History Should Not be Told by Bigots
The world was underpinned with false ideas as it developed within racist structures. Because some educational institutions have sought to ignore this problem, it still haunts us today. Fortunately, over the course of centuries, people have fought against racism and injustice. We were all born into a system that discriminates and depends on a false rendition of the historical record. We are never just individuals making things happen on our own. We can either choose to go along with the situation we were born into or labor to make it better. No one in any age had to be just men or women of the times. It is a sorrowful commentary that the majority of people often just blindly go along with the way things are manifested without conscious thought or critical thinking. Our life span is very short, we will never be here again, and this is precisely the reason why we should do the best we can for ourselves and humanity. We can go along with the forged narratives that prop up social and political institutions with misguided hero worship and race supremacy, or join those who have seen and directly experienced injustice and have determined that this life and our society can do better by word and deed.
This is reflected in the efforts by the governor Greg Abbott and the Texas legislature to prevent Black and Brown history from being taught in classrooms across the state. These bigots want to return to a time when history was white history only, when television was white oriented, when political leaders and power was concentrated in the hands of white supremacists, when the illegal killing of a Black man by police could be ignored, when schools were segregated, when Black and Brown people could not be buried in white cemeteries, and when Black people could not eat at department stores in downtown San Antonio right next to the Alamo, the so-called “Cradle of liberty.” When true history is brought up in discussions or in classes, racist bigots attempt to prevent primary source documents from being presented. They fear white privilege will be watered down. In discussing the importance of slavery during the Civil War, and at the Alamo, these bigots holler to the top of their lungs that “it is only our opinion” even when the historical facts prove that slavery was a central reason for the Civil War and the fight for Texas independence.
Racism is undeniably a cancer that has yet to be eradicated. We must discontinue completely our use of the term “race” and begin discussion about ethnic identity, cultural assimilation, and skin color. Racism has poisoned mankind for hundreds of years with serious consequences. Claiming to be “color blind” does nothing to address this problem. Color blind racism is the denial of the real problem. Racist whites do not want to talk about racism or slavery for fear that their ancestors will be discovered as hateful bigots instead of the fabricated royal descriptions that they grew up. Asa Mitchell (Mitchell Lake area) was one such person, lionized in Bexar County, but who was a slave catcher. Hendrick Arnold, a supposed “mulatto,” and one that some duped “historian” lionized at the Alamo, sold his own daughter into slavery. Using Black folks to lie about history is what they do. It is interesting, to say the least, how bigots go out of their way to find historians they can manipulate to tell false history. We will not let bigots tell our history without being challenged.
