I'm Sorry

Revisionist History? Balderdash! (Alternate Title)

WE have been studying revisionist history all our lives, every last one of us who are now living and breathing and all who have gone through modern day educational systems. To say that the removal of Confederate statues and public memorabilia honoring the breakaway republic is revisionist history is balderdash. To say that removing racist and offensive team monikers and removing the Confederate flag from public symbols is changing history is bunk. WE cannot change history.

I do not often write regarding politics as I believe Jesus is a-political and I wish to be in line with His political thinking. However, I am seeing on my limited social media outlets, Instagram and Facebook mostly, that some of my friends and colleagues are decrying the removal of Confederate icons, statues, and symbols, as well as the removal of racially offensive corporate symbols, as an attempt to change history. I am trying not to think less of them for doing so and my struggle is raging.

WE cannot change history. To borrow a tired phrase, it is what it is. WE have been offering in our schools, our textbooks, our museums, and a host of other media outlets, a revisionist history constructed by those in power in order to shade themselves in some sort of romantic light so they can feel better about themselves and justify the continued oppression of races of people different from themselves. WE have romanticized the genocidal actions as WE tried to wipe out our American Native brothers and sisters. This is historical.

I was not taught of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in school and yet it is a part of history. It took the murders of several black people in rapid succession by white policemen to bring it to light for me and put it in the news. I would have loved to say that those murders culminated in the murder of George Floyd but sadly it has continued, and continued with a blind eye from those in the highest levels of our leadership.

I did not learn of the Trail of Tears in the classroom. I picked up a book about, and perhaps by, Will Rogers, a Cherokee citizen. The first chapter was about the hardships and degradations he suffered on the Trail of Tears. I was so ashamed that WE did this and so much more to inhabitants of our land that I could not continue reading. I don’t know where the book is. It is a treasure I snagged from a church rummage sale to support work we did at the Vah Ki Presbyterian Church and it is still in this house filled with hundreds of books. I will find it, take my medicine, and read it cover to cover.

WE weren’t satisfied that we had denigrated a race of people and forced them to live in designated reservations set in the most inhospitable parts of the continent. I am friends with residents of the Gila River Indian Community and while reading of their history and the history of a man who tied our church into this community I learned that WE had to take this reservation and dam the river which gave it life, beauty, an agricultural culture, and their identity and plunge them into a depth of poverty that made them wholly reliant on the WE that never publicized or taught this bit in our history classes.

WE cannot rewrite history. We the People can rewrite the history books and the anthologies WE use to teach history and continue the righting of wrongs. WE must name them so that We the People might be truly free.

We the People are making moves to stop the romanticizing and glorification of the vilest parts of our history and are naming it what it is, teaching what it is, fighting what it is – the sin of racism, the sin of discrimination, the sin of genocide…

There is one act, and one act only, in the history of creation that can erase any act in one’s personal history and that is the once given sacrifice God made of his son, God in the flesh, Jesus Christ. This one act atones for the actions of an individual who accepts it as true and confesses his sins. It does not change history nor the way it should be taught.

Sadly,

jj white

Tail of Tears Map