OPINION — America has an imperfect history. We should teach it honestly.
Native peoples suffered displacement. Slavery and segregation are part of our history. During World War II, Japanese Americans were incarcerated because of their ancestry. Those aren’t comfortable facts, but history isn’t supposed to make us comfortable.
What concerns me is the tendency of public institutions to emphasize the ancestral, racial and cultural categories that separate us. Land acknowledgments are one example. Well-intentioned, they still ask us to look backward at inherited identities when civic responsibility should pull us together.
