Powerful U.S. senators, in seeking to defend American freedom and values, are again trying to prohibit the teaching of the #1619Project, a work of American journalism protected by the First Amendment. cotton.senate.gov/news/press-rel…
@SenTomCotton: “Activists in schools want to teach our kids to hate America." My essay: I wish that I could go back to the younger me & tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.
Only if one believes that the Black Americans fighting to force this country to live up to its founding ideals, who died expanding democracy and rights for all, are not real Americans, can one treat the #1619Project as teaching anyone to hate America.
Does this line from my essay sound like teaching hate for country? “Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.”
Does this one? "Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed."
What they are really saying is that a history that honestly assesses this nation's failings, and that does not make white Americans the exclusive heroes of the story, is unpatriotic.
While we are expected to see ourselves in the narrative of white heroes, they are unwilling to see themselves in the narrative of Black ones.
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