Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991                   TAG: 9102180331
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: C/3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RHETT S. JONES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LET'S STUDY THE HISTORY OF ALL AMERICANS

In self-admitted "penny-ante sarcasms," syndicated columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. decries the plans of Virginia's Fairfax County "to dispense with Western history and geography for the sake of cultural sensitization," by which he means ninth-graders there will give up some study of white history to study some black history. Writing in U.S. News & World Report, John Leo describes proposals to study Africans and African-Americans as the "curriculum of resentment."

Bothering these and other critics are plans to teach the history of all the peoples of the United States, rather than simply celebrate, admire and gape in awe at that of whites. Americans are a pluralistic, racially diverse people who have almost, but not quite, achieved a social order in which we tolerate one another's differences. The United States has worked pretty well, its major stumbling block having been its failure to address the rights and legitimate aspirations of people of color.

While our soldiers, both black and white, were making the world safe for democracy in World War I, blacks were denied the vote in a good part of the country. German prisoners of war interned in the South during the World War II received better treatment than "free" black southern citizens.

Those who think racism dead and gone need look no further than the recent decision by Arizona voters to reject a holiday in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. Racists have learned to take great offense at being named such. Asked about the vote against the proposed King holiday, one Arizona resident declared, "We are not racists. We just don't like King and the things he did."

King, what he did and why he had to do it over and against the implacable opposition of millions of white Americans ought to be studied in our schools. We need also to study why and how Euro-Americans managed to see no contradiction between celebrating their nation as the greatest democracy on the face of the earth while holding millions of Afro-Americans as slaves.

And we need to study how despite being taught systematically for generations by white preachers, politicians and professors that they were an ugly, stupid, smelly and degenerate people - indeed, perhaps not even people at all - Afro-Americans miraculously not only emerged with a positive conception of themselves, but equally miraculously managed to yet love and forgive Euro-Americans.

This is the real stuff of American history, demanding a careful study of whites, blacks and their complex relations with one another. It would be easy enough to write a selfish, self-serving black interpretation of America's past to match the selfish, self-serving white one long taught in our schools. It is far more difficult to write, teach and study a balanced racial history.

For persons who claim to be interested in history, Yoder, Leo and the rest of the pack seem curiously indifferent to the study of all Americans and to the hard work it requires. Yipping and yapping, they continue chasing the smelly underside of their tails, hoping to recapture a mean-spirited, racially partisan, inaccurate American history that celebrated one race at the expense of all others.