A multitude of reasons should compel us to watch Ken Burns’ new PBS series about America’s often deaf and dumb response to the anti-Semitic Nazi genocide. For starters, the antipathy toward immigrants that metastasized on our shores in the early 20th century is eerily present today, thus proving that William Faulkner was right when he famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
But in addition to all the predictably grievous stats – only 225,000 of the doomed European Jews managed to reach America, foiling the Catch-22 State Department rules that were designed to deter them – the series packs a potent message. A message that’s clearly aimed at the book-banners and right-wing hacks who are currently determined to whitewash our flaws and “protect” our young people from anything that detracts from mythical American perfection.
Surely you’ve noticed what’s been going on lately. Witness the relentless attacks on “critical race theory,” a catch-all phrase for anything in a curriculum that examines past and present inequities, anything that discusses the gap between American promise and performance.
For instance (there are so many instances), a Texas legislator last fall launched a probe into 850 books that, in his view, “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race.” Model legislative bills, ginned up by various conservative groups, seek to prohibit the teaching of historical racism and the past struggles of marginalized groups. Tabitha Dell’Angelo, a professor of education at the College of New Jersey, recently said: “Right now, even the best-intentioned history teachers are fearful, because the structure is such that if they say a certain thing, they fear they will lose their jobs.”
Abby Reisman, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, said in the same forum: “(George) Washington was a slave owner. That (throws) grown-ups into crisis – ‘But he’s a hero!’ ‘But he was a slave owner!’ It’s like we can’t possibly hold those two thoughts together. But actually, kids can hold these two thoughts together … I think there’s a fundamental mistrust of what kids can tolerate and their capacity for complex thinking. It’s not the kids who are necessarily uncomfortable or afraid; it’s the adults, and they project that onto the kids.”
Fortunately, Ken Burns slam-dunks the whitewashers in the early minutes of the new series. His talking heads do the honors.
Historian Daniel Greene: “We tell ourselves stories as a nation. One of the stories we tell ourselves is that we are ‘a land of immigrants.’ But in moments of crisis, it becomes very hard for us to live up to those stories. I think the impetus should not then be to wag your finger at people in the past and think that we’re somehow superior to them, but to struggle to understand why (there’s) such a tension between having a humanitarian ideal and then living up to it on the ground.”
Historian Nell Irvin Painter: “Part of our national mythology is that we are a good people, we are a democracy. And we are a democracy, and in our better moments we are very good people. But that’s not all there is to the story. And I think if we are going to congratulate ourselves on our democracy, which I think we should, we also need to face up to the other side.”
Historian Deborah Lipstadt: “In the past few years, I’ve begun to wonder how serious America’s commitment to looking at some of the dark marks in its history really is. How can we learn from the past? Where did we go wrong? How can we not go wrong the next time?”
We’ll continue to go wrong if we marinate in ignorance and fail to confront uncomfortable past truths. (The Nazis’ anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws were modeled on the southern Jim Crow laws; in ’30s polls, two-thirds of Americans said that Germany’s Jews were “partially or entirely” to blame for the persecution they suffered.) Indeed, ignorance is the kindling wood for future conflagrations. Ignorance is what inspires some fellow citizens to raise their arms in modern-day sieg heils at rallies staged by a racist demagogue and thief of nuclear secrets. And if we adamantly refuse to learn from our historical failures, ignorance will prove to be our undoing.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2022
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