Critical Race Theory and US history

Killing California Indians

From Reuters:

....conservative politicians, parents and right-wing media have deployed the term to denounce discussions of racism, "white privilege" or diversity initiatives in U.S. public schools.

Parents have bombarded school board meetings across the country with complaints that CRT[Critical Race Theory] is being used to promote an anti-white, anti-American worldview through racial sensitivity training for teachers and allegedly biased curricula that indoctrinate impressionable children.

At least eight Republican-led states have passed legislation restricting how the concept of race can be taught. In Tennessee, where legislation was signed into law in May, lessons cannot make students feel “discomfort, guilt [or] anguish” because of their race or sex....

In other words, conservatives don't want the country's young people to learn about the history of their own country, partularly how slavery poisoned American society from the start and the historical aftershocks that continue today.

We saw this kind of stupidity practiced by liberals, not conservatives, recently in San Francisco with the kerfuffle about a mural in a city school (see Teaching city children to be snowflakes and Lessons on the mural).

Conservatives now have another history lesson they won't want children to learn: the systematic slaughter of California indians by white men. 

In today's NY Times:

....Across Northern California — north of Napa’s vineyards, along the banks of the Russian River and in numerous other places from deserts to redwood groves — as many as 5,617 Native people, and perhaps more whose deaths were not recorded, were massacred by officially sanctioned militias and U.S. troops from the 1840s to the 1870s, campaigns often initiated by white settlers like Mr. Hastings who wanted to use the land for their own purposes.

Thousands more Indians were killed by vigilantes during the same period. But what sets apart the organized campaigns is that the killers’ travel and ammunition expenses were reimbursed by the state of California and the federal government.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that California state legislators established a state-sponsored killing machine,” Benjamin Madley, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said....

Hastings School of Law, Vice President Harris's alma mater, is named after "Mr. Hastings."

From Dwight Macdonald's 1945 essay, The Responsibility of Peoples: 

....we have followed Nazi racist theories in segregating Negro soldiers in our military forces and in deporting from their homes on the West Coast to concentration camps in the intcrior tens of thousands of citizens who happened to be of Japanese ancestry; we have made ourselves the accomplice of the Maidanek butchers by refusing to permit more than a tiny trickle of the Jews of Europe to take refuge inside our borders; we have ruled India brutally, imprisoning the people's leaders, denying the most elementary civil liberties, causing a famine last year in which hundreds of thousands perished. 

But this is monstrous, you say? We, the people, didn't do these things. They were done by a few political leaders, and the rnajority of Americans, Englishmen, and (perhaps---who knows?) Russians deplore them and favor quite different policies. Of if they don't, then it is because they have not had a chance to become aware of the real issues and to act on them. 

ln any case, I can accept no responsibility for such horrors. I and most of the people I know are vigorously opposed to such policies and have made our disapproval constantly felt in the pages of the Nation and on the speaker's platforms of the Union For Democratic Action. 

Precisely. And the Germans could say the same thing. And if you say, why didn't you get rid of Hitler if you didn't like his policies, they can say: But you people (in America and England, at least) merely had to vote against your Government to overthrow it, while we risked our necks if we even talked against ours. Yet you Britishers have tolerated Churchill for years, and you Americans have thrice re-elected Roosevelt by huge majorities....

Macdonald also cites the saturation bombing of German cities by the US and Britain during World War 2, atrocities that should also be pondered by American students. 

Maybe those atrocities show that the United States wasn't a racist power that only incinerated Japanese cities?

"Our" bombing of Dresden during The Good War.