Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Do we? It's not 1955 anymore. We don't make movies where white settlers are the unquestioned good guys and the cavalry triumphantly blows away Indians. A year doesn't go by without a Hollywood movie or pulitzer award nominated book about the horrors of the African American slave experience. Nobody who has gone to school or watched a Hollywood movie on the subject in the last 50 years is unaware of the tragedy of native Americans or slavery.
|
Really? That's like saying racism is over because we had a black president. Just because authors write books and people make movies doesn't mean that the general, average, everyday person in America is really educated about the actual history about the genocide of and stealing the land of the Natives, the true horrors of slavery, etc. Did you attend school in the US? Because I did, and everyone I know did, and movies aside, actual honest to god education in this country does not give much information about this.
In school, history focuses on discovery of the New World, kinda skips over that whole part where Christopher Columbus and his crew were actually awful human beings, it talks about forming treaties with the natives, and then it glosses over all the bad stuff. Slavery the same way, it kind of skips over how long we allowed it straight to Lincoln and the Civil War.
The average American is vaguely aware that slavery was bad and maybe we weren't super nice to the Natives, but in general the history classes here focus on the rah-rah America part, about how we worked with the Natives for creating treaties, how we ended slavery, and we skip over the fact that we were actually at fault for a lot of really terrible things that happened.
Just for reference:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/o...s-history.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...ilemma/411601/
https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...oliday/409984/
Hollywood tells a dramatized version of historical events, but that is in no way an example that people in the US really know the ins-and-outs of their history unless they go out of their way to research.