If you Kneux better You'd Deux better Family!!!!

I was watching a documentary a few weeks ago named “The Neutral Ground”, a very dope documentary that talked about the controversy behind the Confederate Monuments. I learned quite a bit from the documentary, being there were groups trying to get the monuments removed in my city, New Orleans, for years and one monument in particular that was located by the Aquarium of Americas being an ode to the Ku Klux Klan. I didn’t take history as serious as I should have until I got to college. Thanks to Dr. Caldwell and Dr. Cashmere for planting a seed of wanting to gain a better understanding why things are the way they are. One thing I could never understand is why confederate general were immortalized and embraced the way they were. The South lost the civil war and it is plastered all in the history books, yet you still have people that believe different. Well that was something else that I learned in the documentary, people were taught this. I get it no one wants to believe something that they were taught as an “accurate depiction” of history to all but be a fairy tale.
 
“The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn”
- Alvin Toffler
 
I get it. History is uncomfortable and awkward. It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind which an accurate account of how African Americans have been treated and slighted when it comes to equal opportunities. In 2010, Texas board of education was trying to change language like Tran-Atlantic Slave Trade to Atlantic Triangle Trade and denounce that slavery played a central role in the Civil War. This proposal has since then been overturned but to read about parents not wanting their kids to not learn about slavery and how it marginalized a demographic of people is insane. And then there is this book called “The Lost Cause” a false version of U.S. history developed in response to Reconstruction that minimalizes slavery’s central role in the Civil War, promotes the Confederacy’s aim as a heroic one, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and portray the white south as the victim. This piece of literature was used in Mississippi text books until the 1980 and it took a federal court order to make them stop. The poisonous false narrative taught lessons to multiple generations of Southerners to uphold institutional white supremacy in part through public schools shaped by United Daughters of the Confederate, a still active organization.
 
So here is Critical Race Theory, something we need and why it is very important. Critical Race Theory is a way of understanding how American racism shaped public policy, interprets how the law produces and maintains racial hierarchy. It exposes racism as not being the product of individual bias or prejudice but something that is embedded in the legal system and policies. I think it keeps history accurate but you have dumb people like Ted Cruz claiming the educational plan paints all Caucasian people as racist. Again, the truths behind American history is not pretty at all from African slaves to the Indigenous people of America to the PoC born in the United States. How hypocritical is it to teach false history based on a narrative but ban accurate accounts because you don’t like the idea of how it will be received?  My final though on all of this is based on an African word from the Akan tribe in Ghana, which is Sankofa. In order to move forward in a progressive manner, the truths of the past need to be learned to help facilitate equality.  In Germany, the swastika was a symbol of peace and then after was used as a symbol of a many evil things. Germans took accountability for the swastika meaning something evil and removed it, not the knowledge of it and how it affected people to learn and move forward progressively.