<body><div>On MLK day in 2011, I was working in a small nursing home in my home county back in Iowa. I was tired and making $8 an hour helping 120 nursing home residents maintain interest in active lives. These were very old people who’d spent a lifetime on farms or running mom-and-pop businesses in the area’s little towns. Some had been born in log cabins or grew up without electricity. So I wondered what on earth would this group say about Martin Luther King, Jr and Civil Rights? I organized a small presentation in observance of the holiday. During the program, my captive audience listened quietly. Some dozed. Others rocked back and forth on their wheels. Aromas of Sysco food products drifted from the kitchen. I displayed photos of MLK and other civil rights leaders on a big screen and offered a history lesson of justice, integration, and equality. And then Lester said, “Well, our classmates were Black.”I was holding a Life magazine book aloft with a picture of King’s speech on the National Mall. I peeked over the top at Lester. “What?”Lucy, another resident, answered by question, “Our classmates were Black.” Lester looked at her through his tinted eyeglasses and nodded. She went back to rubbing her arthritic knuckles.“Yeah, the Marcy family farmed over by Bluffton. And then… I can’t remember her name… but she lived in town and her kids were in school with us too. All of them were so smart. They had to be,” said Lester nodding.By now, the book was resting in my lap and my memory scrambled back through my history classes trying to locate the story of Midwestern pioneers with African ancestry. I sat back abruptly in my chair and teased Lester, “Lester, there were not Black people in Northeast Iowa in 1930.”At this, I had everyone’s attention. Even my three sleeping audience members looked up. Lester looked at me defiantly and nodded his head, “Yes, there were too Black people living here.” Everyone chimed in to support Lester and began sharing memories of their classmates. They described a time when people in Northeast Iowa were living side by side and doing things together. They also described the racism they witnessed during those years. With reels of “Little House on the Prairie” spinning in my head, I was speechless.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1Tu9Ck_0vTeIYwD00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1Tu9Ck_0vTeIYwD00" width="880" height="542" ><figcaption>A blacksmith’s shop in Buxton, Iowa, an integrated town established by Consolidation Coal Company in 1900. &nbsp;(State Historical Society of Iowa)</figcaption></figure><h2>The Collapse of Identity</h2>The history of my country is important to me, and I need to know the truth of the land I’m living on. Without knowing my history, I’m at a great disadvantage. So why would some people or groups want schools to teach only a static and glorified version of American history?It’s easy to say that people who do not want schools to teach a comprehensive American history are racists – and they are racists. They want America’s story to be about Puritans, Patriots, George Washington, and a war for “state’s rights.” But wherever there’s racism happening white people need to take a deeper look and understand what’s going on behind the racism. And when we lift the curtain on where an acculturation with racism comes from, I think we encounter a generations-long identity collapse. The U.S. Census requests that I identify my “race.” This is because the United States established racialized categories which, historically, assign value and worth based on skin color. And even to this day, when I check the box “white” on the census record, I know that this category affords me a certain amount of protection and priority in public spaces. Systemic racism makes this possible. Early in the history with taking control of this continent, people coming from Europe were able to associate themselves with something new — a skin color. And skin color became an identity. Europeans were no longer from an ethnic group because they were now “whites.” They went from being people with a history and culture to being an ideology. The ideology asserted that people with white skin were biologically superior… unless, of course, you were poor. Destitute white people – who were, in fact, most of the Europeans arriving on American soil – were in a category by themselves. But that’s another story.I think that what’s happening today in the minds of racists – the ones who want to erase the history of everyone except for a glorified white story – is that they’re the inheritors of this severance from their humanity through racialization. They continue to live – as the immigrants who arrived here from Europe – in a reduced identity condition associated only with the color of their skin. It’s a collapsed identity. And in this frame of mind, they want to isolate themselves in a deception that they’re superior; they see nothing wrong with bringing harm and marginalization against people of color. It’s desperation to remain a priority, after ancestors made this identity switch, and these people haven’t realized how a connection with a skin color doesn’t have to be who we are. If we are “white,” and that is all we are – a color that we cling to or aspire to be – we’ve lost our own humanity.An answer to disrupting this racist apathy isn’t to disappear back into one’s ethnic origins attempting to reclaim something that connects us to being human. Locating ancestors and ethnic traditions can be very meaningful, and it’s fun. But it’s more liberating to realize how disadvantaged you are when you adhere to a white identity, centering it in your life as “normal” and “better.” It’s critical that we identify the layers of what a white identity ensnares us with: the constant pressure for perfectionism, striving, industriousness, othering people, and ideological purity. Naming these things will help people classified “white” to abandon them. Once you can see how white identity deceives you into thinking you’re super-human, it’s a relief. It’s better. When you grow into letting go of “being” white, you can really connect with the fullness of your own humanity. It’s worth it. <figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1Jrm4T_0vTeIYwD00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1Jrm4T_0vTeIYwD00" width="852" height="621" ><figcaption>A map shows that most Iowa counties had Black residents in 1870, according to the U.S. Census.</figcaption></figure><h2>“Sanitizing” History Hurts Us All</h2>Most Americans spend our time working to keep our families fed, housed, and on a path to economic security. When we’re classified “white,” we don’t see or we can choose to ignore the ways systemic and individual racism is harming our loved ones — family members, neighbors, Americans. I remember being more afraid for my son’s friends than for my son when they would go out together in the evening as teenagers. I didn’t have to worry about my white kid’s safety on the same level that I worried about the safety of his friends’ with African or Asian ancestry. I shouldn’t have to feel this way. Nobody should. But people of color have to keep this on their radar all the time. This is a crime: systems of white supremacy force us into unequal safety; unequal access; unequal opportunity.To make deep societal changes and abolish systemic racism, we can start by teaching youngsters a comprehensive history of the land we’re living on. American kids need this history so they can choose to become vigilant protectors of justice and democracy. If American history is omitted from curriculum, we empower systems that are here to divide and exploit us. When we don’t know our history, we’re vulnerable and weak. We prioritize something that isn’t even tangible: skin color. <h2>Being Strong, Together</h2>When I learned that Americans with African Ancestry were pioneers alongside my European family, I was stunned and I felt cheated. By not knowing the truth of my own land, I had been denied the chance to connect more deeply with my own humanity. I was disempowered and ignorant.I remember vividly that MLK day in the nursing home in Iowa because I was given an incredible gift from my elders. They gave me the gift of living memory and they showed me that racism is really only for weak people. None of them thought it was particularly remarkable that their childhoods were spent integrated with great diversity because it was, to them, simply normal. Diversity was ordinary. In a way, learning the history of the land I live on from the living memory of my elders was a radical experience for someone with pioneer colonizer ancestry. History textbooks erased the story of African American pioneers in the Midwest. But you cannot erase the memory of experience when our elders show us the way back to truth. I am profoundly lucky. This fall, let’s remind parents and school boards that youngsters deserve to hear the history of their land. We want them to grow up to be strong. We want them to be informed. We want them to locate their full humanity and to experience empathy, joy, compassion, and love. And you just can’t do that when you confuse who you are with the color of your skin. Knowing our own history – and preserving the words of our elders – will show us the richness of what it means to be strong, together. <h2>Additional Resources</h2>Here are some of the important books that can help readers discover a more complex and comprehensive U.S. history.<ul><li>38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End by Scott W. Berg</li><li>When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America by Paula Giddings</li><li>What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte</li><li>The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns by William H. Turner</li><li>When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa and the Farm Crisis of the 1980’s by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg</li><li>Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest by Leslie A. Schwalm</li><li>Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Road Island by Christy Clark-Pujara</li><li>Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields</li><li>Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls 1890-1960 by Michael A. Rembis</li></ul>Sara June Jo-Saebo is the founder of the <a href="https://midwesthistoryproject.org/">Midwest History Project</a> and author of I Have Walked One Mile After Dark in a Hard Rain, a book that uncovered new facts about an 1848 settlement of Black Americans in Wisconsin. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.</div></body>

Mountain View, CA

NewsBreak

Commentary: Revealing Our Hidden History Has the Power to Heal and Restore Us

On MLK day in 2011, I was working in a small nursing home in my home county back in Iowa. I was tired and making $8 an hour helping 120 nursing home residents maintain interest in active lives. These were very old people who’d spent a lifetime on farms or running mom-and-pop businesses in the area’s little towns. Some had been born in log cabins or grew up without electricity. So I wondered what on earth would this group say about Martin Luther King, Jr and Civil Rights?