Christian Cieri – Illustrator
Did you know that many of the Founding Fathers had slaves? And that Thomas Jefferson, often portrayed as one of the great American proponents of liberty and freedom, had slaves until the day he died? How about the Japanese internment camps? The Trail of Tears?
How do we reconcile these events with our conception of American exceptionalism? Where do they fit into our national psyche?
According to Dan Fisher, a Republican in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, these aforementioned events and the other thematic discussions that are part of the College Board’s AP U.S. History course focus on “what is bad about America.” Recently, he introduced a bill, HB 1380, in the Oklahoma House, which he says would put the focus back on America’s “founding principles,” rather than paint this country as “a nation of oppressors and exploiters.” HB 1380 proposes that, unless College Board rewrites the curriculum to fit a curriculum written for them, funding for AP U.S. History will cease.
Guess what? That bill already passed in the Oklahoma House Education Committee 11-4; all Republicans voted Yea, and all Democrats voted Nay. Fisher, who laments that the current curriculum places too heavy an emphasis on “robust analyses of gender and racial oppression and class, ethnicity and the lives of marginalized people,” is currently rewriting the bill, which he’s deemed too “vague” for its upcoming date in the Oklahoma House of Representatives and Senate.
If this bill passes, it’ll be another setback for nuanced and thoughtful national discourse and a devastating blow to the Oklahoma school system, which, according to most research groups, was among the worst in the country last year. Fisher and his backers—including the entirety of the Republican National Committee, the Georgia State Senate and conservative think tanks across the country—claim that the current curriculum provides a drastically skewed, “leftist” view of our nation that is “critical of American exceptionalism [and] the free enterprise system and emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while minimizing positive aspects.” Luckily, Fisher and the GOP are ready to swoop in and rewrite the curriculum “to accurately reflect U.S. history without a political bias.”
Now, how does this bill go about erasing this bias? The bill authored by Fisher—who is on the board for a group called “Reclaiming America for Christ”—states that the curriculum would include “documents…that contributed to the foundation or maintenance of the representative form of limited government, the free-market economic system and American exceptionalism.” Language about President Reagan’s “bellicose rhetoric” (as it’s put in the current curriculum) would be replaced with a much more positive portrayal, including three of his speeches. President Bush’s speech on September 11, 2001 is the most recent addition Fisher recommended. Conspicuously missing from the curriculum are any speeches from the last three Democratic presidents. Luckily for those pesky “marginalized people,” Fisher graciously includes a speech from Malcolm X, two works from Martin Luther King Jr. and a speech from each Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. The most recent speech included by a woman occurred in…oh, wait—there aren’t any speeches by women. The most recent work by a woman is Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” a poem written in 1883. The “Declaration of Sentiments,” the famous feminist document that came out of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, is one of only two expressly feminist documents included in the curriculum—the other having been written in 1776 by Abigail Adams.
This bill is a farce. It’s reminiscent of Dinesh D’Souza’s recent documentary, “America: Imagine the World Without Her.” The film tackles different issues of American history that are debated in classrooms across the country, from slave ownership to the atrocities committed against Native Americans. D’Souza takes apart issues such as these and argues that they’re overblown, meant to make us feel ashamed about being American. According to D’Souza, people such as Barack Obama, Howard Zinn and Saul Alinsky thrive off our shame—as long as we’re ashamed, their liberal agendas will hold water. Rather than feel ashamed, D’Souza contests, we should be proud to live in the greatest country on Earth.
Truthfully, I don’t disagree with the sentiment. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our country—the United States has done an incalculable amount of good for the world since its birth, and to be ashamed of it is to be ignorant of some of the most important achievements in human history. But that doesn’t mean that we get to simply ignore the dark issues of the past because they’re not consistent with how certain people perceive our country. Fisher and his backers seem to believe that the classroom is not the place for nuance or discussion of America as a real, flawed place, but rather, that the classroom is for nothing but rote indoctrination and political slants.
Oklahoma isn’t the only state where this is happening. Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Colorado are all having similar debates right now.
If you took AP U.S. History in a high school in one of those states, and this is troubling to you, please take the time to write to your local congressman that the curriculum doesn’t need meddlesome hands using it for their own ends.
Bernstein is a member of the class of 2018.
