History Is A Funny Thing by Akayle

History Is A Funny Thing by Akayle - August 2017 Scholarship Essay

If I were a college professor the class that I would most likely teach is a history class. A class probably mostly focused on political history, but history nonetheless. As time goes on and people and cultures advance, we tend to forget our roots and the efforts and undertakings that have moved us to our current point. Not only that, we tend to repeat, downplay, or undermine the tragedies that have shaped not only the United States but the rest of the world. Today we make jokes about Hitler and the Nazis but then are simultaneously surprised when these entities infiltrate our own media and political system. The people at large have seemingly forgotten the amount of support that Hitler and his allies had from the American Nazi movement and that this hateful vitriol is nothing new to the American conciseness. In some places people down play the impact of slavery and the Jim Crow area but then are simultaneously surprised when people of color are gifted with nooses or forced to confront their fellow students who taunt them with black face. These are realities of our past that have been muddled so much that we are surprised when they reoccur in our present.

As time goes the balance of power shifts, the oppressed and the oppressors can change. The people who are being disenfranchised or excluded form society can change, but we humans tend to be simple creatures. Our behaviors tend not to change. One group will always think that it is better than another for some innocuous reason passed down from generation to generation. The first step to solving this problem is acknowledging that this tendency exists and tracing its origins through our shared history.

There is a propensity to want to avoid our history. We see swastikas and we flinch away from the past and remain helpless when we come against them in the present. We romanticize the Jim Crow era and shut our eyes when students are threatened with nooses and Confederate flags. Our history books give us bland glances at the past and so it is distorted. As a history teacher, I would want to rectify these wrongs. Build a generation of students who know and conceptualize their past and use it as a force against those who would seek to bestow harm onto others. Knowing your history is the first step to shaping the world that you wish to see in the future.