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Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
You know the drill by now. I don't like talking about Black history. Americans know Black history. I want to talk about white American history. In other words, racism, and the erasure of both positive achievements of, and injustices suffered by, non-white people. That's what people don't know.
Try this: Ask your white US friends what the statue of liberty celebrates.
Now ask your Black friends. Or French folk of any color.
1/N
@mekkaokereke
People "Remember the Alamo!" but don't remember that the reason Texans wanted independence from Mexico was because Mexico had prohibited slavery.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/10/myth-alamo-gets-history-all-wrong/
I grew up in Texas schools in the 70's, 80's, and graduated in 91. We were required to take whole history classes in middle and high school that were nothing but "Texas history". Stephen F. Austin and the old 300 (which included one of my ancestors) James Bowie, the last stand at the Alamo and the defeat of "Santy Anny", on and on. I even went on to win a whole-ass state level UIL history competition for a play I wrote about it.
I did not learn until I was a big grown up girl the real reason.
@TheJen @bobwyman @mekkaokereke I'm actually related to Lt. Col. William Barret Travis, and i didn't learn until my 20s that he was on the wrong side of that war.
@adrienne @bobwyman @mekkaokereke
Indeed. We were simply not told, and it's only gotten worse.
@TheJen @bobwyman @mekkaokereke i still regard him with a certain amount of admiration -- he was, unequivocally, very brave and as good a tactician as anyone could ask for in that situation! -- but he was emphatically on the wrong side.
(Fun fact: had i been a boy child, i would've been named Barret William Travis)
@TheJen @bobwyman @mekkaokereke And i didn't even grow up in Texas!!! (But the Alamo is definitely a treasured bit of family history on that side of my family)
@adrienne @bobwyman @mekkaokereke
Ma'am, you have missed the entire point of this entire conversation.
@TheJen @bobwyman @mekkaokereke I don't think so, but i definitely wasn't clear. (sorry, i was pretty tipsy from nye champagne when I sent the last message, and that's on me). my point was that history is taught badly (and with overt or implicit anti-Blackness) everywhere, and for all sorts of reasons. My family didn't mean to be anti-Black but they were, in their retellings of this story.
@TheJen @bobwyman @mekkaokereke I don't treasure the history myself. I'm very angry about my uncle being on the wrong side of a war. But it took me a long time to get there bc of the way my family told the story.
Wilhelm Heinz Guderian was undeniably a military genius and expert tactician. He used his creativity and knowledge of military tactics to invent the blitz kreig, the style of warfare that the nazis used to rapidly conquer much of the world. He conquered both France and Poland, and much of Russia.
But if someone said that they "admired" him, that would sound... a little weird.
Because if you lost relatives to nazis during WW2, it is largely because of him.
@mekkaokereke @TheJen @bobwyman That's fair. I definitely don't admire this guy! I think it's the "doomed last stand" that gets me, I'm afraid, regardless of cause -- and that's a flaw, bc lots of causes are evil!
@TheJen class of '94 chiming in, my Bay Area, CA US history class included the whole story of TX v MEX... I had a really great teacher. Now it seems like the kids are lucky if they get US History at all. cc @bobwyman @mekkaokereke
@TheJen @bobwyman @mekkaokereke This was my experience as well. All of Texas History was about “independence “ with no more explanation than that.