U.S. History: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Continuing with our main story

tonight

, it's all about

history

, a subject so fascinating that sometimes we're willing to do crazy experiments like this. Scientists were able to imitate Nessie Moon's voice by recreating her mouth and her vocal cords with a 3D printer that allowed them to produce a single sound. Excellent, finally, an answer to the question scholars have been asking for years: what would an ancient Egyptian sound like if he had an orgasm while taking antidepressants, but look, sadly,

history

isn't always funny. strange mummy ventriloquism, can also be painful, as the United States was recently reminded because George Floyd's murder has forced a tough national conversation about the presence of this country, which is impossible to carry out effectively without reexamining its past and, unfortunately, that's not a conversation that all Americans are well prepared for because there are some embarrassing gaps in many people's knowledge of American history, just look at what happened a few

week

s ago when the president, in the middle of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, announced plans to hold a rally in Tulsa on June 19, a surprisingly tone-deaf decision for two key reasons: Next Friday, June 19 is Juneteenth.

Holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. In Tulsa, 99 years ago this month in 1921, the city witnessed the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the country's worst outbreaks of racial violence, recently portrayed in HBO's Watchmen. Now the reason they mention Watchmen is Many Americans first learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre, almost a century after it happened, by watching that show basically the night the episode aired. Many white Americans became saints. I had no idea this happened while many black Americans became saints. They will be scared when they find out this happened. Debbie at work will want to have a conversation.

Coverage of that Trump rally not only introduced many Americans to that massacre, but also to the very concept of Juneteenth, the day it commemorates. when Union troops informed Texas that slaves there were finally due to be freed two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. By the way, a recent poll showed that a shocking 48 of Americans were either not at all or not very aware of Juneteenth, which is not good, I mean it. It would be nice if almost half of Americans were unaware of Groundhog Day, the meaningless holiday in which some idiot dressed like Goth Willy Wonka holds up a non-clairvoyant groundhog whose face somehow screams: I have better things to do. , but Juneteenth actually means something and that's just one of the many gaps in knowledge that some are now realizing they just saw joy behar trying to explain why george washington statues should be left in peace and in doing so they learn something that george washington in addition to being a founding father and a great general and someone who was so instrumental in this union that we have in this republic also freed his slaves, so if you are going to defeat someone , defeat Thomas Jefferson, who didn't do it, who didn't free his slaves, no son disagrees, he didn't do it. freeing his slaves, he actually spent the

last

year of his life relentlessly chasing slaves who were trying to escape, he was a horrible slave owner, yes, it was like always.

Sonny Hostin is very right and Megan McCain is very present because, although Washington promised to free his slaves in his will, he specified that they would not obtain their freedom until the death of his wife, so only one person was freed immediately after death. of Washington among more than a hundred and in fact became a slave owner at only 11 years old, such a horrible fact. It's a little hard to know what to make of that, at least the story of him cutting down a cherry tree as a child and admitting it to his father by saying I can't lie becomes a lot less charming if the next part is his. parents who say thank you for being honest, george, as a reward, here are some human beings to own and the thing is that joy behar's version of the story, although distorted, is definitely more acceptable, especially to white people, and look for versions of history is a pattern that we have seen over and over again this year since the number one movie on Netflix during the protest following the murder of George Floyd, being the help

last

week

when Senator Tom Cotton said that the Schools should lose federal funds if they teach a curriculum based on the New York Times.

The 1619 bill that puts slavery at the forefront of American history and perhaps the most absurd disconnect came in the wake of President Obama's praise for John Lewis this week in which Obama advocated abolishing the filibuster if necessary to expand the voting rights. Tucker Carlson had this to say Imagine if a greasy politician showed up at his loved one's funeral and started spouting stupid partisan talking points about Senate procedure. Can you imagine you would be surprised if that happened? He'd probably go out desecrating a funeral with campaign slogans. What kind of person? Would that wait? What kind of person would honor a friend's legacy by continuing to advocate for voting rights?

Do you know what I can think? John Lewis would do that and the truth is that so many people misunderstand our history, whether by accident or by a lot. By the way, we thought

tonight

it might be a good idea to talk about how the history of race in America is currently taught in schools, what some of the gaps are, why they're there, and how we can fill them, and let's start with the fact that there are no national standards on the topics or figures that students should learn in school and state standards vary widely when cbs investigated this year it found that seven states do not directly mention slavery in their state standards, only two mention slavery white supremacy, while 16 list states Human rights as a cause of civil war and we actually did an entire 21 minute article on what's wrong with that argument, but this clip explains it much quicker.

The fundamental cause of the civil war is clear. What caused the civil war was slavery, the main cause. and the reason the south decided to succeed was because of slavery, so why do our history textbooks get it so wrong? They don't want to deal with what their ancestors did. Yeah, I mean, that sums it up pretty well and it can be hard to deal with what your ancestors did, trust me. I am British. One of our most famous tourist attractions is a castle where we executed people for centuries and now it is full of stolen jewels such as the cohen or the diamond that, according to the tower's website, was presented to queen victoria and that verb is doing a lot heavy lifting there, it was presented in much the same way that India was present and Britain took it and despite all the current concerns about how any change would politicize American history it is worth remembering that its teaching has always been policy.

After the Civil War, the battle over how history would be told in textbooks was intense because you know the same history is written by the winners. The South set out to prove who was wrong. an organization called united daughters of the confederacy campaigned for schools to adopt textbooks that would give full justice to the south, told librarians to write unjust in the south about those who did not, which is clearly absurd, it would be as if a librarian wrote unfair to voldemort in harry potter's one to seven or unfair to the whale in moby dick or unfair to l ron hubbard in leah remini's problematic colon surviving hollywood and scientology, but that impulse to downplay The horrors of slavery have marked how schoolchildren have learned about it ever since.

A Georgia textbook from the 1950s claimed that the master would often have a barbecue or picnic for his slaves, then they would have a lot of fun and Look, any excuse for slavery is bullshit, but we gave them sandwiches, sometimes it has to be one of the most horrible ones and some of them learned. the history of books like those I couldn't believe what they were told at the time just watched this school teacher from alabama review her 4th grade textbook no alabama some slaves were good workers and very obedient many took pride in what they did and they loved their cabins and the plantation as if they really owned them others were lazy disobedient and sometimes cruel I wonder what kind of slave I would have been I wonder if I would have been one of those lazy slaves who just weren't willing to work for anything they are disobedient because I just didn't want to be a slave, yes, that contempt is fully deserved there because, among other things, the idea that being a lazy slave was a character flaw rather than a frequent act of protest against a brutally unjust system It's infuriating and doesn't make sense. alabama sounds less like the title of that textbook and more like something you would yell no, alabama, stop that bad textbook, no, and those passages were in the standard alabama history textbook in the '70s, so the people who read them and may have been shaped by their content and are now 50 years old doing things like running businesses or, I don't know, holding elected office and while the newer textbooks may not be as atrocious, there are still problems earlier this year, one historian pointed out a rather notable euphemism at a current Texas school. book, this is a picture and the legend says that some American settlers brought slaves to Texas to help work in the fields and do housework, and you know, I don't think we should describe slave labor as tours.

Yeah, you're right, we probably shouldn't call. Slave labor is a euphemism on par with calling Hitler a best-selling author with a side job or the assassination of JFK a bad day or this a comedy show and look, state standards and textbooks are just a base here, what happens in a classroom largely depends. about teachers who have a very difficult job and often work with scarce resources, which means that, among other things, they may not be able to obtain updated versions of textbooks and some work very hard to correct poor materials, but Others can make things even worse if they don't have a musical ear. assignments and classroom exercises that you may be familiar with from watching local news like these.

This is the activity in question. It asks students to choose to be slaves or slave owners and then write a journal entry describing daily activities before civil civilization. war the question about slavery read you own a plantation or farm and therefore you need more workers set the price for a slave these could be worth a lot this grandmother from north carolina couldn't believe the homework they gave her fourth grader grade and in this game it's called escape slavery a slavery themed monopoly like a game students played in elementary school kids working in small groups they got this freedom punch card if the group was in trouble the card said They would be severely punished and sent back to the plantation to work as slaves where they are going to be hanged, they are going to be killed, what are you doing there?

You can't reduce a person's freedom from slavery to what is basically a Jimmy John punch card, and imagine what it would feel like to be a black person. child in that classroom or if you don't have to imagine, remember because it's not just the story that hurts here, but how they make you feel while learning it and the frequency with which stories like that tend to come up may have something to do with it. with the fact that the overwhelming majority of school teachers are white and many may have grown up learning the same biased version of history that they are now passing down and when you take all of this together, we are giving children an incomplete education in history and at the same time do real damage because those kids grow up just listen to this guy from Tulsa explain how he felt when he finally found out about the 1921 massacre that occurred where he lived when I went to visit us in 1998, he was sitting in a class of African American History and the professor was talking about a place where black people had businesses and money and doctors and lawyers and he said it was in Tulsa and I raised my hand and said no, I'm from Tulsa, that's not accurate and he was talking. about this massacre, riots, man what you talking about?

I said I went to school in Greenwood. I had never heard of this. That's terrible and his school really let him down. Think about the emotional whiplash that man must have gone through. He found out. something amazing immediately existed right where he lived something horrible had been taken from him and the story had been hidden from him and all this hadhappened less than a hundred years ago the dinosaurs died 65 million years ago and you would still be absolutely defective If someone just told you about them, I'm sorry, there was, what do you mean? everywhere and they were, how big could some of them fly, what happened to them, oh no, how come this is the first time someone has mentioned this to me?

It's pretty clear that we need to improve the way we teach our history, and while I obviously don't have time to go over all of that history right now, it might be worth slowly looking at three big mistakes that many historians think we make. What we need to fix in schools and beyond the first thing is that we don't fully recognize the history of white supremacy in America from its founding to the present day, and I know that every time someone suggests telling kids anything less than Jesus, they would have been best friends. with abraham lincoln, the rejection is fierce.

Watch Laura Ingram take a school board discussion about an anti-racist curriculum and turn it into a dystopian vision designed to terrify her viewers. Now every subject, every extracurricular activity, will be perverted to turn your children into mini Elon. omars are going to learn that capitalism is racist, history as conventionally taught is racist literature, most of it is racist, patriotic songs are racist, and the declaration and the constitution, of course, are racist. Are you sensing a theme here now? Laura Ingram might not strike you as someone who would follow anything other than black teenagers just trying to shop at CVS, but I think she's actually picking up on an issue there because since she mentioned the constitution, let's talk about it because that document is in many ways genuinely revolutionary and the foundation of an improbably durable democracy, but it is also infused with and inextricably linked to slavery and a legacy of racial inequality. from the three-fifths clause to the fugitive slave clause, the constitution codified slavery and made it difficult for people to escape from it and just because the constitution is steeped in racism doesn't mean it's canceled, not a youtuber who just Now he is realizing that it was wrong. doing blackface for 14 years and it definitely doesn't mean that children shouldn't learn about it, but they should be taught to see it as an imperfect document with imperfect authors who extolled the ideals of freedom for all and at the same time. codify slavery and that is possible to do, children can understand that there are things that can be racist and also other things, the constitution can be revolutionary and also racist movies can be romantic and also racist books for children can be charming and also Racist stations can be incredibly successful and racist, and if children are taught an incomplete story, they will never understand the whole story, or when they do, they won't have the framework to understand how the pieces fit together.

Here is a teacher who explains how difficult it can be for his students to learn. the whole truth about thomas jefferson what that kid is going to do then is say wait a minute why didn't i know this before i was running around here singing praises to thomas jefferson and i didn't realize that he is a r kelly of his time , so while it may be awkward, he says you have to be honest. I swear Ohioans suffer from the Underground Railroad. That's right, you ask him, yes, who would have been who would have been in favor of the underground railroad in class, every white hand goes.

I'm like, look, if you all had been on the Underground Railroad, you wouldn't have been underground, it wouldn't have been necessary. Well, first of all, it says a lot about Jefferson that if you went back in time. I explained to him who Kelly was and told him that they were comparing him to him. Child porn charges wouldn't be the number one reason he would be insulted by the comparison, but that professor makes a very good point the less you know. history, the easier it is to imagine that you would always be on the right side because the truth is that the history of the United States is a story of change of an America that does not want to be changed and that actually leads us to the second common mistake we make when to see the progress of American history as if it were constantly and inevitably upward.

Too often American history came down to there being slavery, then there was a civil war, then there was no longer slavery, then there was a civil rights movement, and then there was Racism was no longer just a smooth, steady upward arc, but the moment on both sides of those historical eras greatly complicated that arc because they were full of white hostility and ugly setbacks in the century between the end of the Civil War and the often overlooked but probably should be taught civil rights law Much more in depth begins with the reconstruction of a dozen years of real promise when the South was basically forced to rewrite its constitutions and allow the registration of black voters, that is, black southern men voted in the decades of The effects of Reconstruction were almost immediate, with approximately 2,000 black men serving in elected office during that era, including a number in congress and just look at these guys, one extra accomplishment, one extra facial hair there and sure you might think you can grow a mustache into a beard, try it, you can't, but in response to that. progress whites retreated and retreated hard the kkk was founded 2,000 blacks were lynched and by 1877 the south had regained local control here's a crazy story you may not know in 1898 the multiracial municipal government of Wilmington, North Carolina became the target of the only coup d'état ever to take place on American soil, in which a mob of up to 2,000 armed white men killed at least 60 black residents and replaced city councilors with white supremacists and whether it is the first Once you're learning about the only coup on American soil, you're not alone because what happened there is usually not taught at all or, as the author of a book about that massacre points out, talked about in very, very misleading ways.

Here is a quote from a textbook from 1949. several blacks were imprisoned for starting a riot and a new white administration took over the government in Wilmington end of quote, yes, that's it, and that's not just denying the what happened, it's even worse, it's blaming the victims, technically you shouldn't even call. It's both a history book and a bullshit book because we feel a little weird about all that racist violence and Wilmington wasn't even at the halfway point of that century of regression and the Laura Ingrams of the world would probably say yes. All of that is ugly, but in a sign of American exceptionalism, the civil rights movement ended all of that when Martin Luther King's dream came true and that is the version most Americans are taught in school. , but he leaves a lot out, in fact, he takes the march to Washington. actually that wasn't his full name, it was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the economic justice part was front and center.

King actually became more outspoken on that topic in the years that followed, and King himself understood why that was the case. It's harder to make progress on that front, it didn't cost the nation a penny to get the lunch count right, it didn't cost the nation a penny to secure the right to vote, but now we're dealing with issues that can't be resolved. without the nation. spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power, yes, it turns out that Martin Luther King had more than one dream and one of them was about the redistribution of wealth, so while I know it's easy to distort the entire legacy from King to that one dizzying speech. point to the cast of this is us and say: see, we all did it, everything is fixed now, the truth is that the civil rights movement was already messier, more radical and, fundamentally, was frustrated in more objectives than it many of us were taught in school and that actually brings us to the bottom line here, which is that we don't connect the dots to the present and those dots are very much there, look at the black and white wage and wealth gaps, both are older now than when King gave that speech. and our housing and education systems, even in liberal cities like New York and Los Angeles, remain shamefully segregated and if history is not taught properly all you see are those effects and not the causes, when the truth is that you can trace a straight line from the return of plantation land to former Confederates after the Civil War through massive homestead law land transfers, primarily to white people through the growth of suburbs in the 20th century, where the line Red tape prevented blacks from moving into white neighborhoods across the country.

Just listen to this woman from Levertown, Pennsylvania, explain her objections to a black family moving to the city in 1957 with real honesty. We like the advantages that Levittown seemed to offer compared to other cities and understood that it was going to be all white. They are very happy to buy a house here. Do you think a black family moving here will affect the community as a whole? Definitely the problem with this integration business is that in the end you will probably end up mixing socially and you will have a good I think their goal is intermarriage and being equal to white people.

It's always strange to hear someone, whether or not they seem like a Betty Crocker-framed summer casual human being, being treated equally as something negative. It's like listening to someone say the whole problem with putting. graham crackers, chocolate bars and marshmallows together we could end up with s'mores, yes exactly, that's good, just a monster wouldn't want that and you might not be surprised to see that someone was incredibly racist in the 1950s , but one of The problem with the way we teach history is that it too often fades after the civil rights movement and when you skip over the last half century you can't see the process by which white supremacy, rather than disappear, it simply adapted. and perhaps no one clarified this process more than lee atwater, an important republican campaign strategist who worked, among others, for ronald reagan and george h.w bush.

Here he is explaining the entire game in 1981 and I will warn you that you are about to listen. the n word a lot, you start in 1954 saying that in 1968 you can't say that your back hurts, so you say things like forcibly breaking up states' rights and all that and you're getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes and all these things that you are talking about are totally economic things and the resulting problem is that black people are harmed more than white people, we want to reduce this and we want something much more abstract than even the issue of bus transportation and a hell of a lot more abstract than ever ever holy now he's obviously too comfortable with that word, you tend to hear it come out so softly whether it's in Tarantino movies or online forums where white kids play video games together, but actually that's a Pretty concise story. of a certain thread in politics over the last half century that brings us to today, literally today's Wednesday, which is when the president of the United States, announcing a rollback of an Obama-era government under the law fair housing, sent out a tweet in which he informed everyone who lives his suburban lifestyle that they will no longer be bothered or financially harmed by the construction of low-income housing in their neighborhoods and that it is basically a promise of campaign put together by lee atwater and designed to win over this woman who is probably already dead and the notable thing is not that Trump is racist, which is not even remotely surprising, but how perfectly he fits into a systemic racism that has been established in this country from the beginning and will still be here when he is gone and if children are not taught this, what chance do they have of understanding what is happening right now?

Obviously, you would need to calibrate this for each age group. No one is suggesting playing Lee Atwater with two third graders, but it's a bit. Just like in sex ed, you don't jump right into ejaculation, which by the way is good sex advice for anyone with a penis, but we also don't spend the first semester of sex ed teaching kids who fell from the sky. by stalking because then they will have to unlearn that and I know that addressing errors like these will not be easy; there will be bad faith accusations that doing so is political, although I would argue that it is no more political than the decisions we have made to We teach history as we do now and no doubt some parents will instinctively resist this back in 2010 when Texas was reviewing theirstate standards, one parent made it very clear that the main story he wanted his children to be taught was that of American exceptionalism.

I want my kids to know when they leave school about America that the worst day in America beats the best day in any other country. It seems like there becomes a lot of focus on the negative history of America instead of saying uh oh, here. for example, slavery instead of, you know, looking at it from a positive perspective, that Americans overcame something as evil as slavery and that we're still a great nation today, it should be a testament to the kind of American spirit that exists in this country. there's a lot to unpack first, your worst day in america really depends on who you are and more importantly when you are there's a reason for example marty mcfly was white because black people generally don't hang out with

john

c impersonators calhoun who are obsessed with If we go back to the 1950s, Americans did not overcome slavery, certain Americans defeated other Americans and slavery ended, but whether it was overcome is another question and look, I understand that any parent wants their children are taught something inspiring of what it is essentially. asking your children to be misinformed and that is not going to be of any use to them when they grow up, it is not going to be of any use to any of us because ignoring history that you don't like is not a victimless act and an American history that ignores white supremacy is a white supremacist history of America, which matters because while it may seem obvious, the story is not over yet, it is still being written and you know who understood that John Lewis is someone who is a very important part of American history and he knew. the importance of drawing a line from the past to the present, that could be why one of the last things he did before he died was visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington.

He even wrote an op-ed that will be published posthumously that speaks directly to what we've been talking about tonight, just listen to this excerpt read by Morgan Freeman. He must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this heartbreaking existential struggle for a long time. People on every continent have been standing. in your shoes through decades and centuries before you, the truth does not change and that is why answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time exactly history, when taught well, shows us how to improve the world, but history when taught poorly falsely claims that there is nothing to improve, so we have to teach it better and continue.

Learn it because it is important for all of us to listen to the voices of history, whether they are truly a call to action. horrible or a sad mummy orgasm. Still, excellent, that's our program. Thanks so much for looking. We leave next week, August 16. good night