I grew up in the south, graduating from high school in 1960. It was a segregated, discriminatory, racist culture. It was a system that was disrespectful, unjust and hurtful to African Americans.
However, as I grew up in that culture, I didn’t think about how we lived as being wrong, sinful or hurtful. It was more like, that’s just the way things were. It was like the water we drank and the air we breathed. We were so immersed in racism that it was all but invisible to us. We didn’t have the eyes to see it.
The civil rights movement was coming into full bloom in my high school and young adult years. In the back of my mind, there started to grow a voice that said something was wrong with the way we were living. As I increasingly paid attention to that voice, I wanted to separate myself from the values of the culture in which I had grown up.
I consciously set out to extricate myself from the racism in which I was immersed. I was trying to separate myself from the air I was breathing and the water I was drinking. In struggling to do that, it was enormously helpful that the civil rights movement was opening the country’s eyes at the same time I was engaged in that process.
I could never have changed if I hadn’t been able to see the racism. Thankfully the civil rights movement was opening eyes all over the world. Having it laid out before us allowed those of us who wanted to change to do so.
Many years later, I’m aware that racism is still present, deeper and more prevalent than I knew. In our time, there are leaders in our state and around the country doing the opposite of opening our eyes.
They are passing or proposing a slew of laws, including “Freedom from Discrimination,” the teachers’ loyalty bill, which includes not teaching any “negative account or representation of the founding and history of the U.S.,” and something called “divisive concepts.” The attempt with these bills is to keep our eyes shut. It is an attempt to control minds and the future by not allowing students to have complete information.
It is hard to even talk about what these leaders are saying in these bills because the language is so convoluted and vague. But their purpose is clear: it is to intimidate teachers into not teaching and discussing a comprehensive history of our country with their students.
These laws are designed to threaten our teachers into lying by omission. In courts of law, witnesses are charged with telling not only the truth but the whole truth. The legislative leaders proposing and making these laws are doing the opposite. They are putting teachers in situations where they either have to lie by not teaching the whole truth or face criminal penalties.
If they succeed, we will be raising students who will believe they have an accurate understanding of this country and its history, and they will be wrong. As they grow into adults, they will have a very limited and distorted knowledge of the country and its history.
They will make decisions for themselves and the country that are flawed by their limited understandings. They won’t intend to hurt others but having limited knowledge, they will be making decisions that are hurtful and destructive to others.
We need to encourage our teachers to tell the truth about our country and its history. Sometimes the truth is complicated and multifaceted. With all the different sides that need to be covered, it’s sometimes difficult to tell the truth even when that is our goal. But the goal should be to get as close to the truth as possible.
There is an old cliché about those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Being deprived of the truth of our history is a sure path to repeating centuries of mistakes. It’s hard to imagine the suffering these kinds of laws will cause.
(Gray Fitzgerald is a former United Church of Christ pastor and lives in Concord.)