February is Black History Month. If your first instinct is to snarl, whine, or otherwise complain that there’s no white history month, you can skip this post. Every month is white history month. Others need a point of emphasis once a year to remind us that their history is our history, too. The accomplishments, triumphs, defeats, hardships, and resilience of others have contributed to the history of America as well.

Great nations do not spin a mythology to proclaim their magnificence. Great nations face their past, the glorious and the shameful, to learn how to be a great nation. Great nations celebrate the contributions of all their people, the lesser and the more, that have made them what they are. Great nations do not shy away from the truth of their past because it informs and shapes their present.

That brings us to the joint statement released by the American HIstorical Society and Organization of American Historians regarding the January 29 Trump executive order regarding the teaching of history in school:

The executive order “grossly mischaracterizes history education across the United States, alleging educational malpractice.” “The executive order’s narrow conception of patriotism and patriotic education does more than deny the actual history of American democracy; it also undermines its own goals of a rigorous education and merit-based society,” the statement reads. “We reject the premise that it is ‘anti-American’ or ‘subversive’ to learn the full history of the United States with its rich and dramatic contradictions, challenges, and conflicts alongside its achievements, innovations, and opportunities.”

This month, we celebrate Black History Month and the contributions and hardships that Black people have faced as they live in the United States of America. We’ll follow that with Women’s History Month (March); other months will follow including Hispanic Heritage (mid-October to mid-November) and Native American (November).

We will also have Pride Month in June. All of these are Americans and their story is a part of everyone’s story. We need to borrow those red hats and change them from ‘Make America Great Again’ to ‘Make America Great as She Has Never Been Before but Aspires to Be.’

(But MAGASHBBBATBE doesn’t have the same ring, does it? Especially the stutter in the middle–not to mention trying to fit that on a baseball cap!)

The propagandization of a white-washed history has no place in our schools as the statement points out: This executive order, however, mandates ideological instruction and the politicization of history grounded in ahistorical thinking. The order draws upon the deeply flawed and roundly debunked 2021 report of the “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission”—a panel devoid of experts in the history of the United States—which the OAH characterized in 2020 as a partisan attempt to “restrict historical pedagogy, stifle deliberative discussion, and take us back to an earlier era characterized by a limited vision of the US past.”

It’s worth your time to click on the link and read the full statement. I’ll close by quoting their final paragraph, “Like all histories, American history is complicated and fascinating; learning about our past should stimulate discussion and debate rooted in evidence and professional scholarship. For that to happen, we must let our teachers do what they do best: teach without interference or ideological tests. And let our students learn how to think, rather than what to think.” [Emphasis mine.]