Lies My Teacher Told Me (Chapter 5)

So the Native Americans were not the only ones who were being discriminated by whites. Black African Americans were too! And they may have been discriminated for even a longer period than Indians. I knew that Blacks had been discriminated and even were a little bit in the present. But this chapter made it clear to me why African Americans were treated that way. I did not know that there was such a tight connection between slavery. I did not know that the African Americans in the North had been discriminated, almost as bad as the South did. I did not know that the civil war had not ended slavery, and was merely the turning point  between slavery and racism. 

Rab mentioned in a previous lecture that "people are guilty when they are aware of the problem yet ignore it". One of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, is definitely guilty in that sense. He had kept over 200 slaves while people around them were letting go! I do respect Jefferson as a prominent figure in the history of USA, but knowing slavery was bad and yet keeping it is just outright absurd. What is more insane however, is the fact that most textbooks (and the Jefferson Memorial!) hide this fact from us and depict him as a "goody goody" hero! I cannot believe that America keeps the truth away from their people, and that the people themselves do not question their ancestor's identity. 

This gives me an unnerving thought. Maybe the same is happening in Japan! There may have never been slaves in Japanese culture, but there possibly are many instances where the Japanese government published textbooks which only tell one side of the story. I would really love to investigate this and revise what actually is my cultural heritage, but there is a bit too many homework for me to do that right now. Maybe in the summer holiday. 

Back to racism. The 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than 75 people is truly shocking. It's wrong for the police to keep staring while whites lynched black people! The instance where an all-white town would threaten African Americans from visiting their town really made me remember a japanese comic strip called "Billy bat", where an African American man does exactly that and is almost lynched by the Ku Klax Klan. 

I am the generation that Loewen mentions in the second-last paragraph of the chapter. Under 30, not knowing anything about the background African Americans endured, I myself cannot deny the fact that I felt some sense of superiority over African Americans and other Asians. Although I did not think that there was a intellectual difference between races, I may have thought that there was something which usually prevented African Americans becoming prosperous. It's time to stop taking in just what you are told. We must think for ourselves. As much as time allows