Disgusting, pornographic, racism was recently displayed in a Snap Chat video sent out by students from Short Pump Middle School. Confederate flags openly displayed at Cosby High School, and N-word laced text messages sent by Midlothian High School students in response to a planned protest by Black students during the school’s “America Day” celebration. The bullying of several Muslim students at an elementary school in Chesterfield, and continual harassment of students of color in Henrico have uncovered a culture of racial intimidation, cultural insensitivity and outright persecution and disruption within our public school system. Our children are “acting out” what is happening in our nation. The open display of White Supremacy, neo-Nazism and racist ideology in our public spaces and political debate have increasingly caused an erosion of public discourse, civility and decency among us. And our children are watching!
We are arguing about Civil War and Confederate monuments, claiming and questioning the historic relevance, cultural heritage and legacy all in the same debate. It is confusing our children and without knowledge and context they are displaying the same deficiencies they see in the adult conversations going on around them. Richmond, we have a PROBLEM! The root of the problem is inextricably bound to our inability to deal with the legacy of our historic past as Americans and as citizens of the RVA community. We have been passive participants instead of engaged constituents. Our history MUST be faced, acknowledged and aggressively taught not only to our children, but the adults too need to recognize that the history lessons we were taught in school were truly deficient in the TRUTH of our country’s origins and the place that Richmond, Virginia played in that story.
Race and racism, sex and sexism, religious freedom and expression, country of origin and how we all came to be called Americans is a complex and incredible history. The multicultural and pluralistic perspectives of that history have NOT been taught in our schools. The perception of the history of the United States of America has traditionally, to this day, been taught through that of the white male perspective. He has been the recorder of the history and the one who has been primarily responsible for its dissemination. It is time to wake up and get involved with teaching and learning our history so that we are able to engage in open and honest dialogue that courageously faces our past in order to build our future together!
“Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
—
HOWARD ZINN,
A People’s History of the United States
