to whitewash American history, which is analogous to Holocaust denial. Far from giving our children a comprehensive and unblinking look at our nation’s heritage to help them avoid the tragic mistakes of the past, several Republican-majority states have enacted restrictions or bans on the teachings about the role that racism played in the shaping of the country.

The Republican education measures have taken on a number of forms, but the general idea involves de-emphasizing or even banning education on racism while also airbrushing out the prejudices of our founders and other leaders.

Meanwhile, the GOP-led gutting of education further resembles Holocaust denial in that it’s about stripping the humanity from minority populations by obscuring their history and suppressing their story. Denying children the proper understanding of racism in our history opens the door for doubts that oppression occurred, or at least skepticism about its magnitude. This in turn can lead to children thinking that communities of color have no one but themselves to blame for their own plight.

Without proper grounding about slavery or Jim Crow laws, for instance, people won’t understand the similarities between voter-suppression laws being adopted in several GOP-led states today and a century’s worth of laws preventing Blacks Americans from voting. Without proper education about Native American history and the role that violent racism played in it, it’s impossible to fully understand the inequitable conditions on reservations today.

This is what denialism is, ultimately: a double-pronged weapon to ensure the dominant race is represented as pure and inevitably virtuous, while denying victims their history and humanity and thus blaming them fully for their lot today.

At least seven states have passed legislation along these lines, according to research from the Brookings Institution, while school boards and education officials in several other states have issued their own edicts. Meanwhile, some 20 states are considering state laws on the issue.

Those behind this propagandizing of education claim they’re doing it in opposition to critical race theory (CRT), even though many of them couldn’t come close to accurately describing the theory and many schools — including those in the Clark County School District — don’t even teach it.

The reality is that CRT, a scholarship framework that has been around since the 1970s, examines how racism in the criminal justice system, education system, housing market and other social institutions has led to disproportionate outcomes for different ethnicities and disadvantagement of communities of color.

Contrary to the disinformation coming from the right, CRT does not hold white people living now responsible for the racist actions of their ancestors. Rather, it asserts that white people have a responsibility to work toward undoing the damage of this institutional racism and strive to develop an equitable democracy.

The same concept applies to Germany and its Holocaust education. Germans aren’t blaming today’s children for Adolph Hitler’s reign of evil, but they are teaching those children that they have a humanitarian responsibility to be alert to hatred in their country and counter it when it arises.

Imagine if tomorrow, Germany announced that since it wasn’t the first or only society to commit genocide, and since it worked to address anti-Semitism and fascism since World War II, it would halt education about the Holocaust in public schools.

But change the subject to slavery in the U.S. or the genocide of Native Americans, and that’s exactly what the Republicans are doing. They want to wallpaper over our national sins with a misleading narrative in which the U.S. rose above its prejudices thanks to its egalitarian ideals and the noble actions of its leaders.

That’s pure denial. The truth is that Americans of color remain at a disadvantage to whites today over an array of metrics — educational attainment, income, homeownership, health outcomes and many, many more. That’s particularly the case among Blacks and Native Americans.

For our nation to meet its foundational ideal of equality for all, it’s critical for our children to know about these enduring inequities and to understand how slavery and the Native American genocide played into them. Fundamentally, the denialists violate a core tenant of Western morality — and certainly of all forms of Christianity and Judaism — that only by admitting sin and resolving to cease sinning can we be virtuous.

Again, the same thought applies in Germany, where Holocaust denial and historical revisionism present a threat of another rise of fascism. Thus children there are taught exactly how ethnic hatred looks and feels, so they can be watchful against it.

Here, the Republicans who are misleading our children are exactly like those who claim the Holocaust didn’t happen or was greatly exaggerated. They’re disarming our kids to recognize inequality while erasing the humanity of those who were oppressed, making them susceptible to being manipulated by those motivated by hatred.