General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "School decides to read book on Black astronaut to all students after parent complains about it" [View all]Lonestarblue
(9,969 posts)But what is needed is for traditional history books to remove the whitewashing that has been done over the last few decades and incorporate all people into the history of this countrys development. And we need to stop sanitizing history because parents dont want their delicate children to know the horrors perpetrated by white people on others. Its no wonder children grow up today with absolutely no understanding of anything but white history, even minority children. When courses are separate, its too easy to dismiss them as their history, which isnt the real history of the country.
Sanitizing history means that slavery has been called immigration for work and images of the Holocaust are photos of camps, not the emaciated bodies of prisoners freed after WWII or the stacks of bodies waiting for cremation. Obviously, some of this needs to be age appropriate, but I still remember a television program from my childhood, from the 50s or early 60s, on the Holocaust that showed such images. They were seered on my brain, but I understood the evil things the Nazis had done. Today, such photos would most likely not be shown, and not in prime time, or they would come with a warning from the moderator that the content might be difficult to watch. If we never see difficult events, we can just go on believing they never happened. Todays children are protected from so much that they grow up to be insensitive, ignorant adultslike Donald Trump.