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The Travesty of "Woke" [1]

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Date: 2022-08-21  

Photo: Great Schools

In the summer of 2014 I went to a Dallas, Texas theater to watch the historical drama “Selma” written by “Paul Webb” and directed by “Ava DuVernay.”

The riveting film took the viewer into the historic 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama through the eyes of Martin Luther King Jr, the late Congressman John Lewis and other notable figures.

As I was leaving the theater I overheard a young couple walking behind me. Their conversation surprised me as they discussed never hearing about the civil rights march and the violent attacks on the marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Nor did they hear of the 1963 killing of four young black children at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama by white supremacists.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, how could anyone not know about these critically historical events in this day and age?

It didn’t take long for my indignation to turn to reflection.

I attended junior and senior high school in the 1960’s. To graduate students had to take a minimum of four years of history. I recall learning about:

The founding fathers, but little about the Constitution.

The Civil War, but not of slavery and nothing at all about “Reconstruction.”

We never learned about the KKK or other White Nationalist hate groups and the thousands of people who died at their hand.

We learned about WWI and II but nothing about how “Fascism” destroyed “Democracy.”

We weren’t taught about the U.S. “Japanese Internment Camps” and the thousands of lives it destroyed due to fear and discrimination.

We never learned about “McCarthyism” — Senator Joseph McCarthy’s so called “Red Scare” that destroyed the lives of innocent people even though it was fairly recent history then.

We learned nothing about the Vietnam or Korean wars even though the Vietnam war was taking the lives of hundreds of thousands young men during that time.

The list of omissions in our education was and continues to be, endless.

I was well into adulthood when I learned of all the historical facts that were left out during my education. Including the Civil Rights Movement which was happening right under my nose during my school years.

I recall being angry that it took years for me to learn the unvarnished historical truths and that my ignorance of facts may have somehow impacted my behavior or how I viewed the world throughout my life. With that being said, I excused and understood how that young couple was just as uninformed as I was, at their age, and not to be blamed. The real travesty of “woke” is our failure as a country and a society to educate our students. I’m not suggesting that we burden our elementary age children with the uncomfortable nuances of historical atrocities, but once they’ve reached an age where they can exercise critical thinking it is imperative that they are taught the unadulterated and undiminished history of our past. We mustn’t make them wait for decades to learn histories factuality's. “Woke” should be an endless journey of awareness that begins in our teens and continues throughout our lives. History should never be skewed by politics, it is what it is and belongs to all of us.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/21/2117972/-The-Travesty-of-Woke

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