Erasing history

 Today is Juneteenth, and so the Blob will dispense with Blobbing about a guy with a name like a hotel chain (Wyndham Clark) coming from the depths of the PGA to win the U.S. Open, and about Ja Morants' 25-game suspension for acting the fool, and about any and all other Sportsball matters.

Today is about history, and stirring s*** up. 

The former cannot be done right without the latter, see, because history is messy and not easy. And so this day is about wondering, only half tongue-in-cheek, if teachers in Florida are thanking their lucky stars Juneteenth falls during summer vacation, because now they don't have to fear losing their jobs if they talk about it in a way that displeases their governor.

Juneteenth, after all, is the celebration of the day the last slaves in America learned they were free. And we all we know how Florida's governor, Ron "Don't Say Slave" DeSantis, feels about that subject.

He's essentially banned any mention of the S-word, is what he's done. Can't talk about how slavery has shaped American history, and how its legacy continues to shape it. That's considered -- gasp! -- "Critical Race Theory." It might make white kids feel bad, and heaven knows we can't have that in the Il Duce of Florida's kingdom.

Do I exaggerate for effect here? Perhaps. But not by much.

And so on this Juneteenth I wonder how the day would be commemorated in the more DeSantisized precincts of the nation -- which apparently includes at least one school district (Hello, Northwest Allen!) here in the Fort. I wonder, as a student of history, about the disturbing trend toward muzzling history in favor of feel-good propaganda, because propaganda is designed not to educate but to validate a manufactured reality. 

I also wonder how black kids feel about so much of black history being downplayed (or in some cases, removed from their school libraries). And why that doesn't seem to matter to il Duce and others of his ideological stripe.

Their history is a throwback to the 1950s, a comfortable time to be white in America but not so much for Americans of color. History textbooks in those days still advanced the false catechism of  the Lost Cause, teaching a generation of young minds that most slaves were happy and, anyway, the Civil War wasn't about slavery. It was a time when no one questioned how bizarre it was that United States military installations were named for Confederates who waged war against the United States military.

That bit of nonsense is finally getting a long-overdue course correction. Governor DeSantis, of course, has pledged to reverse it, telling a crowd in North Carolina he'll restore the name "Fort Bragg" -- thereby re-honoring Confederate general Braxton Bragg, an incompetent boob whose troops killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers.

Why, I can't think of anything more appropriate than that. Can you?

Juneteenth, on the other hand, is rightly celebrated, but you can't fully discuss it without acknowledging the backlash that followed. It led to freedom, and then the ballot, and then to representation in Congress -- and then, as night follows day, to the violent overthrow of Reconstruction in favor of the reconstruction of slavery in the form of Jim Crow.

And then to the black Holocaust of lynching and racist violence. And then to the civil rights movement, the backlash-to-the-backlash whose gains the usual suspects are now working overtime to undo.

You can't properly teach Juneteenth without mentioning that context. And yet it's everything those usual suspects are trying to suppress in the name of  -- to use one of their arguments -- not stirring up resentments that divide us. 

Know who else used that rationale?

Well, in Adam Hochschild's history of the years 1917-21 in America, "American Midnight," there's a passage describing domestic Military Intelligence chief Ralph Van Deman's strong-arming of the black press. His excuse was that they were running exposes about lynching, and that pieces like that might create "a feeling of disloyalty" among blacks.

Hmm. Sounds kinda familiar.