Re-education on issues of race means understanding the false teachings that led people to turn a blind eye to the false narrative against other populations in their midst. However, when people hear re-education they think of a system of oppression.
There is a difference between re-education camps and re-education. One is to create a baseline for a genocidal system of execution or imprisonment and the other is to help society to change its ways and correct them to the roots of their source and from the inside out. Both supposedly seek to “re-educate” people but one does it by elimination and the other does it by correcting miseducation and building understanding. We need to look more closely at the latter.
Should we take down statues?
This past summer, we saw the movement to take down statues including those of men like Robert E. Lee, the confederate general who led the southern military effort for secession. Granted, he failed but, obviously, many southerners recognized him to be a hero for over one hundred sixty years. When I heard about the effort to take down his statue, I remembered what we learned about Lee in elementary school in the 1960s. I was, obviously, too young to question the narrative. Living in New England, our understanding of the impact and meaning of the confederate general at that young age was so distant it was almost on the margin.
I remember learning General Robert E. Lee did not fully support a Confederacy. Texts taught us he was an honorable man who reluctantly supported the cause. A true Virginian, he put the priorities of his homeland first over his own beliefs. These were the lenses through which I understood Lee. No one taught us the now obvious — he still fought for slavery.
An article about a completely different topic based in a different country that had nothing to do with Robert E. Lee led me to understand the movement to remove his statue. The Irish Post reported that Boris Johnson defended the statue of Winston Churchill by asking who is next? Oliver Cromwell?
“Where will it end? Are we supposed to haul down Cromwell who killed so many thousands of people in Ireland?”
I am an Irish American and among the Irish, if there is one name that is NOT worthy of a statue or heroic status it is Oliver Cromwell. He tried to eliminate the Irish race. He sold the Irish into slavery and tried to destroy their food supply, among many other genocidal things.
If protestors were taking down statues of Oliver Cromwell, I would not be the first in line to celebrate for there would be too great a competition for that spot but I would be there. Once I read the aforementioned piece, I understood the removal of the Lee statues. Remembering my elementary school education, I immediately questioned the narrative. What kind of a country makes as their lead general a man who does not fully believe in the cause?
Nuremberg Laws on our shores
Studying further, I discovered a horrible fact about us in this country and again it is something that we never learned in school. The postbellum Jim Crow laws were the basis for the Nuremberg laws of NAZI Germany. The NAZIs exterminated fourteen million people including six million Jews — the specific targets of the Aryan legislation. Hitler loved the way Americans segregated the black population: explained James Q. Whitman in his book Hitler’s American Model (2017 Princeton University Press). Nevertheless, he teaches, those Aryan laws were less restrictive than the original purity laws in some US States.
Prior to the rise of the NAZIs in Germany, one could go to jail for anywhere from eighteen months to ten years for marrying someone who was up to a third-generation descendent of a forbidden race — in Maryland, explains Whitman (p.79). Edwin Black in his fascinating book War Against the Weak (2012 Dialog Press) revealed the eugenics programs of the NAZIs, including the pre-World War I work of Mengele, received funding from major institutions in this country. Clearly, some serious re-education is in order.
The Nuremberg Laws went into effect in 1935. In August of 1936, US newspapers reported glowingly of an American woman attending the 1936 Olympics in Germany who kissed Hitler (cf: Kissed Hitler, Central Press, Fayetteville Daily Democrat, August 20, 1936 p. 3). Simultaneously, German leaders prohibited their Jewish athletes from competing for their own country. The media at the time did not cite any of this in the coverage of the international buss of the fuhrer. The irony, therefore, of the success of Jesse Owens during that olympiad is even more profound in context.
It could not be a secret anywhere, especially in the media at the time, that the Jim Crow laws were the source of the Nuremberg laws. Would not the proper thing to do at the time, looking from 2021 to 1935 be to eliminate Jim Crow laws and recognize the grave sin in enacting them. Despite this, even in 1963, a standing governor in the United States, George Wallace, stood at the door of a school to prevent two African-American students from entering the University of Alabama. Often described as a Republican, Wallace was a Democrat but fighting against other Democrats including then-President John Kennedy who sent in the Army to enforce integration at that school.
I remember reading in junior high school the powerful book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin (1961 Houghton Mifflin). It is an inside look at the then still active Jim Crow laws in the second half of the Twentieth Century bordering on the thirtieth anniversary of the by then-defunct Nuremberg Laws.
Clearly, there is an urgent need for education on agendas and teachings that glossed over the racism endemic in this country and that provided the basis for the racist and genocidal regime of NAZI Germany. Part of it comes from a lack of proper education throughout our history. It is our job to change it. What our country really needs is a bottom-up initiative to speak the truth every day. That effort begins with each of us.
Please note: Douglas Perkins wrote his article on Robert E. Lee around the same time I wrote mine. The timing is purely coincidental. I did not use his article to prepare mine. However, he goes into better depth of Lee’s reasoning.