Ross: Are kids really too delicate to learn the truth behind American history?

This week’s news about historian Nikole Hannah-Jones’ decision to leave the University of North Carolina has again focused attention on her 1619 Project for the New York Times on the history of Black America, and whether it should be part of the public school history curriculum.

It feels to me like some parents think their children need to be protected from their country’s history.

I know the project has its critics, but whatever its faults, the 1619 Project has definitely revealed one thing that is beyond debate: The American history textbooks that I grew up with were censored, if not outright doctored.

I was a pretty smart kid; I loved doing homework. Yet in New York where I grew up, I came away secure in the knowledge that slavery was a Southern thing and that the Civil War fixed it. I had no clue that all the colonies, including New York, also had slaves.

Those race massacres we’re now hearing about? Not a peep.

Reconstruction was just a word. The laws passed in the 1890s designed to disguise a new version of slavery? Never came up.

As a result, when I went to Atlanta for my first job out of college, I drove into that city thinking that seeing Gone With The Wind was all you needed to know about the Civil War. Atlanta was the new South, the city too busy to hate. Segregation was fading into history.

Except that for some reason, I noticed all the white people lived north of the railroad tracks, and all the Black people lived south. And when it came to the Civil War, you could sense it was still an open question about who the good guys were.

What were my teachers protecting us from? They didn’t hesitate to teach us about the Holocaust. I still remember the day we saw the films of the concentration camps. It was the most graphic thing I’d ever seen. You instantly understand why the Constitution protects religious freedom.

But there was nothing in our textbooks that would explain why Black people never seemed to live in the same neighborhoods as white people, even in the North. For some reason, that was a big secret.

Someone thought we couldn’t handle the truth — that we were snowflakes.

Well now, the rest of American history is surfacing. If there are mistakes in the curriculum, then fix them. If you want to debate why these things happened, that’s great!

But don’t hide what happened. Just because kids like me were treated as snowflakes doesn’t mean today’s kids have to be.

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