You can not change what you refuse to acknowledge. Less than 24 hours since the new President and Vice President took their oath of office. It’s 5:00 am in the morning and I’m haunted with the question of how do we really make America turn away from her ugly past.
I’m thinking about the appointments that President Biden is making to his cabinet. All of them are important but I think the one that will be most important in correcting the course of the nation is the Secretary of Education. If America is to really change it must begin with telling the truth. For decade after decade after decade America as been guilty of telling and perpetuating the great lie. America was built on a false construct of race that sought to elevate one group of people at the expense of all others.
We will never be able to move forward until we tell the truth about our history. We are more divided than at any other time in our history because almost 80,000,000 million Americans believe and embrace a lie. That lie is strangling the life’s blood out of us and will not go away of its own volition.
The next Secretary of education must take on an unenviable task. The next Secretary must take on the task of re-teaching Americas history. The truth of who and what we are is going to upset some people because it will not conform to view they have of our nation. You can not change what you are unwilling to acknowledge.
We must deal with Americas history of slavery and the legacy that lives with us today. We must teach that the Civil War was never really about freeing the slaves. It was about economics and the preservation of the Union. We must teach all the children of America that reconstruction was an experiment. That the Civil rights act of 1875 was killed in 1883 by a Supreme Court that inspire of the 13th and 14th amendments still refused to see black people as fully entitled to equal citizenship.
We must teach children that slavery never really ended, it just took on more creative forms. Things like peonage, crop sharing, and contract labor were all vehicles for keeping black people in bondage. We must teach that voter suppression is not new to America. From 1865 until now whites have consistently sought to suppress the vote of non white people. We must teach the children about the insurrection of 1898 in Wilmington, NC. The burning and looting of Greenwood in 1921. The history that lynching as played in the suppression of blacks. We must tell the truth. They must know that there was a Red Summer.
We must educate our children regarding the countries history with the indigenous people. How America took the land they lived on for white settlers. How America made and broke treaty after treaty to the detriment of indigenous people and the benefit of white people. We must tell the truth. Yesterday President Biden corrected a wrong done to our indigenous people by revoking the Keystone pipeline permit. The question remains how do you make the tribes whole for this injustice? We can not do better until we acknowledge our history.
Our history of how we have treated our Asian brethen. How we imported Chinese labor to build the railroads west and once we were done enacted draconian Chinese Imigration acts that remained in effect until the 1960’s. We have real education to do.
We can not atone until we are ready to acknowledge that we have never lived up to the aspiration. There will undoubtedly be people who read this whose first reaction is that they bear no responsibility for these things. My response to that is that but for these things they would not be where they are today.
I could go on. I’m sure that there are things that I should have said but didn’t out of weariness. I watched the events of yesterday with a profound sadness. Electing Joe Biden was not the victory. The victory will only come when we are ready to teach our people the truth. When we let go of the notion of American exceptionalism and acknowledge that we have work to do.
President Biden you have an opportunity to chart a new course for America. The new course begins with your selection for Secretary of Education and a concerted effort to teach Americas real history. Without a full commitment America will continue the great lie until that lie consumes us.
THINK!!
EYES WIDE 
OPEN!!!
I IMPLORE YOU TO SHARE