OPINION

OPINION | LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Rethinking history

Rethinking history

Editor, The Commercial:

I have read where certain prominent folks claim to have done "due diligence" on the reported "1619 project" and they say they've found it full of major errors.

I'm here to tell them and any others of like mind, that if they used the same books and other collections of blather written by White "historians" and taught to most of us in public schools to do their "due diligence" then their results are far from reality!

I'm over 80 years old and can attest that much of the history taught in my lifetime was garbage, plain and simple. White folks wrote Native American's history and they will tell you quickly that most of it was written with no basis in facts. I have learned more of factual U. S. and Arkansas' history since graduation than I was ever exposed to before that.

Tom Cotton as well as the rest of the deniers know "Jim Crow" well enough. What that whole bunch find distasteful is the prospect of "Eating Crow" when the rest of the country makes it plain that we've been lied to by them about the history of Blacks, Native Americans, Orientals and most others not of Caucasian origins in this country.

Like any written work, there may be some inadvertent factual errors in Project 1619, but with impartial and judicious editing it should be acceptable for appropriate use in public schools to correct the willfully erroneous or willfully incomplete junk foisted off on us as accurate history!

Opinions we all are entitled to and they can and will differ. Facts are immutable and cannot be changed once they are known. They can be falsified purposely as they have been here, or simply omitted from the known factual record. Those who do that or countenance the doing of that are, simply put, a crew of self-serving prevaricators who can't be trusted as truthful in any other matter.

Our forefathers did steal this land, then got wealthy using forced labor from the disgraceful practice of enslaving Black people. Lying about any of that to school children does not improve anything. It only makes things worse when TRUTH becomes known, as it always eventually will be. They will not, with very good reason, believe anything of like nature they hear from you thereafter. Any Native American can tell you what genocide is. Their ancestors experienced it at the hands of our ancestors. I am a Caucasian of European extraction.

Karl Hansen,

Hensley

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