For the better part of the last 3 months, I’ve been neck deep in textbooks, articles, and diverse dissertations among social scientists. The class I learned the most from was POLS 2070, an upper division political science class that discussed diversity and US politics.
During that time, I’ve learned about “Lies my Teacher Told Me,” and I thought I’d share a few new revelations. So sit back, grab yourself a slice of good ol’ American apple pie and some chocolate milk. This should be at the very least, entertaining, brow-raising and educational. There’s also the chance you might vomit a little bit. So read on, if you dare, to learn some controversial truths about our United States of America.
Thomas Jefferson was “inspired” to write the Declaration of Independence, claiming that “all men are created equal.” He was so inspired that he probably forgot all about those 175 slaves he owned back on his homestead of Monticello, Virginia. I’m guessing he didn’t think much of his ownership of other living people since his property ballooned up to 225 people at the peak of his slave ownership. Monticello, Virginia, I’ve been there and it’s nothing short of beautiful. I have newfound respect for those who made it such.
I learned that Christopher Columbus was an a-hole. Oh, and a rapist and murderer. Instead of giving the 10,000 gold that was promised to the first man to spot land on his voyage to find the back passage to the West Indies, he selfishly claimed it for himself, saying he saw a man walking with a torch of fire along the shore the night before. Right, when you were 80 miles off land, you saw a guy carrying a torch? That makes sense. Because he was “the People’s Hero,” Columbus supervised, allowed and instructed the killings of about 500,000 indigenous people in the 10 years the Spanish were making trips back and forth from Europe in the name of the Spanish crown. If the indigenous, who would gladly give of all their substance wouldn’t bring him what he wanted, Columbus would chop off their arms, especially if they didn’t bring enough gold. How compassionate. Good thing we don’t have a holiday named after this Grade AAA clown.
In another lecture, I learned that African-Americans couldn’t get interest-earning bank accounts until the 1980s. Their money was better off left under their mattresses or sock drawers. They couldn’t pass any savings along to the next generations, because there were not safe places to house extra cash. Did you know that when a black family moves into a pre-dominantly white neighborhood, the home values drop 3 to 4 percent in a year? “Redlining” is a real and common practice. These acts are still observed in 75 percent of real estate laws under the Federal Housing Administration.
One million black GIs returning from World War II were stifled and shocked when they couldn’t move into neighborhoods after they had just secured the beaches of far away lands while the USA claimed victory. Blacks felt as if they had been shafted once again, the first time coming just after the Civil War concluded. Abraham Lincoln promised every former black slave “40 acres and a mule” if they served in the Northern Army and swore to fend off the powerful Southern troops. When the North won, and Lincoln was assassinated, Andrew Johnson had all the power in his hands, and could have really united this country for the better. Instead of making good on Lincoln’s promise, Johnson’s inaction made him one of the USA’s most terrible and ineffective presidents of all-time by choosing not to honor his predecessor’s promise to all black men throughout the country.
**That anecdote reminds me of Isildur in Lord of the Rings: He has the power to banish evil for all-time, yet he lets the power go straight to his head, and he ultimately pays the price by not getting anything done under his administration.**
Way to go, powerful White Americans! Now I begin to understand why minorities hate white people so much. Here’s a fun fact: White Americans will be the minorities by the year 2035. Now I can laugh at the comment my former boss used to say all the time, “Why can’t they just learn English? No one is ever going to need to learn Spanish.” It’s good to know I don’t have to work for people who possess such narrow-minded traits.
I read firsthand accounts of border patrolmen lining up headshots on Mexicans and other Latin Americans on sight. The border patrol are trying to prevent the influx of immigrants who want to come to the United States for better opportunities, much like the patrols’ white ancestors did through Ellis Island. Only back then, certain races weren’t allowed to go through that port. Asians: nope (reference the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act: effectively banning Asian immigration from 1924 to 1965.) Mexicans: no. African-Americans: no, for the most part, excused if they were slaves or indentured servants. And of course, Arabs: no. Some things never change. Never mind that Europeans wiped out tens of millions of indigenous people that engaged in “awfully disgusting practices” such as bathing, sharing crops, and prohibiting private property. Surely, we as European Americans would not stoop so low as to the hideous and primitive habit of actually grooming ourselves.
And here’s one more, just for kicks and giggles.
When Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich were declaring the parameters to which the Germans, Polish, French and all under their rule would live by, they didn’t “write the book” on Eugenics or racial science. Nope, they went back to the good old annals of American literature and science. Thomas Jefferson and Louis Agassiz, contemporaries in the early 1800s wrote about the differences between the different peoples of the world: Slaves from Africa, men from the East Orient, those of European descent. How else to rule the peasants with superiority? Why, create the idea of race, of course! By creating a social agenda and putting yourself at the top of it because you have all the money and power, you can create a rift between people just by suggesting, “There really is something different about these people.”
Something tells me Thomas Jefferson was incredibly vexed at the end of the day. This man’s accomplishments were truly remarkable. Here he was promoting freedom, liberty and democracy on one hand, and a system of slavery and exploitation of non-white peoples with the other. Maybe Two-Face wasn’t just a DC comic book character in Batman. Maybe Jefferson’s ambiguous antics inspired this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character in the mid 1900s.
You can read all about how the idea of RACE and its origins appeared in, “Notes on the State of Virginia” by Thomas Jefferson. TJ will tell you all the reasons why blacks are inferior to whites, and might even convince you that “Homo sapiens Europaeus were much more enlightened than other peoples of this world, and therefore, loved by God on a greater level.”
“What a bunch of crap,” I say, but then, men like Jefferson have been elevated by historians, put on the grandest pedestal, and therefore ought to not be slandered or have their intellectual output challenged.
If the 3rd president of the United States wrote it, then it must be true. Truth is, Thomas Jefferson was an egomaniac, and an “Enlightened” jerk. If he really did receive inspiration from a divine source to create the Declaration of Independence, I’d imagine he lost his seat on the express train to heaven by following up the D of I by “creating race” and becoming the world’s first racist. All in an attempt to create even more reason to have “superior people” immigrate to the United States. Way to go, douche canoe!
Not only did Jefferson get bumped from my list of all-time favorite historical figures, he did a body slam down all 105 flights of stairs. Gone baby gone. Now, Teddy Roosevelt is climbing the ranks, even if he was the one that suggested a death tax on inheritances. Stupid estate tax!
In the long run, it seems we got a fair deal from the Nazis. We gave them the intellectual property of eugenics to justify killing 6 million Jews in World War II, and they gave us the concept of freeways and interstates. I’d imagine Hitler probably picked up a few other ideas on how to wipe out and displace countless generations of people from their native lands as well from US history.
That information was from five different lectures, just for starters. A sliver of information I received this semester. Like Neo, I ‘took the red pill’ and made the plunge, just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Articles, antiquated journal entries from historians, and research papers have enlightened my world and caused massive rifts throughout the memory channels of my brain. It’s completely ironic that capitalism and colonization have brought so much terror upon those peoples who lived on the American continent since the late 15th century and have been massacred, yet the USA is the exemplary country that so many others applaud. I mean, hey: we made the first Constitution. We had the power to VOTE, (minor details regarding the fact that only 37% of those living in the Colonies at that time actually possessed that right).
You have to admit, our history is pretty messed up. Columbus didn’t “discover” the American continent. Those living here knew where they lived. Even in their “savage, primitive and backwards” minds.
At the end of each class in Diversity and US Politics, it was almost as if Paul Harvey was in the background. Telling us like he did so famously saying, “And that, is the rest of the story.”
Here are some of the book titles and articles which I studied this semester:
“The Truth about the First Thanksgiving” from Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
“Notes on the State of Virginia” by Thomas Jefferson
“The Plan of Creation in the Animal Kingdom” by Louis Agassiz
“White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling
*“The White Use of Blacks in America” by Dan Levy, circa 1971
“The People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn
“Never Meant to Survive” by Aimee Sands
Federal Housing Administration, circa 1930
*Banned book in many states
