Rewriting history
I remember growing up there were all sorts of labels that Bad People could have. Racist, bigot, liar, Marxist(!), the list goes on. There was one that I never really understood, largely because I could hardly believe such people existed: Holocaust deniers.
This isn’t a blog post about Holocaust deniers per se, but as it turns out, yes there are people who, due to flagrant anti-Semitism and affinity for Nazism and other ideologies of hate, promote conspiracy theories that the Holocaust was a hoax or was greatly exaggerated. Like many other conspiracy theorists, even when they are presented with overwhelming evidence that they are wrong, they double down and cling to their preferred false version of history.
The reason I bring up Holocaust denial in a blog that’s not about Holocaust denial is that it seems to be providing the playbook for a lot of people right now.
It’s not a particularly complex play to run, either:
Notice that certain historical facts make something you care about look really, really bad.
Deny that those facts are true.
Try to convince others that 99.9% of people are just wrong about history and that your discredited, obviously biased take is correct.
Now, in most cases the conspiracy theorists running this play do not have very much power concentrated. With or without tin foil hats, they produce low-res YouTube videos from (I assume) a dark basement. Almost no one takes them seriously, so their ability to influence and harm is minimal.
One of the scary elements of the current political moment in the US is that a bunch of history deniers are in power. One of the GOP’s obsessions over the last 10 years has been censoring and controlling what is taught about US history. Not for the sake of accuracy or truth—heavens no—but for the sake of not making white kids feel sad about being white.
Because it’s all they seem to be good at, politicians pushed this agenda by creating a vague enemy to stoke fears: critical race theory (CRT). They talked up and down about the dangers of CRT, but none of the book censoring they did had the slightest thing to do with CRT (a very complicated legal school of thought about the ineffectiveness of “colorblind” statutes in the face of systemic racism). No, they just starting pulling books that taught about slavery, racism, and privilege. Because, again, those concepts might make white kids sad.
I’m writing about this mostly to rally us to a radical acceptance of history as it actually happened. It’s not only generally just better to live in reality rather than self-serving fantasy, but we actually learn and grow when we face difficult aspects of life and history.
My former colleague at The Christian Century, Amy Frykholm, reflected on a parent’s attempt to force her son’s school to ban Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved:
When a Virginia parent complained recently that her son, a high school senior, experienced “night terrors” after reading Beloved, I wanted to congratulate the woman on having raised such a profoundly sensitive son. Here was a person who could feel the horrors of that book in his own body and soul. What a gift. If he could feel that, then maybe there is hope for all of us, as we try to reckon with American history, with slavery and the world it bequeathed to us.
The horrors of the past are, by definition, horrifying. What does that horror do to us when we consider it—not dwell on it endlessly under mountains of shame, but to truly consider it, grapple with it, reckon with it? It breaks our hearts. And then, as we mend our broken hearts, we do so with more empathy and compassion and desire for justice.
So if parents really cared about their kids’ moral and intellectual development, they would want them to read (age appropriate) history books and novels about the slave trade, war, genocide, internment camps, residential schools, the list goes on. We cannot learn from history if we avert our gaze. If we deny it ever happened.
But, of course, learning is not what matters in these censorship campaigns. Comfort is the chief concern. When people tried to ban a Mark Twain book, Toni Morrison herself observed the attempt was “designed to appease adults rather than educate children.” And this is certainly the case with the current bans as well. Frykholm goes on:
What that Virginia mother wanted was to escape the reckoning of history—and Beloved is all about the impossibility of that desire. I can almost feel Morrison saying to her, “I understand you, sweetheart. I understand why you want out of this story. But none of us can escape it.”
If some part of the historical record makes white people look bad, or makes the USA look bad, or makes Christianity look bad … so be it. It’s an invitation for us to do better.
