Is it actually the truth?
A look into the reality around us
A look into the reality around us
Jena was walking down the halls of her school with the thought of playing with her friends and what fun activity they would do next. She was in the bliss of adolescence, ignorant of the world around her. As she grew with every inch, her thoughts changed. She entered the high school doors where her new adventures would take place, not knowing what would be next, and waiting for the finish line to be in sight. During her senior year, she was a straight-A student who didn’t overthink what was taught. On a rainy day in the warmth of her history class, they were learning about the civil rights movement.
As they moved through the topic, the teacher said the people who protested were trying to make the issues worse and spreading one-sided information to other people. That they were trying to change something that didn’t need to be any different. The teacher also said that there are good protests and bad ones. The "good" ones are non-violent and very well organized. The "bad" was violent and not put together at all because there were too many angry people. In her mind, she never questioned what the teacher said because she believed that her teacher wouldn't lie to her. She hit the finish line thinking that everything she was told was the truth, this gave her a sense of peace.
One sunny day, on the streets of downtown Cleveland, she was heading to her usual cafe when she saw a group of protesters chanting “Everyone should have EQUAL protection" in front of the courthouse. At first, she kept thinking that what they were doing was a waste of time and that they were just people who wanted others to follow them. Until she saw her two closest friends in the protest crowd chanting the same slogans. She took a step back and started to rethink what she once thought. Her two closest friends were siblings who grew up across the street from her. She met them when she was very young and they have created a close bond that has never gone away. She calls them her family and she knew they were good people that tried to keep to themselves. So why would they be protesting?
She began to approach them to ask but before she could get over there, the police showed up and started putting the protesters in handcuffs. They believed them to be the instigators of a riot. She knew that her friends were not bad people and they never got in trouble. After the cops had left, she noticed a pack of papers on the ground where the protesters were standing. She looked back to when she first saw her friends in the group and realized that her friend was holding this packet up for everyone to see. She picked it up and decided she was going to read it in order to get a better look into why her friends didn’t believe what they were told in school. As she examined the excerpt, the title caught her eye: "The Propaganda of History." She began to think about what this could mean, and at first, she couldn’t come up with anything until she read the first couple of pages of the packet. She soon realized that this excerpt was about lies that Americans were told.
She put the packet in her bag and decided she was going to go to the library to read the excerpt in more depth. Before she could make it into the library she ran into her friend's parents sitting by the little fountain in front of the library. She decided to ask their parents if they knew their kids were going to protest. To her surprise, they did know and they said "Yes we know, they have been expressing to us that there is a very important movement occurring and they wanted to make an effort to change the world around us so that African American citizens can be treated the same as everyone else." She then came to the realization that maybe her friends were doing this to help instead of trying to spread information that was not important. This led her to another question that she asked. "Why would they do it if they could get in trouble?" The parents didn't have an answer to that question and said she would have to ask their children. She said goodbye to them and made her way into the library.
She found a seat in the corner and sat down. She pulled the packet out and started reading. As she moved from paragraph to paragraph, it was hard for her to believe anything that was said. She decided to take out a pen and a highlighter in order to write her thoughts down as she was reading. Since she did this, it allowed her to go back through once she finished reading to try and answer her own questions and to help her organize any thoughts she had. She only made it four pages in when she found what the packet was arguing about. The author was W.E.B. Du Bois, an American historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. He argued that the ways history was written and taught was "for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment.” (Du Bois, The Propaganda of History, p.714) To her, this means those in power have taken out important facts. Those with political power want to preserve their own self-image so that people don’t stop trusting the decisions they are making.
As she continued reading, it brought her to another piece of the argument. “Somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief.” This told her that in order to have a truthful history, the person writing it has to give the facts instead of twisting it to make it seem better. Once we can get over preserving our own self-image, we can better inform our new generations about what happened in the years that have come and passed. After she read this excerpt it changed her perspective completely. She decided that she would become a historian herself. She felt as though the new generations deserve to know the whole truth, whether it made America look good or not.
Once she came to this conclusion she decided to head home and try to talk to her friends. She made it to their house excited to talk to them. She knocked on the door, eager for them to answer the door. The parents answered and told her that they were having dinner and that she was invited to eat with them. She entered the house and found a seat open next to one of the siblings. She sat down with a million questions running through her head. She started with "What made y'all want to protest when there was the possibility of y'all getting in trouble." One sibling answered, "We did it because we wanted to make a difference. We knew there were risks when we even thought about protesting and came to terms with it." As she kept asking questions one of the siblings got up and went to grab a book. This book was called Myth America and it was edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer. It is about how historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. The other sibling said, “When you get a chance, take a look at this book, especially chapter 13.” She took the book and thanked them.
The next thing they brought out was a board game that would help her understand their motive for wanting to make a difference. It was called Red Lining. She had never heard this word before. “What does redlining mean?” One of them replied, “Follow along as we explain it. If you don’t understand once we are done, we will try to explain better.” They unboxed the game and played it together. On one side of the board there was a white house piece and on the other was a black house piece. From the start of the game, she could get the hint that it was about race but didn’t know why. There were two card decks, one green and the other red. The person with the white house piece would be handed the green cards and the person with the black house piece would be handed the red cards. As they picked the cards up, she started to realize that the cards were stacked against her. It made it hard for her to make any progress in the game. There was also another setback. Her community was gated, and even if she got enough money to move out of the community, the regulations and laws forbid them from leaving that area, and she would be denied any other house not placed in the community. This meant that her community could not prosper and that’s where they ended the game. They then asked her, “Do you understand now?” She responded. “I believe I do. Redlining is when there are strict limitations put on a group of individuals so that they can make no progress and actually have the ability to have a prosperous life. It restricts everyone and only allows the other group to grow and have all the advantages in life.”
She got up to leave and once again said thank you and walked back to her house. Once she got home she went to her room and opened the book. She took a second just to read the first few pages. As she read this sentence, it stuck out to her. “If protests do not conform to the orderly marches staged by people practicing passive resistance in the face of violence, then they aren’t 'good protests'.” The reason this stuck out to her was because it was the total opposite of what her teacher taught her in school. This brought her to the question: why did her teacher only share her opinion and not what is actually true? She closed the book and sat with that question for many hours, pondering different ideas. The next day she went back to her friends and asked them the same question. They said, “I think it is because that's what she was taught and not knowing anything different, she taught it to us.” Finally, it made sense why things were taught one way. It was because that's what has been taught for generations, so there was no other idea around unless you looked for it.
While deciding the topic to write our blogs about my mentors came up to me and asked what I would write about. At first, I didn't know until I started bouncing ideas off in order to get a grasp of what I wanted to write. The idea that was the loudest was how we truly know what we know. We read many texts this summer that explore this idea. I decided to pull in these texts to get more perspectives on my writing. Since this was a hard question for me to figure out, I decided to use the ideas that are brought up in the texts and put them into the perspective of what we learn in school. I decided that my character would go through many different events in order to reflect onthis question. I decided to have her break through the imaginary walls and see a different side.
Nathan L. King in The Excellent Mind introduces the idea of intellectual virtues. In Chapter 7, King discusses the aspects of honesty and how dishonesty can be shown in many different ways. “Plagiarism, lying, bluffing, bullshitting, and self-deception are all failures to respect the truth” (King, 140). Dishonesty is the information that we can misrepresent to others and even ourselves. Even though the text is very straightforward and seems like it would be obvious, it can be hard to always know what the actual definition is. As people move through their everyday life they encounter different forms of deception when others think it's the truth. As people grow up in this world they have to decide what is the truth for them. For instance, the character in the short story had to figure out the truth about protests. In school, she was taught that it was a bad thing when it wasn't. When people try to decide the truth, they come to the question of how we know what we know when everything around us can be questioned.
Another aspect of King's The Excellent Mind was the sense of not knowing means people can spread information that is false to others. In the eyes of that person, it isn’t a lie because they believe what is being said. People see this as lying because we are spreading false information and can be hard for us to see the other side. It's hard to decide whether this provides an answer for whether spreading false information is the same as lying. As people come across these topics they come to the conclusion that the other is lying and we shouldn’t believe them but wouldn’t it be better to inform them of the facts? Yes it may be hard for them to realize, and they may not change, but at least they have seen the information that is believed to be true. In the short story, the teacher believed that what she was teaching was correct. The reason for that is what she was taught, which leads to the idea of a generational lie that had been prepared for years.
In "The Propaganda of History," W.E.B Du Bois argued that how the history of reconstruction was taught in schools was intentionally incorrect. In Book 17, Du Bois talks about how our history has been shaped to look a certain way by higher powers in order to make it look better. “We are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment” (Du Bois, 714). In the past and even today, higher powers have lied about what actually happened. Whether this was because they were trying to preserve the image of something or if it was because they believed that people could not handle the truth. Where it is highlighted in orange stuck out the most because he talks about how we shape history to make people feel like we did the right thing. Many people do not know that what they are taught is actually a twisted version of what happened. This causes false information to be spread which leads to others not knowing what is true and what is not.
Glenda Gilmore in Myth America challenges the myth about a good protest. This myth said that the only good protests were the ones that went against the worst state-sponsored laws, and most of the protests that are marked bad, are not bad they are just compared to one singular moment. For instance, she wrote, “If protests do not conform to the orderly marches staged by people practicing passive resistance in the face of violence, then they aren’t “good” protests.” (Gilmore, Myth America, 198). The term “good” protests are only used when a march is passive and there is no violence in order to get their point across. Some people may have seen that the passive ones were not getting their point across so they decided to take a step further, but that should not make it automatically bad Instead, we should take a step back and try to figure out why it got to the point to where it needed to be violent? How can we qualify a protest as bad if we don’t know what is truly good? In order to do that we would have to be able to define good and bad. That is a challenge on its own.