Author Topic: Colonialism as viewed by Westerners  (Read 2364 times)

Zea_mays

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Re: Colonialism as viewed by Westerners
« Reply #15 on: October 06, 2021, 02:54:30 pm »
This article looks back on the history curriculum some prominent right-wing politicians were taught in school. These politicians, of course, have called teaching things like slavery "left-wing propaganda".

Not surprisingly, a lot of these politicians are so old they literally went to segregated schools. Racist textbooks continue to this day, however:

Quote
Tom Cotton, a 1995 graduate of Dardanelle High School, likely learned his American History from The American Pageant.
[...]

Cotton’s text never explicitly says the Civil War was about slavery or even refers to it as a “Civil War.” Instead, it carefully couches the “War for Southern Independence” as a clash that had to do with tariffs, Northern overreach, blah, blah, blah. The book also doesn’t quote any of the actual declarations of secession, only noting that the “rebel” Jefferson Davis told the despotic “King” Abraham Lincoln: “All we ask is to be let alone.”

And, of course, the textbook describes the period after the Civil War:

    Unbending loyalty to “ole Massa” prompted many slaves to help their owners resist the Union Armies. Blacks blocked the door of the “big house” with their bodies or stashed the plantation silverware under mattresses in their own humble huts, where it would be safe from the plundering “bluebellies”...Newly emancipated slaves sometimes eagerly accepted the invitation of Union troops to join in the pillaging of their master’s possessions.

This would be a theme throughout many of the textbooks. The few passages that described the lives of Black people were usually crafted from single-sourced narratives of enslavers or other white people. “The-thing-that-happened-that-one-time” becomes the mold for “this is how the slaves were,” which is the literal definition of stereotyping.

Perhaps the only thing more racist than this textbook is the name “Tom Cotton,” which sounds like the person you have to fight when you defeat all the other slave masters.
https://www.theroot.com/we-found-the-textbooks-of-senators-who-oppose-the-1619-1846832317

The problem of school textbooks being Western propaganda and ignoring the ignoble aspects of Western civilization has been pointed out for decades. (Although, unfortunately, books like this did not propose a leftist/pro-American competing narrative, so it has led only to cynicism on the left):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me