The justification for erasing America’s historic injustices, claiming that knowing them causes kids to feel guilt or shame, is a high priority for our current right wing government. Trump and his ilk make this sound like a noble cause—protecting kids from carrying the factual and emotional burdens of history. Think how much more uncomplicated and gentle—easy to bear—our history would be if slavery and indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, misogyny and corporate malfeasance never happened. They call knowing and teaching this true history being “woke.” Woke is a synonym for simply being aware. And don’t we all know that being aware is a bad thing? Or, am I the only one who remembers that the primary function of education is to make kids aware, keep them awake to truth and reality. In classrooms that protect students from the dangers of wokeness, teachers will give gold stars for falling asleep. And Teachers of the Year will be selected for how thoroughly they erase the history of injustice, canceled climate science, and denied the effectiveness of vaccines.

Are the proponents of censoring history doing that for all kids—or particularly white kids? Kids of color might experience the woke curriculum as being seen, knowing the truth of the origins of racism: this is what was done, this is why it was wrong, this is how we moved forward. It’s the moving forward, grappling with injustice, having the courage to confront that dragon in his cave, that turns what could be guilt and shame into inspiration and heroism. The lesson of history is not that it unfairly defines white people as cruel, racist demons; the lesson is that many refused to be cruel and racist and insisted that all people be treated equally. It teaches us the only way we maintain ideals is if people have the courage to demand and enact them.

Those who denounce wokeness want these things:

1. To cleanse our history of the facts of racism and misogyny. It claims we’re exceptional people who never did those things, never had those flaws.
2. They don’t want you to know about the courage and perseverance and idealism of those who fought and resisted institutionalized racism and misogyny. They don’t want you to know about those people who could be your role models. Why? Because then you would want to be in the company of those heroic people, resisting the lies, injustices, racism, the greed, arrogance, and cruelty of leaders denouncing wokeness.
3. People who attack wokeness want you to be more attracted to power than truth, more comfortable shaping your identity from a cleaned up myth of yourself than what actually happened.
4. People who attack wokeness want you to willingly move into the dark cave of ignorance and cruelty where you can be manipulated by their power, told what to see in their imposed darkness. Prefer myth to reality.
5. They want you to feel and be powerless in the face of injustice.

 

What kind of country would prefer its citizens be the walking dead, rather than responsible and aware, engaged people? Woke people know the past and use that knowledge to shape a better future. They read the signs of encroaching injustice and know how to confront it.

This project, Americans Who Tell the Truth, is the champion of the power of wokeness.

It blows the trumpet of alarm about injustice and inspires with examples of how to challenge it. AWTT asks students  questions like, Who would you rather be—Rachel Carson, who tells the truth about pollution in the environment,or the CEO of the chemical company that prefers to profit from hiding it? Rosa Parks, who exposes and confronts racism, or members of the Ku Klux Klan who use terror to deny it? Daniel Ellsberg, who exposes government lies that promote immoral war, or President Johnson who told the lies? As you can see, championing unwokeness is not merely encouraging ignorance, it promotes complicity in crimes of injustice.  

In the struggle over wokeness, guilt and shame are the just burden for those who encourage ignorance and want our schools to graduate uninformed, inactive citizens.

Woke history teaches the importance of courage, the exciting journey of insisting on truth and justice. You won’t be in that inspiring company if you are never taught why it was necessary then and now.