https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/do-polish-lives-matter-bruce-bawer/
The other day, during a discussion of the current race-war madness, a guest on Anthony Cumia’s podcast asserted with confidence that the answer to the whole problem is simple: young Americans need to be told more about the injustices historically suffered by blacks in the United States. I wanted to reach into the screen and smack him. Yes, blacks had an extremely lousy deal in America for a very long time. But young Americans know all about that. Indeed, if they emerge from their years and years of schooling with no other historical knowledge whatsoever, the one thing you can always be sure they know is that white Americans held black Africans as slaves, that chattel slavery was a cruel and evil system, and that the repercussions of that nightmare can still be felt in our own time.
Some, if not most, of those young Americans also come out of school with notions about slavery that aren’t anywhere near being true. They’ve been told – or have somehow acquired the belief – that America invented slavery. Or that American slavery was, in some way or another, uniquely corrupt. Already many students around the country are being inculcated, courtesy of educational materials furnished by the New York Times as part of the 1617 Project, in a set of preposterous, perfidious ideas, among which are these: America was founded on slavery; a devotion to human bondage is at the core of our national ideology; the American Republic was built not on glorious new Enlightenment ideas about human freedom but on an ignoble dedication to the belief that it’s okay for one person to own another.
As if all that weren’t enough. now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, adult Americans by the million are paying good money for new books that explain to them that the stain of white American racism is deep and indelible.