As someone who works everyday on what we teach in schools, this narrative that people are systematically "destroying history" like in authoritarian states is really bizarre. I literally know of zero people who have tried to somehow destroy or hide history. Most of the debates actually just focus on historical emphasis and narrative.
Let me give a brief example. We've always taught about George Washington in schools, but textbooks and teachers often ignored his role as a slave owner. I guess you could say educators and the public were "hiding" the history of Black Americans. Social studies educators today don't "cancel" Washington, but we actually teach him and others in more complex ways. So now, I often teach both about him as a slave owner and in his roles as a general and president. My elementary social studies teacher candidates read a Young Adult version of Erica Armstrong Dunbar's
Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. I often teach the other parts of Washington through a critical analyzing of
Hamilton (Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton focuses on the traditional, presidential, heroic Washington). My students come out of my class with a deep understanding of the revolutionary and early American time period, but not just from the Founders, but from those who were enslaved by them too.
The only example of systematically hiding history I can think of is how Oklahomans hid the Tulsa Race Massacre. The inciting Tulsa Tribune article was destroyed (still no records of it) and it was excluded from textbooks. It wasn't until Scott Ellsworth's book came out in the 1980s that White Oklahomans slowly started recognizing the event again. But, as I point out above, schools have taught a historical narrative that is distorted, simplistic, and Eurocentric/White history for a very long time. That's changing because people are teaching more full and complete histories... or trying to. There's still plenty of racist history being taught, including about Indigenous nations and peoples in Oklahoma... that's another thread altogether.
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