What if your race had known only tragedy throughout America’s history?
What if your people had been enslaved, murdered, persecuted and denied
their civil rights? And what if, instead of owning up to having
inflicted such outrages, showing remorse, asking forgiveness, and
making amends, those responsible, their descendants and sympathizers
denied that those actions had ever occurred or, if they had, they had
best be forgotten?

But what if the history of those deeds could never even be taught in
our schools, but shrouded in silence because it would only be
“divisive” or “racist” against those whites who had committed them?
Rather, let bygones be bygones! We should forget the past and simply
move on!

This is the white supremacist gospel being preached by some in our
country today, especially by protestors at school board meetings. It
is the New Jim Crowism that would leave no public record in the
classroom of the centuries-old infamy that was inflicted on the Black
race.

Moreover, these protestors add insult to injury by denying the victims
of this racism the chance to finally have their story told to
America’s children as our schools have done for the Holocaust.
Children deserve the truth, not fairy tales, even when the truth makes
racists uncomfortable.

Anyone with an ounce of humanity could not help but be moved when
learning about the brutal treatment of Blacks over the centuries.
Students would learn that the justification of slavery was preached
even from church pulpits.

They would learn about the KKK, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, fire
bombings of Black churches, racial segregation of our schools today —
decorously disguised as “school choice,” the assassination of Martin
Luther King Jr., the killing of George Floyd, and the freedom march in
Birmingham, Alabama when Commissioner “Bull” Connor turned his fire
hoses, attack dogs, and police truncheons on peaceful Black marchers
demanding their civil rights, as Americans watched aghast at their TV
screens as it unfolded.

It would be a national catharsis to know that America was finally
coming to terms with the dark chapters in its history and
not-so-distant past. For this is what great nations do that are big
enough, humble enough, contrite and courageous enough to admit their
past failings and vow to do better.

The beginning of healing is the admission of wrong! Great nations also
reverence the sacrosanct nature of the mind. They do not insult those
who have dedicated their lives to the noble profession of teaching the
young. They do not force teachers to indoctrinate their students with
a sanitized history that omits the entire truth about their nation’s
past.

However, teaching the truth is terrifying to these protestors who view
truth as dangerous, especially for their children, for it would mean
losing control over their minds. Schools that teach what actually
happened should be shut down because truth leads to social unrest, and
it is better to have peace based on lies. In a word, we are dealing
with an educational philosophy that teaches: Thou shalt not think!
Thou shalt not question! Thou shalt only conform!

These protestors abhor teaching about what happened to Black people
since this would mean the end of their white supremacist world. Their
protests are an assault on the mind itself, the importance of truth,
and the nature of education.

An education in its ultimate sense is not an initiation rite into the
myths of one’s tribe, but a personal struggle to free oneself from
those myths. It is escaping from Groupthink.

An education is not about fear of the truth or a blind acceptance of
White supremacist doctrine. Teachers resist such indoctrination of
their students. They want to teach, not suppress, the truth of what
happened, but these protesters know what happened and want to suppress
it lest it be taught not only to their children, but to everyone’s
children, as well, a.k.a. censorship.

Teachers refuse to aid and abet this fantasy of a dying white
Supremacy whose days are numbered as anyone knows who has checked the
demographics, for what we are hearing today is but its death knell!

A classroom is a sacred place, a temple of reason, not a recruiting
station for a white supremacist dogma that would ban the teaching of
Black history because it dismisses Black people themselves as
unimportant in their kind of supremacist democracy that is not a
democracy at all, but an ethnocentric, xenophobic, would-be fascist
dictatorship, and not the American democracy we know, cherish, and
want to preserve.

Teachers refuse to violate their consciences by lying to children and
shattering their trust in them, and when they are forbidden to tell
the whole truth lest it embarrass white racists, they refuse to betray
both children and truth

A Purpose-Driven Life

Once upon a time over the portals of the fabled Library of Alexandria
were chiseled these words: “The Hospital for the Soul.” This majestic
phrase captured for all times the eternal dream of the pure and
unfettered pursuit of knowledge and our need for quiet places like
schools and libraries to find repose in renewing the spirit.

Amidst the confusions of this distracted world, the Greeks never lost
sight of thinking about the larger issues of life and its ultimate
meaning. We must not lose our way amidst the obsessions of the moment,
they warn us, for in turning a blind eye to the concerns of our
humanity, we court our destruction.

The school and all that it stands for are now under siege for its very
soul. Paideia, that noble dream of classical antiquity in the
transformative power of education, the belief in self-enhancement
through knowledge, the single-mindedness in promoting the common good,
and an aware citizenry about political charlatans, this enduring
legacy is struggling for survival in these darkest of times.

The 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt referred to a coming
age of “terrible simplifiers” that would crush these ideals. We are
now in that age, with the school especially vulnerable in being taken
over by the toxic mentality of those with no understanding of a
school’s meaning and purpose in liberating the mind from all forms of
hatred and bigotry.

They reject the search for truth and the things of the spirit and
would replace them with the ignorance and intolerance of a white
supremacist gospel, a betrayal of what education has always embodied
since the Greeks.

The truth will make you free, but it may not always make you happy,
and it may even make you uncomfortable, which is always the sign of
growth and abandoning the delusion of “possessing the truth.”

Is there any hope for the moral regeneration of our nation when some
Congressional GOP leaders, state legislators, and governors
institutionalize this national amnesia about historical truth in
avoiding a long-overdue reckoning with our national racism?

Rather than denial, what we need from these leaders is honestly
confronting this sickness in providing moral leadership as apartheid
South Africa did in the 1990’s. Their bellowing silence, however,
speaks volumes about these leaders in high office.

Many are disappointed but not surprised that these “profiles in
courage” have not already offered a strategic vision for lasting peace
and reconciliation between our two races by having not at least tried
to convince their followers to confront our national demons to seek
moral rebirth. Instead, they have rejected the only lasting solution
to this tragic malady — a national examination of conscience.

This dismissal of the brutal treatment of the Black race in American
history from being taught in the classroom must also be seen within
the framework of that other GOP outrage of voter suppression, the very
embodiment of its disdain for Black voters, minorities, women, and
democracy itself.

These politicians would rather that their party steal its way to power
because they know that cheating is the only way they will win. It used
to be called “losing with honor” rather than “winning with disgrace,”
but that was a long, long time ago.

Suppressing the historical truth in schools and the votes of Blacks
and other people of color are two different forms of the same
censorship in the cause of enshrining a white racist supremacy in a
nation that was once a welcoming beacon of hope to all of humanity.

When Whites think about race, they think as Whites because they have
never endured racial hatred and discrimination. But if they had
suffered the same enormities as Blacks at the hands of a non-White
population, they would see the country that enslaved them in a much
different light.

A little role-play, however, evokes compassion and empathy, magical
elixirs that are good for the soul and can transform one forever! As
the ancients well knew, it is not logic that softens the heart, but
pity.

Fortunately, many Whites today do understand what Blacks have endured
in this country for centuries to the extent that any White person can
understand this. They deeply sympathize with their Black citizens and
are appalled at their fellow Whites, who even to this day are still
consumed with such unaccountable hatred.

They realize that it doesn’t matter what color a person’s skin is
because we are all human beings with a common destiny when we all,
indeed, shall be equal in very fact. They affirm our common humanity,
no matter one’s race or ethnicity.

What is hard for them to comprehend, however, is why all Whites cannot
see this. They feel a moral obligation to promote peace and good will
between the races, while living in a country where, almost 160 years
after the Civil War, Black Americans still find it impossible to vote
in many parts of our country or even to have their story told to
America’s schoolchildren, as it is routinely told about the Jewish
Holocaust.

One hundred and sixty years, and the hatred and bigotry continue among
those who take enormous pride in being God-fearing, righteous,
church-going people!

I am reminded of those words in the Good Book: If a man says, I love
God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he that loves not his
brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? (1
John 4:20)

There is a psychologically astute observation by the Roman historian
Tacitus about hating those whom one has injured because of the guilt
one feels at having injured them, which, naturally, makes one feel
“uncomfortable”!

Tacitus was characteristically much more laconic, Proprium humani
ingenii est odisse quem laeseris. It is human nature to hate someone
you’ve injured (Tacitus, Agricola, 42).

All of us are here today and gone tomorrow, and we sometimes forget
what we are doing and what it all means. What will be our legacy? When
the final curtain falls and we are resting in our graves, would some
be exultant to have these words on their gravestones: Here lies one
who tried his best to make America a Hell for Non-Whites?

The Danger of Empathy

The Desert Fathers of the 3rd and 4th centuries CE lived alone in
their caves and hovels in the Egyptian wilderness and began to have
visions. Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony gives a
literary artist’s portrait of why it isn’t good to be alone shut off
from the world. We need other human beings to keep us human and, more
to the point, to keep us sane.

When we take the trouble of getting out of ourselves, we are no longer
adrift in our own inner galaxy, but can mingle with all manner of
different persons and all the beautiful things we share in common with
the human family. We need this vacation from ourselves for balance and
healing, but if we are cynical or bitter, we can project into others
our own inner demons which we mistakenly believe to be theirs, whereas
all we’ve discovered are only our own.

However, I would be less than candid were I not to alert you that
there is a danger for some in reaching out to others through the
magical power of role-play. In fact, these individuals feel that
role-play is very dangerous, so dangerous, in fact, that they would
even ban it from our schools, such is its power in awakening
compassion toward others.

Role-play teaches the young many things, one of which is how bigotry
and hatred can blind us to the suffering of others, suffering which
those more powerful have made them endure.

It enables the young to feel the pain of others and be appalled at
those responsible for inflicting that pain.

It exposes them to the cruelty that one group can cause another when
they learn of the horrors of American slavery, the extermination of
the American Indians, and the persecution of the Jews down through the
centuries.

This discovery of the fate of millions who, through no fault of their
own, had to endure a lifetime of suffering merely because of their
color or creed, is a shocking revelation that remains with these
children for the rest of their lives.

Those who could torture innocent men, women, and children, while at
the same time priding themselves on being such virtuous, God-fearing
folk, leave them deeply confused and unsettled. It makes them
confront, perhaps for the first time in their lives, the inhumanity
that so often comes with power over others and the twisted delusion
that, while causing such pain, they are doing God’s Will.

It allows them to peer into the very heart of darkness to realize that
there are those of such bottomless malignity who, with a clear
conscience, could inflict such deeds upon others. Exposed to these
lessons, it is no wonder that these children resolve to treat
everyone, no matter their race or religion, with the deepest respect
and dignity.

The power of role-play is, indeed, dangerous because it would mean
that they could never understand how some in this world could demonize
innocent groups of people — Blacks and other people of color, Asians,
Jews, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community, when they see them for who
they really are: fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, grandmothers
and grandfathers who want nothing more in this life than what everyone
wants — to be free to find a better life for themselves and their
children.

Role-play is nothing else but the willingness to come out of ourselves
and identify with the pain of others, an ability that makes and keeps
us human. Those who possess this ability might even want to become
better human beings while they are still young, open-minded, and have
a sympathetic heart that beats within them.

If you are one of these young people, you might even want to remake
the world into a place of justice and kindness where everyone can
pursue their dreams without being victimized by those who cannot abide
those who are different. If you do this, then your youth will be
remembered as the Golden Time of your life.

All of these salutary lessons are the blessings of being made
uncomfortable, which is always a source of growth, insight, and a
deepened humanity.

Being made uncomfortable is the open sesame into a much larger world
which lets us feel the pain of others that can transform us forever
into more caring and sensitive members of the human family.

For out of the darkness of being uncomfortable comes the light of
discovery that we are all in this world together, sharing the same
fate, and helping one another.

Regrettably, however, this inner transformation is never allowed to
happen in some of our schools today, where teaching the history of the
Black race in America is decried by White supremacists and those
politicians who share their views.

Why are so many against this noble endeavor in our schools that could,
for the next generation, begin the healing of America’s racism about
which there is such obdurate denial?

Just listen to one possible answer: God forbid that role-play should
ever be allowed to be taught in our schools since the compassion it
engenders toward other human beings might prove fatal in infecting our
young.

Anything that awakens pity in the human heart is dangerous, but
role-play is especially dangerous because it might also weaken our
children’s belief that ours is the only true way, and that would mean
the end of our world.

However, since God is on our side, we righteously struggle against
those who would divide our great nation established by White men for
the White race alone.

We are called benighted, implacable foes of justice and truth when the
Lord has vouchsafed to bestow this great nation upon the White race
alone to rule as our sovereign birthright.

We are said to want to brainwash not only our children, but also the
children of others who demand that Black history be taught in our
schools.

The Federal Government claims that our doctrine of States’ Rights is
but an excuse to perpetuate hatred and bigotry toward non-Whites unto
the next generation.

We call it the inviolable States’ Rights over the tyranny of a Federal
Government that would impose its abominable falsehood of non-Whites
being equal citizens on God-loving parents like ourselves, who
champion the ways of our forefathers and, by Heaven, we shall not be
moved!

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