The Story Of All America's Cultures By Luch Ji-Yeon

In response to “Making kids read The Help is not the way to teach them about the civil rights struggle”, writer Jessica Roake informs the audience that she is giving facts about how kids shouldn’t read these books because it’s written by white authors in her article “Not Helpful.” Using several rhetorical strategies, Roake effectively builds her argument. One important rhetorical strategy Roake uses is Logos. She builds her argument by using facts about the Jim Crow laws. She establishes “Jim Crow was a time of systematic oppression, when an entire population was terrorized because of the color of their skin” (Roake, 2).

A specific example is western dominance in society and how most students do not realize why this statement is true. He describes that textbooks do not include all of the information concerning Christopher Columbus’ journey to North America. The author describes Christopher Columbus’ voyage was not for “exploration or even trade, but for conquest and exploitation” (Loewen 38). Loewen describes factors that textbook authors misinform or leave out in many eras of history, but he always relates the factor to Christopher Columbus. The author continues the chapter to discuss that Christopher Columbus did not start his voyage spontaneously.

“…her audiences included many leading African-American women…” (Wikipedia).

When history is whitewashed, it is filtered to hide marginalized groups and oppression. Recently on the news, textbook company McGraw-Hill stated that the company will rewrite a portion of their book which referred to African American slaves as workers and immigrants (McAfee, 2015). I was offended by the fact that McGraw-Hill even published a book that slaves were called workers and immigrants. To say that African Americans were workers and not slaves changes the whole fundamental history of enslaved populations; workers implies a willingness, when in fact, African American slaves were not willing participants. When you change the wording in textbooks, you change people’s views and perspectives of historical events and their everlasting effects on cultures.

From Christopher Columbus to the Pilgrims and Native Americans to the Civil War and slavery, all the way to the present, the author picks apart twelve textbooks, compares them, and shows they are racially and socially biased, and are written by similar authors. Finally, in the last two chapters, Loewen digs into why textbooks continue to teach history this way, and shows some of the effects of giving students the misinformation and lack of important information that our textbooks

The author, Hua Hsu, believes the end of white America was put on a national spotlight when Obama was elected president, which is on the heels of the news of the majority minority switch that is supposed to take place in 2042. This switch would bring the relevancy of W.E.B Dubois, a civil rights activist, prediction of the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line, the race identification society asserts on individuals (Hsu 1). That reality, where the color line becomes a problem, comes to fruition with Donald Trump’s white nationalist views and his growing popularity. His ascendancy illustrates the problem of how we identify individuals and whether America will blur the boundary of race, where people are confined by the identity of race.

In the article Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, Morris Fiorina addresses the issue of the illusion of political polarization. Political polarization is the separation of political beliefs into two separate extremes. The main illustration Fiorina uses is the use the electoral map. The electoral map is used to gauge which party won an election or polling.

History is a novel idea that has been a continuous idea throughout our time in class. We have gone over what history means to us, the students; as well as the authors and filmmakers we have studied. For me, before this class, History merely meant what we

Rosa Parks once said, “Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.” She describes that the future of our world has to be aware of things that have happened in the past, such as racism. The NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is a civil rights organization that displayed their position on this certain situation. The NAACP position is correct in that Mark Twain’s un-sanitized version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should be taught because the book describes the important awareness of the historical oppression of people, it provides a value of morality from that time period that students should learn, and gives an important lesson about race that should be taught to students.

In this piece of writing, the author indicates how history has been overlooked for many years and has been taught to students to disregard the hidden facts of what really makes someone a hero in the American History. Some of the famous people, such as Rosa Parks and Malcolm X, have made a big movement to change the racial issues and create a piece of history that has been taught all over the country. However, even though these people have brought important social changes till this day, historians have tucked away a great part of the facts that would not make a person as heroic as they are remembered today. As I see the author’s point of view, I agree at a certain point that in the american history, there have been hidden facts for many people

The lecture on African Americans in the 1920s by Professor David Canton is very disturbing. His lecture was on the different unjust treatment that African Americans endured. The professor, to me, was trying to make the listener feel the anguish that African Americans did in the 1920s. In some sense he appeared passionate and at times angry about the treatment of African Americans. The government supported this hostile treatment because they believed African Americans were being subversive if they stood up and defended themselves.

In this case, it teaches students about racism, how it’s still a part of society today, and how it’s so deeply rooted in our country’s history. It’s necessary to talk to our students about slavery’s roots in the United States and how recent African-Americans only got their equal rights and treatment with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Act of 1965. John Schwetman, an assistant professor teaching American literature at the University of Minnesota Duluth, explained about a “conversation about literature… acknowledging changing reading tastes, changing values, changing concerns of readers.” (Louwagie) Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote of her experience with racism in mind. It teaches the importance of morality and resonates with the white students.

In the film Coming to America describing the two cultures in the film are the African and American cultures from Africa and Queens New York. The African and American cultures in the movie are different in some ways but similar in other ways by the way the characters in the movie are all family oriented with the respect they show their parents and the way the parents only want what is best for their children. Then there are subcultures in the film that go a little further with style of living. The culture in Africa is that people are to wait on the royal family for everything they do, but in America, the family cares for themselves without the help of servants. The rites of passage are a cultural norm in Africa for the Royal family by having arranged marriages.

History does not always convey the absolute truth. It offers only one side of the story. The strong and powerful voices always drown out the sounds of the weak and beaten. The winner’s word will always be taken over the loser’s. The content that lies within the textbooks was not written by the defeated.

All education systems are shaped by world views and values. Education is not neutral within a society. People have different aims for education and agenda’s. Worldviews are formed by people having different opinions, from experience, geographic conditions, political views, religion, and this influence’s the outcomes and decision’s made to educate and shape the countries youth (Christy, 1986). History is important not that it tells about our past but why we are here so that we can understand better the why to the how (Simon Senek)