- The main story concerns the gaps in Americans' knowledge of US history
- The recent announcement of a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth highlights the lack of awareness of historical events
- Many Americans learned about the Tulsa race massacre and Juneteenth from watching the show "Watchmen"
- A recent poll showed that 48% of Americans were not aware of Juneteenth
- Misleading versions of history are sought out for comfort, such as the popularity of the movie "The Help" during protests
- The teaching of US history in schools lacks national standards and varies widely by state
- Some textbooks downplay the horrors of slavery and use euphemisms to describe it
- Teachers often face challenges in accessing updated resources for teaching history.

- The video discusses the problems with how history is taught in classrooms.
- Some teachers have limited resources and outdated textbooks, while others create tone-deaf assignments.
- Examples of problematic assignments include a slavery-themed game and a simulation of owning slaves.
- The lack of diverse perspectives among teachers may contribute to these issues.
- The video argues for a more comprehensive and accurate teaching of history.
- It highlights the need to acknowledge the history of white supremacy in America.
- The Constitution is mentioned as a document that codified slavery and racial inequality.
- The video emphasizes the importance of teaching history as an imperfect and complex subject.
- It points out the need to recognize the periods of white hostility and backsliding in American history.
- The Wilmington coup d'état and the economic justice aspect of the civil rights movement are discussed.
- The video advocates for a more inclusive and nuanced approach to teaching history.

- The civil rights movement was longer, messier, and more radical than commonly taught in schools
- Wealth and wage gaps between black and white individuals have increased since Martin Luther King's speech
- Housing and education systems in liberal cities are still segregated
- History is often taught poorly, omitting important events and perpetuating systemic racism
- Lee Atwater, a top Republican campaign strategist, outlined a strategy of using coded language to appeal to racist sentiments
- President Trump's recent tweet about low-income housing reflects this strategy
- The importance of teaching history accurately and comprehensively is emphasized
- John Lewis understood the importance of connecting the past to the present
- History, when taught well, can guide us in improving the world

- Americans have gaps in their knowledge of US history, as highlighted by the recent announcement of a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth.
- Many Americans learned about the Tulsa race massacre and Juneteenth from watching the show "Watchmen."
- A poll showed that 48% of Americans were not aware of Juneteenth.
- Misleading versions of history are sought out for comfort, such as the popularity of the movie "The Help" during protests.
- The teaching of US history in schools lacks national standards and varies widely by state.
- Some textbooks downplay the horrors of slavery and use euphemisms to describe it.
- Teachers face challenges in accessing updated resources for teaching history.
- Some teachers have limited resources and outdated textbooks, while others create problematic assignments.
- The lack of diverse perspectives among teachers may contribute to these issues.
- The video argues for a more comprehensive and accurate teaching of history, emphasizing the need to acknowledge the history of white supremacy in America.
- The Constitution is mentioned as a document that codified slavery and racial inequality.
- The video highlights the importance of teaching history as an imperfect and complex subject, recognizing periods of white hostility and backsliding in American history.
- The Wilmington coup d'état and the economic justice aspect of the civil rights movement are discussed.
- The video advocates for a more inclusive and nuanced approach to teaching history, as the civil rights movement was longer, messier, and more radical than commonly taught in schools.
- Wealth and wage gaps between black and white individuals have increased since Martin Luther King's speech, and housing and education systems in liberal cities are still segregated.
- History is often taught poorly, omitting important events and perpetuating systemic racism.
- Lee Atwater outlined a strategy of using coded language to appeal to racist sentiments, as reflected in President Trump's recent tweet about low-income housing.
- The importance of teaching history accurately and comprehensively is emphasized, as history can guide us in improving the world.

John Oliver takes a look at how the history of race in America is taught in schools, how we can make those teachings more accurate, and why it’s in everyone's best interest to understand the most realistic version of the past.

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Our main story tonight concerns history, a subject so fascinating, we're sometimes willing to do crazy experiments like this.

Scientists were able to mimic Nesim Amun's voice by recreating his mouth and vocal cords with a 3D printer.

It allowed them to produce a single sound.

Finally, an answer to the question that scholars have asked for ages, What would an ancient Egyptian sound like if he orgasmed while taking antidepressants?

But look, sadly, history isn't always fun, weird, mummy ventriloquy.

It can be painful too, as America has recently been reminded.

Because George Floyd's murder has forced a hard national conversation about this country's present, which is impossible to do effectively without reexamining its past.

And unfortunately, that's not a conversation that all Americans are well-equipped to have.

Because there are some embarrassing gaps in many people's knowledge of U.S.

Just look what happened a few weeks back when the president, in the midst of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, announced plans to hold a rally in Tulsa on June 19th.

A decision astonishingly tone deaf for 2 key reasons.

Next Friday, June 19th, is Juneteenth, an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S.

As for Tulsa, 99 years ago this month in 1921, the city witnessed the Tulsa Race Massacre, 1 of the nation's worst outbreaks of racial violence, recently portrayed in HBO's Watchmen.

♪ Now, the reason they're mentioning Watchmen there is a lot of Americans learned about the Tulsa race massacre for the very first time, nearly a century after it happened, from watching that show.

Basically, the night that episode airs, many White Americans went, Holy shit, I had no idea this happened.

While many Black Americans went, Holy shit, white people are gonna freak the fuck out when they find out this happened.

Debbie at work is gonna want to have a conversation.

The coverage of that Trump rally didn't just introduce many Americans to that massacre, but also to the very concept of Juneteenth, the day that commemorates when Union troops informs Texas that enslaved people there must finally be freed, 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, by the way.

A recent poll showed that a shocking 48 percent of Americans were either not at all or not very aware of Juneteenth, which is not good.

I mean, it'd be fine if nearly half of Americans were unaware of Groundhog Day, the meaningless date when an idiot dressed like Goth Willy Wonka holds up a non-clairvoyant woodchuck whose face somehow screams, I have better things to do, but Juneteenth actually means something.

And that's just 1 of many gaps in knowledge that some are now realizing that they have.

Just watch Joy Behar try to explain why statues of George Washington should be left alone, and in doing so, actually learning something.

The George Washington, besides being a founding father and a great general and somebody who was so instrumental in this union that we have in this republic, also freed his slaves.

So, if you're gonna take somebody down, Take down Thomas Jefferson, who didn't free his slaves.

He actually spent the last year of his life relentlessly pursuing slaves that tried to run away.

As usual, Sonny Hostin is very right, and Meghan McCain is very there.

Because while Washington did promise to free his slaves in his will, it specified they wouldn't gain their freedom until his wife's death.

So, only 1 person was freed immediately after Washington died out of over a hundred.

Also, he actually became a slave owner at just 11 years old.

A fact so horrifying, it's kind of hard to know what to do with it.

At the very least, the story of him chopping down a cherry tree as a child and admitting it to his father by saying, I cannot tell a lie, gets way less charming if the next part is his parents saying, Thank you for being honest, George.

As a reward, here are some human beings to own.

And the thing is, Joy Behar's version of history, while distorted, is definitely more palatable, especially for white people.

And seeking out misleadingly comforting versions of history is a pattern that we've seen again and again this year.

From the number 1 movie on Netflix during the protest following George Floyd's murder being the help, to just last week, when Senator Tom Cotton said schools should lose federal funding if they teach a curriculum based on the New York Times' 1619 project, which brings slavery into the forefront of American history.

And perhaps the most absurd disconnect was in the wake of President Obama's eulogy for John Lewis this week, in which Obama advocated for abolishing the filibuster if necessary to expand voting rights.

Imagine if some greasy politician showed up at your loved one's funeral and started throwing around stupid, partisan talking points about Senate procedure.

Desecrating a funeral with campaign slogans?

Wait, what kind of person would honor a friend's legacy by continuing to advocate for voting rights?

And the truth is, with so many people misunderstanding our history, either by accident or very much on purpose.

We thought tonight it might be a good idea to talk about how the history of race in America is currently taught in schools.

What some of the gaps are, why they're there, and how we can fill them.

And let's start with the fact that there are no national standards for what topics or figures students must learn about at school, and state standards vary widely.

When CBS looked into it this year, it found 7 states do not directly mention slavery in their state standards, only 2 mention white supremacy, while 16 list states' rights as a cause of the Civil War.

And we actually did a whole 21-minute piece about what is wrong with that argument, but this clip explains it significantly quicker.

The root cause of the Civil War is clear.

The main cause and why the South decided to succeed, what's with slavery?

So why do our history textbooks get it so wrong?

Y'all don't want to deal with the fucked up shit that y'all ancestors did.

And it can be hard to deal with what your ancestors did.

1 of our most famous tourist attractions is a castle where we executed people for centuries and are now filled with stolen jewels like the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which according to the tower's website, was presented to Queen Victoria.

And that verb is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

It was presented in pretty much the same way that India was, in so much as it was present, and Britain fucking took it.

And for all the current hand-wringing about how any changes would politicize U.S.

History, it's worth remembering that the teaching of it has always been political.

After the Civil War, the battle over how history would be told in textbooks was intense, because you know the saying, history is written by the winners?

1 organization called the United Daughters of the Confederacy campaigned for schools to adopt textbooks that would accord full justice to the South, telling librarians to write, unjust to the South on the ones that didn't, which is clearly absurd.

It'd be like a librarian writing, unjust to Voldemort on Harry Potter's 1 Through 7, or unjust to Whale on Moby Dick, or unjust to L.

Ron Hubbard on Leah Remini's Troublemaker, colon, Surviving Hollywood and Scientology.

But that impulse to downplay the horrors of slavery has marked how school children have learned about it ever since.

A Georgia textbook from the 50s claimed, the master often had a barbecue or a picnic for his slaves.

And look, every excuse for slavery is shitty, but, we gave them sandwiches sometimes, has to be 1 of the shittiest.

And some who learned history from books like those couldn't believe what they were being told at the time.

Just watch this Alabama school teacher revisit her fourth grade textbook, No Alabama.

Some slaves were good workers and very obedient.

Many took pride in what they did and loved their cabins and the plantation as if they actually owned them.

Others were Lazy, disobedient, and sometimes vicious.

I wonder what kind of slave I would have been.

I wonder if I would have been 1 of those lazy slaves who just were not willing to work for nothing.

Or disobedient because I just didn't want to be a slave.

Yeah, that contempt is fully merited there.

Because among other things, the idea that being a lazy slave was a character flaw as opposed to a frequent act of protest against a brutally unjust system is infuriating.

And it makes No Alabama sound less like the title of that textbook, and more like something you'd yell at it.

And those passages were in the standard Alabama history textbook into the 70s.

So people who read them, and may have been shaped by their content and now in their 50s doing things like running businesses or, I don't know, holding elected office.

And while newer textbooks may not be quite that egregious, there are still problems.

Earlier this year, 1 historian flagged a pretty remarkable euphemism in a current Texas school book.

This is a picture and the caption says, some U.S.

Settlers brought slaves to Texas to help work the fields and do chores.

And, you know, I don't think we should describe, slave labor as chores.

Calling slave labor chores is a euphemism on par with calling Hitler a best-selling author with a side hustle, or JFK's assassination a bad hair day, or this, a comedy show.

And look, state standards and textbooks are just a baseline here.

What happens in a classroom largely depends on teachers who have a very difficult job, often working with scant resources, meaning that, among other things, they may not be able to get updated versions of textbooks.

And some work really hard to correct poor materials.

But others can actually make things even worse with tone-deaf assignments and classroom exercises that you may be familiar with from seeing local news stories like these.

It asks students to choose to be a slave or a slave owner, and then to write a journal entry that describes daily activities before the Civil War.

The question about slavery read, You own a plantation or farm and therefore need more workers.

This North Carolina grandmother couldn't believe the assignment given to her fourth grader

and in this game is called escaping slavery,

Children worked in small groups got this freedom punch card.

If the group ran into trouble, the card said they'd be severely punished and sent back to the plantation to work as a slave.

You can't reduce a person's freedom from slavery down to what is basically a Jimmy John's punch card.

And just imagine what it would feel like to be a black kid in that classroom.

Or, if you don't have to imagine, remember.

Because it's not just the history that hurts here, it's how you're being made to feel while you learn it.

And the frequency with which stories like those tend to crop up may have something to do with the fact that the overwhelming majority of school teachers are white, and many may have grown up learning the same skewed version of history that they are now passing on.

And when you take all of this together, we're giving kids incomplete educations in history while also doing real harm.

Just listen to this guy from Tulsa explaining how he felt when he finally found out about that 1921 massacre that happened where he lived.

When I went to OU in 1998, I was sitting in a class on African-American history.

And the professor was talking about this place where black people had businesses, and had money, and had doctors and lawyers.

And I raised my hand and said, no, I'm from Tulsa.

And he was talking about this massacre, riots.

And his school really let him down there.

Think of the emotional whiplash that man must have gone through.

He found out something amazing had once existed, right where he lived, something horrible had taken it away, and that the history had been kept from him.

And all of this had happened less than a hundred years ago.

The dinosaurs died 65 million years ago, and you would still be absolutely floored if someone only just told you about them.

How the fuck is this the first time someone's mentioning this to me?

Look, it is pretty clear that we need to upgrade the way that we teach our history.

And while I obviously don't have time to go through all of that history right now, it might be worth going slowly through 3 big mistakes that many historians believe that we make and should correct in schools and beyond.

The first is that we don't fully acknowledge the history of white supremacy in America, from its founding to the present day.

And I know that anytime someone suggests telling children anything less, then Jesus would have been best friends with Abraham Lincoln.

Watch Laura Ingraham take 1 school board's discussion of an anti-racist curriculum and spin it out into a dystopian vision designed to terrify her viewers.

Now, every subject, every extracurricular activity will be perverted to turn your kids into mini-Elon Omars.

They're gonna learn that capitalism is racist, history, as conventionally taught, is racist, literature, most of that's racist, patriotic songs, racist, And the Declaration and the Constitution, of course, they're racist.

Now, Laura Ingraham might not seem like someone capable of following anything apart from black teenagers simply trying to shop at CVS.

But I think she actually has picked up on a theme there because seeing as she brought up the Constitution, let's talk about it.

Because that document is a lot of things.

Genuinely revolutionary and the foundation of an improbably long-lived democracy, but it's also infused with and inextricably linked to slavery and a legacy of racial inequality.

From the Three-Fifths Clause through the Fugitive Slave Clause, the Constitution both codified slavery and made it harder for individuals to escape it.

And the fact the Constitution is infused with racism does not mean it's canceled.

It's not a YouTuber who's just now realizing it was wrong to do blackface for 14 years, and it definitely doesn't mean the kids shouldn't learn about it.

But they should be taught to see it as an imperfect document with imperfect authors who both extolled the ideals of freedom for all, while at the same time, codifying slavery.

Kids can understand that things can be racist and also other things.

The Constitution can be revolutionary and also racist.

Children's books can be charming and also racist.

Broadcasters can be incredibly successful and also racist.

And if kids are taught an incomplete history, They'll either never get the full story, or when they do, they don't have the framework to understand how the pieces fit together.

Here is 1 professor explaining how hard it can be for his students learning the whole truth about Thomas Jefferson.

What that child is then gonna do is say, wait a minute.

I've been running around here singing Thomas Jefferson's praises, and I didn't realize that he's the R.

and suffer from undergrou you ask him who would hav for the underground railr every where every white h look, if all of y'all would have been down for the underground railroad, the shit wouldn't have been underground, right?

Okay, First of all, it says a lot about Jefferson that if you went back in time, explain to him who R.

Kelly was, and told him he was being compared to him, the child pornography charges would not be the number 1 reason that he'd be insulted by the comparison.

But that professor makes a really good point there.

The less you know about history, the easier that it is to imagine you'd always be on the right side of it.

Because the truth is, the history of America is a history of changing in America that badly does not want to be changed.

And that actually brings us to the second common mistake that we make, viewing American history's progress as if it was constantly and inevitably upward.

History is reduced down to, there was slavery, then there was a civil war, then there wasn't slavery anymore, then there was a civil rights movement, then there wasn't racism anymore.

But the moments on either side of those landmark eras complicate the hell out of that arc.

Because they were filled with white hostility and ugly backsliding.

Take the century between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act, which is often glossed over, but should probably be taught a lot more thoroughly.

It begins with Reconstruction, a dozen or so years of real promise, when very basically, the South was forced to redraw their constitutions and permit the registration of black voters.

That's right, Black men in the South were voting in the 1860s and 70s.

When they fought for the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, they were fighting to get back something that they'd already had.

The effects of Reconstruction were almost immediate, with an estimated 2,000 Black men serving in elected office during that era, including a number in Congress.

A-plus achievement, A-plus-plus facial hair there.

And sure, you might think you can grow your mustache into your beard.

But in response to that progress, white people pushed back and pushed back hard.

The KKK was founded, 2,000 black people were lynched, and by 1877, the South had regained local control.

Here is a crazy story that you might not know.

In 1898, the multiracial city government in Wilmington, North Carolina, became the target of the only coup d'état ever to take place on American soil, in which a mob of up to 2,000 armed white men killed at least 60 Black residents and replaced the city's aldermen with white supremacists.

And if this is the first time that you are learning about the only coup on American soil, you're not alone.

Because what happened there is usually either not taught at all, or, as the author of a book on that massacre points out, taught very, very misleadingly.

A number of blacks were jailed for starting a riot and a new white administration took over Wilmington's government.

And that is not just denying what happened, it's even worse.

It's placing the blame for it on the victims.

Technically, you shouldn't even call it a history book so much as a book of lies, because we kind of felt a bit weird about that whole violent racist coup thing.

And Wilmington wasn't even the midpoint of that century of backsliding.

And the Laura Ingrams of the world will probably say, yeah, that's all ugly, but in a sign of American exceptionalism, the civil rights movement ended all of that when Martin Luther King's dream came true.

And that is the version that most Americans are taught in school, but it leaves a lot out.

It was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

And the economic justice part of it was front and center.

King actually grew more outspoken about that issue in the years that followed.

And King himself understood why it was harder to make progress on that front.

It didn't cost the nation 1 penny to integrate lunch counters.

It didn't cost the nation 1 penny to guarantee the right to vote.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS CHANTING But now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.

It turns out that Martin Luther King had more than 1 dream, and 1 of them was about wealth redistribution.

So, while I know it's easy to distort King's full legacy down to that 1 soaring speech, point to the cast of This Is Us and say, see, we did it, everyone.

The truth is, the civil rights movement was longer, messier, more radical, and crucially, was thwarted in more of its aims than many of us were taught in school.

And that actually brings us to the final point here, which is that we don't connect the dots to the present.

Look at the black, white, wage, and wealth gaps.

They are both larger now than they were when King gave that speech.

And our housing and education systems, even in liberal cities like New York and L.A., are still shamefully segregated.

And if you don't teach history properly, all you see is those effects and not the causes.

When the truth is, you can draw a straight line from the post-Civil War return of plantation land to former Confederates, through the massive transfers of land by the Homestead Act, mostly to white individuals, through the growth of the suburbs in the 20th century where redlining kept black people from moving into white neighborhoods throughout the country.

In fact, just listen to this woman in Leavittown, Pennsylvania, explain her objections to a black family moving to town in 1957 with some real honesty.

We like the advantages that Leavittown seemed to offer in comparison to other cities.

And we understood that it was going to be all white and we were very happy to buy a home here.

Do you think a Negro family moving here will affect the community as a whole?

The whole trouble with this integration business is that in the end, it probably will end up with mixing socially.

And you will have, well, I think their aim is mixed marriages and...

It is always weird to hear someone, whether or not they look like some casual Betty Crocker, frame human beings being treated equally as a negative.

It's like hearing someone say, the whole trouble with putting graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows together is that we might end up with s'mores.

Only a fucking monster wouldn't want that.

And it might not surprise you to see that someone was incredibly racist in the 1950s.

But, 1 of the problems with the way that we teach history is that too often, it sort of trails off after the Civil Rights Movement.

And when you skip over the past half century, You don't get to see the process by which white supremacy, instead of disappearing, merely adapted.

And perhaps nobody made that process clearer than Lee Atwater, a top Republican campaign strategist who worked for, among others, Ronald Reagan and George H.W.

Here he is, spelling out the whole game in 1981.

And I'm gonna warn you, you're about to hear the N-word a lot.

You start out in 1954 by saying, nigger, nigger, nigger.

By 1968, you can't say nigger, that hurts you, it backfires.

So you say stuff like, force busing, states' rights and all that stuff.

And you're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes and all of these things you're talking about are totally economic things and the byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.

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