Whitewashing the truth
14th June 2021 · 0 Comments
Some politicians didn’t get the memo. Their decades-long practice of sweeping the parts of American history they don’t like under a rug and whitewashing, revising, or ignoring the truth and facts about American history are over.
Historians, Black and Brown authors, journalists, college professors, and news analysts are putting the facts about the country’s history on front street.
History should be informational and educational, aiming to preserve authentic and accurate accounts of seminal moments, not a narrative manipulated to promote falsehoods.
An example of his-story or whitewashing occurred during a recent Memorial Day celebration.
The organizers of a Memorial Day silenced Retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter’s mic as he delivered a keynote address on the origins of Memorial Day at a Memorial Day event honoring veterans in Hudson, Ohio.
Let that sink in.
Cindy Suchan, chair of the Memorial Day Parade committee and president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, which hosted the event, admitted the audio was ‘turned down’ because a part of Kemter’s speech was “not relevant” to the theme of honoring Hudson veterans.
Suchan’s excuse for censoring Kemter was a shameful justification for preventing those assembled from hearing Kemter’s account of freed slaves being the nation’s first Memorial Day Ceremony originators.
Suchan’s attack on Kemter’s First Amendment rights didn’t go unnoticed. News coverage of the event prompted one guy to tweet: “They cut his mike off. This is how far some people will go to Hide the REAL History of America.”
We searched for proof of Kemter’s statement regarding the freed slaves’ involvement in Memorial Day and found an e whitewash and revise the facts to fit a more palatable narrative for whites.
Several writers engaged in a boldfaced whitewashing of the facts by disputing the historical account that freed slaves held the first Memorial Day Ceremony a “legend” or “myth.”
When we visited Snopes, the oldest and largest fact-checking site online, we found the unvarnished truth about the event.
Here’s what Snopes found:
What’s True
In May 1865, free Blacks in Charleston reburied dead Union prisoners of war and held a cemetery dedication ceremony.
What’s False
The May 1865 event was not the origin of the modern Memorial Day observance.
KNOW YOUR HISTORY:
Memorial Day was started by former slaves on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, S.C., to honor 257 dead Union Soldiers buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp. They dug up the bodies and worked for two weeks to give them a proper burial as gratitude for fighting for their freedom. They then held a parade of 10,000 people led by 2,800 Black children, where they marched, sang, and celebrated.
In a formal sense, the modern Memorial Day originated with an order issued in 1868 by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, for the annual decoration of war graves:
Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30.
There’s an old saying: The truth hurts. Perhaps people are insecure about facts and fear the truth because they’ll have to pay for their transgressions if exposed. And that will surely hurt their wallets.
And if elected officials ignore truth and facts and deny their existence, they can escape accountability.
Why are politicians insecure about the facts?
Could it be that politicians fear losing political and economic power or getting voted out of office?
From the voting booths to the halls of Congress, they engage in whitewashing or ignoring the truth daily.
On Capitol Hill, White Republican males partake in the systematic racism that permeates American institutions by regularly talking over and rudely interrupting Black Congresswomen, including Representatives Maxine Waters and Val Demings.
And even they are exhibiting racist behavior; if you call them racists, they deny that fact.
The truth is White men fear data that shows that by 2030, the majority in the U.S. workforce will be Black and Brown people and women. They fear the loss of white privileges and control of the American economy. Whitewashing or ignoring the truth about current and past injustices benefits them disproportionately. That’s why they continue to do it.
The only way to end the whitewashing of historical truths is for those in power to correct past and present injustices, pay restitution and protect and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans. They and only then will we be the United States of America.
White politicians will never agree to pay Black people for the social and economic damage they endured in the past and still endure today. That would require too much money and too many mea culpas. To avoid paying reparations or providing restorative justice, politicians usually wait until the victims die, as they did with the slaves, and they say there are no victims to pay.
They’re doing the same thing now with victims of Jim Crow. They’re waiting until Black baby boomers die, so they can say there are no victims to pay. Meanwhile, they ignore calls for reparations.
Sometimes historians rely on erroneous research or the slanted views of those involved in the historical events they cover.
On the other hand, people who engage in whitewashing or ignoring facts and the truth do it to avoid being responsible and accountable for the negative consequences of the perpetrators, whether they are the perpetrators or people from the past whose actions destroyed people’s lives.
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Black people know about slavery, lynching, domestic terrorism, legal segregation, voter suppression, gerrymandering, abusive policing, and the economic oppression that generations have endured. It’s a history none want to repeat.
We can’t sit idly by while others take away our rights. We must call out the lies and the lying liars who tell them. We must continue to demand reparations. We must require elected officials who claim to represent us to pass legislation that benefits us.
Finally, we must demand that these officials get their heads out of their asses and save our democracy from politicians who ignore truth and facts as they continue to construct an authoritarian government that only benefits the wealthy.
This article originally published in the June 14, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
