What We Have Excluded From History Books

In the worst possible way, it’s amazing what America has excluded from history books. The things that have been conveniently left out of our textbooks aren’t that hard to stumble across, yet nobody goes looking. Names like Henrietta Lacks, occurrences like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study are hardly known, the horrors that our own country caused ignored. The hands writing our history books are white, the perspectives from which they are written biased and single-sided, half the story deleted to mask the horrors we don’t want to mar our reputation. America is supposed to be a nation of liberty and freedom, that allows people the pursuit of happiness, that has a whole Constitution devoted to the rights of the people that should belong to everyone but instead don’t. Instead, we leave out minorities, tucking them into the shadowy corners of history that are only going to be discovered and commemorated if somebody truly cares. The atrocities our nation has committed that we have the audacity to conceal is truly terrible. We have been cowering for centuries behind our bold claims that we are a nation of liberty and justice for all when really they are lies woven to fill in the missing pieces in the tapestry of America’s history. Every old textbook holds watered down, sugarcoated versions of the truth, the truth that the white hands writing those textbooks wants the younger generations of America to hear. The person holding the pen has the power, and they are abusing it to the greatest extent possible, not by writing lies but by skating over the truth, leaving out important details to make America sound better than it truly is, to not tarnish the name we have created but do not deserve. We must shed light on those shadowy corners of history we initially chose to hide, to drag the horrors of our past into the center so people can truly understand what this country has done. Then we can move forward, staying in the light, but carrying our past with us to show that we will not let those horrible moments be forgotten, we will accept them and right the wrongs we have committed to the minorities scattered across this nation. America is a nation of justice and freedom, but it is also a nation built on slavery, built on scandals and horrors we choose not to include, that we choose to skip over when push comes to shove, and really that is the greatest injustice of them all.