Truth or Consequences: Trump on Slowing Down COVID-19 Testing

“And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

– President Trump, speech at medical supply distributor
in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May, 2020

"When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’” 

-- President Trump, speech at rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, 2020

These are the words of a U.S. president in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic. His misunderstanding of testing as it relates to the virus is disturbing and, frankly, very dangerous. Trump's motivation for “slowing down testing” is evidently rooted in his financial concerns despite the obvious danger to the health of the nation.

Trump should not be given a pass for these remarks as many of his supporters write them off as “indicative of his nature” or “just kidding.” His reckless nature should be identified and strongly condemned. He should be accountable.

Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, American Heart Association Chief Medical Officer for Prevention, tells us why testing is so important. Sanchez says …

1. “When a communicable disease outbreak begins, the ideal response is for public health officials to begin testing for it early.”
2. “That leads to quick identification of cases, quick treatment for those people and immediate isolation to prevent spread. Early testing also helps to identify anyone who came into contact with infected people so they too can be quickly treated.
3. I”t's crucial of course to help treat, isolate or hospitalize people who are infected. Testing also is important in the bigger public health picture on mitigation efforts, helping investigators characterize the prevalence, spread and contagiousness of the disease.”
4. “Knowing who has been infected also is important because people with immunity from COVID-19 can safely work in essential settings such as health care, public safety and the service industry. They also can work in "non-essential" settings with less need for extreme personal protection.”
5. Furthermore, for clinical care, testing for seroconversion – the technical name for the process of going from non-infected to infected to immune – can identify people whose plasma contains COVID-19-specific antibodies.

(Dr. Eduardo Sanchez. “COVID-19 science: Why testing is so important.”

American Heart Association. April 2, 2020.)

The data from testing can provide important puzzle pieces for stopping or slowing the disease in the future. And, consider this – knowing the result of a test allows rational individual decisions.

Testing is a major weapon in the arsenal against COVID-19.

“COVID-19 testing, when integrated with social distancing policies, becomes a formidable weapon against the pandemic. This is how it works: In the first instance, all patients who need to be hospitalized will be tested for COVID-19. Those with influenza are treated with antivirals specific for the flu, but those with COVID-19 are isolated with special procedures to prevent the spread of the virus. This is essential to protect nurses, doctors and other health care professionals from being infected.”

(Edison Liu, Jill Goldthwait. “Why Testing for COVID-19 Is So Important.”

The Jackson Library. March 26, 2020.)

Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA, Immediate Past President of the American Medical Association, tells us …

“It is critically important that we dramatically expand our testing capacity, both diagnostic and antibody testing. Only through that expansion will we have the data and information necessary for public health officials to determine when it is safe to resume a semi-normal way of life. Diagnostic testing tells us who is currently infected, so these individuals can be safely isolated to prevent further spread, while contact tracing is conducted to quarantine those who were exposed. For public health agencies to effectively conduct contact tracing, they will need to rapidly recruit, train and deploy a substantial new public health workforce.”

The scientific evidence is clear – the United States must expand testing to fight the pandemic. To ignore this advice or to refute it creates an environment much less safe and much more deadly. It also adds fire to the arguments of those who insist COVID-19 is “just a flu” and not that dangerous. On this day, June 25, the nation has experienced 121,000 deaths and record spikes in the number of cases in many states. Would you listen to Donald Trump or to the medical professionals? The choice is yours. It is not really a consideration at all … unless you simply wish to risk the lives of your fellow human beings.

The 10% Tipping Point -- Spreading Minority Ideas

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority. Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

– The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Researchers have used mathematical modeling to demonstrate that there is a tipping point for when opinions held by a committed minority spread through the rest of a population.

The tipping point is 10%. That is not a typo – “The tipping point is 10%.”

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found if 90% of us are uncommitted, and 10% are committed, it’s only a matter of time before we match our opinions with the much smaller group.

The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

(“Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas.” Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center. July 26, 2011)

The Rensselaer scientists set up this dynamic in each of their models: in general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.

SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan said …

“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change. People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10.”

(“Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas.” Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center. July 26, 2011)

The research has broad implications for understanding how opinion spreads. An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

(J. Xie, S. Sreenivasan, G. Korniss, W. Zhang, C. Lim, B. Szymanski. “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.” Physical Review E, 2011; 84.)

In 2000, author Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, a book that explains how ideas and messages spread like viruses. With catchy phrases of its own, like “the law of the few”–which attributes the success of any social epidemic to 20 percent of the population–The Tipping Point led to an explosion in the pop science genre.

(Bryan Farrell. “You only need 10 percent: The science behind tipping points and their impact on climate activism.” wagingnonviolence.org. January 2, 2012.)

In his book Developmental Evaluation, Michael Quinn Patton says

“Complexity theory shows that great changes can emerge from small actions. Change involves a belief in the possible, even the 'impossible.' Moreover, social innovators don’t follow a linear pathway of change; there are ups and downs, roller-coaster rides along cascades of dynamic interactions, unexpected and unanticipated divergences, tipping points and critical mass momentum shifts. Indeed, things often get worse before they get better as systems change creates resistance to and pushback against the new.”

(Michael Quinn Patton. Developmental Evaluation. 2010.)

The latest research cuts Gladwell's “tipping point” of 20% in half. The research supports a truly remarkable revelation. There is no reason that intensity, activism, protest, and agitation need to be seen as alternatives to an incremental process pushed by moderate insiders. They are not mutually exclusive.

This critical mass of 10% can help us to understand the world around us by letting us spot changes before they occur, make sense of tumultuous times, and even gain insight into our own behaviors. Is this theory what explains the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other such global phenomenons?

But, as I digest this information about the tipping point, I must focus on the semantics of the findings: 10% of “opinion holders” is the point AN OPINION held by a committed minority SPREADS through the rest of a population. “Spreads” is not the same as changes. It does “influence a society,” but that distribution does NOT necessarily produce an effect. “If that proportion of the population (10%) emphatically embraces an idea, then it will spread rapidly to the majority of the population,” say the scientists.

So, it seems to me that a relatively low percentage is required to spread a minority opinion and to accelerate the call for a change; however, the change itself relies on more than acknowledgment and tacit approval. A change must motivate others, be workable, be flexible in overcoming hurdles, and be modifiable. Changes depend upon a committed effort by those who wish to enact them. Still, the 10% finding is a wonderful revelation for progressive reform.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,

but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

– James Baldwin

Gear Up and Tear Up -- Riots and Policing

“When you see riot gear, it absolutely changes the mood: it takes away any perception the officers could be empathetic.

“If I went up to speak with a police officer and I’m covered in armor and holding a shield and a stick, don’t you think they would regard me as a threat?

“When we see riot gear, as black people it takes us back 400 years.”

– Ron Moten, a longtime community organizer in the nation’s capital
who was out demonstrating this weekend.


I found a recent article in the Portsmouth Daily Times to be very informative. The article was titled “Injuries at Protests Draw Scrutiny To Use of Police Weaponry.” It posed the idea that equipping police officers “in a manner more appropriate for a battlefield may put them in the mindset that confrontation and conflict are inevitable.”

Rubber bullets and similar projectiles have damaged eyes or blinded at least 20 individuals from ages 16 to 59, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, since protests began over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Other tactics were on display at Lafayette Park, where police used chemical agents to break up a peaceful protest minutes before President Donald Trump posed for pictures outside a nearby church this month. In Buffalo, an officer used a baton to shove a 75-year-old man to the ground before that officer and others marched past as blood collected beneath the man’s head. 

Protesters in Denver have arrived at the hospital with injuries from police projectiles that caused one person to lose an eye and left three other people with permanent eye damage, said Prem Subramanian, a physician who operated on some victims following demonstrations late last month. Subramanian said ..

“They weren’t accused of any crime, and they came in with devastating eye injuries. We’re learning the consequences of using these weapons.”

(Larry Neumeister and Tom Hays. “Injuries at Protests Draw Scrutiny To Use of Police Weaponry.” Associated Press. June 22, 2020.)

The physician added that he was so upset about it that he complained to city officials, who promised to investigate any abuses. He said the injuries rivaled what he saw treating shrapnel damage to eyes of soldiers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center who were injured by explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Edward Maguire, a Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice professor, in a 2018 Police Executive Research Forum report on police response to mass demonstrations, gave guidance from police officials and academics from around the country who echo the sentiment that dressing for a confrontation escalates the tension between officers and protesters.

Former Chicago Police Deputy Chief Kevin Ryan said in the research report … 

“If police show up at a demonstration in full riot gear right away, you are projecting conflict and escalation. We have the capability to increase our level of response and use a higher level if necessary, but normally we can handle everything in normal field gear.”

(Chuck Wexler, Executive Director. “The Police Response to Mass Demonstrations: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned.” Police Executive Research Forum. 2018.)

The report used well-known history to illustrate past mistakes. Boston Police Superintendent Bernard O’Rourke said at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, police had five days of protests with bicycle patrols. They started with the soft approach. We had public order platoons on standby all week long. But then, things changed. O'Rourke explained …

“We made one big mistake. On the last day, we got a request from the commander of those public order platoons. They felt that they weren’t taking part in the situation, so they wanted to come out to the street. The mistake they made was coming out in full turtle gear. They didn’t walk out and mingle; they marched out. And as soon as that happened, the crowd started throwing things at them, and we had to make several arrests. We learned from that. Since then, unless we need the public order platoons, they stay out of sight.”

(Chuck Wexler, Executive Director. “The Police Response to Mass Demonstrations: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned.” Police Executive Research Forum. 2018.)

Measured models for protest-policing all center on a few key ideas:

Communication,

Facilitation, and

Differentiation.

One such model, called “Negotiated Management,” amounts essentially to talking it out: police and protesters cooperate and set out rules of engagement before an event. The Madison Method aims to facilitate protests – which, after all, are protected by the First Amendment – with communication and restraints on police action. The elaborated social identity model (aka ESIM) emphasizes differences among members of a group, so that looters are arrested as criminals while protesters are allowed to continue.

Ed Maguire believes treating protesters like looters will cause a riot. Maguire said …

“Much of what we’re seeing go wrong in my country right now is a failure on the part of police to do this piece of differentiation. We’ve seen police firing tear gas or less-lethal munitions on the crowd, most of which hasn’t done anything wrong and certainly hasn’t broken any laws. Instead, police should make targeted arrests against those causing violence, starting fires, and looting shops, but take no enforcement action against the rest of the crowd.”

(Nicole Kobie. How US police used military tactics to turn peaceful protests violent.”

Wired. June 4, 2020.)

Ronald Davis, a former California police officer and the former head of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, concludes …

“More community policing is needed, and is something that all agencies should adopt. What I’d like to see is police not just taking a knee but standing in support of systemic, sustainable police reform. Instead of being against police, this can be a movement to change policing. It doesn’t have to be us versus them.”

Leshia Evans, protesting the shooting death of Alton Sterling. She is meeting police

 in full riot gear in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2016).

Mississippi -- A State Still Under the Heat of Oppression

State Flag of Mississippi

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream Speech” on August 28th, 1963

Those famous words of Dr. King remind us of a time when segregation and inequality had a firm grip on blacks in the Deep South. Thank God all of that has changed. Or has it? A banner of division still flies over public grounds in the State of Mississippi.

Now, in June 2020, the NCAA announced that Mississippi teams can no longer host college baseball and basketball regionals until the state changes its flag. The NCAA announcement came after a group of former Mississippi college athletes petitioned the NCAA to stop holding post-season events until the state changes its flag.

Mississippi State and Ole Miss, the two SEC schools in Mississippi, refuse to fly the state flag. So do the other six state-supported universities. So do the cities of Oxford, Starkville, and Hattiesburg. Jackson, the state’s largest city won’t fly the flag. It also came down recently in Gulfport, the second most populated Mississippi city.

Mississippi is the only state that was part of the Confederacy and has not chosen to remove the rebel insignia from it’s flag. All other southern states have cut ties with the Confederate battle flag. The last state to make such a change was Georgia, which adopted a new flag in 2003 after coming under increased pressure from business and other organizations threatening to boycott the state.

NASCAR, which has been a haven for Confederate flags throughout its history, has banned the banner. In June 2020, the Delta Council, which opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, came out in favor of changing the flag.

The archaic flag of Mississippi is a disgrace to the state and to the nation. Flags are powerful symbols that signify dominion and sovereignty and express personal and political allegiance to a state or nation. Used by states and nations, they are not just strips of fabrics and colors left to random interpretation. Flags represent people – all people under their territorial dependency.

Mississippi has used the Confederate emblem in its flag since 1894, when white supremacists in state government adopted it after Reconstruction. Georgia put a large Confederate battle symbol on its state flag in 1956, during a backlash to the civil rights movement. That state purged the symbol from its banner in 2001 – the same year Mississippi voters overwhelmingly chose to keep it on their flag.

Voters in Mississippi had two choices in 2001: keep the current flag, adopted in 1894, with the Confederate emblem of 13 white stars on a blue X, or adopt a new flag with 20 white stars on a blue square, to symbolize Mississippi's role as the 20th state. They chose the banner with the “heritage” of the Confederacy.

The 2001 flag referendum vote totals showed 64 percent of voters affirmed the current state flag design. That same year, 36 percent of voters favored a new, specific flag design – one that critics at the time said was a political stunt to sway voters from voting against the current design.

Opinion has changed. A September 2017 survey of Mississippi voters by Jackson-based Chism Strategies showed that just 49 percent of Mississippians favored the current state flag while 41 percent want to retire it and 10 percent are undecided about the issue.

The same group polled residents in 2020. Chism now finds forty-six percent support retaining the old flag compared to 44.9 percent who support changing it. In terms of polling, the outcome would essentially be considered a statistical tie.

Why the significant stubborn resistance to change? The state evidently feels the need to continue its support of Confederate history by using the Civil War battle symbol as an icon of the Lost Cause. And, some Mississippi residents actually believe the flag is of no consequence concerning the problem of racism. One man said …

"I don't think the flag is the concern. I'm concerned more with the hearts and minds of people. A piece of cloth with stars on it ain't going to change nothing.”

Rather than look to its past, it is time for Mississippi to look to its future and that means change. For Mississippi to show that it cares about its citizens who are not white, they have to take down the flag.

Ronnie Crudup Sr., administrative bishop for the Fellowship of International Churches, said that when his father and other black soldiers were together in their dress uniforms after returning to Mississippi from the Korean War, a white man used a racial slur against them and told them nothing had changed.

“By not changing the flag,” Crudup said, “we’re saying to the world: ‘Nothing has changed.'”

(Emily Wagster Pettus. “Mississippi faces reckoning on Confederate emblem in flag.”

PBS News Hour. June 13, 2020.)

I hear you Mr. Crudup. I pray all the citizens of Mississippi hear you too.

Race and Identity -- What Race Inhabits Your Skin?

If someone asked you to describe your identity to them, where would you begin? Your nationality? Your language? Your skin color? How about your race?

Just what is “race” and how did the term begin?

Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist and palaeobiologist at The Pennsylvania State University, who is known for her research into the evolution of human skin color, says this about race …

“'Race' and 'ethnicity' have been and continue to be used as ways to describe human diversity. Race is understood by most people as a mixture of physical, behavioral and cultural attributes. Ethnicity recognizes differences between people mostly on the basis of language and shared culture."

So, race is usually perceived as something inherent in our biology. It is commonly understood to be inherited across generations. Emma Bryce, Live Science contributor, explains the history of the term …

“The idea of 'race' originated from anthropologists and philosophers in the 18th century, who used geographical location and phenotypic traits like skin color to place people into different racial groupings. That not only formed the notion that there are separate racial "types" but also fueled the idea that these differences had a biological basis.”

(Emma Gryce. “What's the difference between race and ethnicity?”

Live Science. February 08, 2020.)

By the 18th century, race was widely used for sorting and ranking the peoples in the English colonies – Europeans who saw themselves as free people, American Indians who had been conquered, and Africans who were being brought in as slave labor

Then, in the first half of the 19th century, one of America’s most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton, a man who accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs, proported that people could be divided into five races and that these represented separate acts of creation. The races had distinct characters, which corresponded to their place in a divinely determined hierarchy.

Morton’s “craniometry” showed, he claimed, that whites, or “Caucasians,” were the most intelligent of the races. East Asians—Morton used the term “Mongolian”—though “ingenious” and “susceptible of cultivation,” were one step down. Next came Southeast Asians, followed by Native Americans. Blacks, or “Ethiopians,” were at the bottom. In the decades before the Civil War, Morton’s ideas were quickly taken up by the defenders of slavery. Paul Wolff Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania explains …

“He had a lot of influence, particularly in the South. When Morton died, in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina praised him for 'giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.'”

(Elizabeth Kolbert. “There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label.”

National Geographic. March 12, 2018.)

Today Morton is known as the father of scientific racism. So many of the horrors of the past few centuries can be traced to this idea that one race is inferior to another. To an uncomfortable degree we still live with Morton’s legacy: Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense of self.

The effects of this history prevail today because in current definitions of race, there is still an underlying assumption that traits like skin color or hair texture have biological, genetic underpinnings that are completely unique to different racial groups. Yet, the scientific basis for that premise simply isn't there.

Nina Jablonski explains …

"If you take a group of 1,000 people from the recognized 'races' of modern people, you will find a lot of variation within each group. But, the amount of genetic variation within any of these groups is greater than the average difference between any two (racial) groups. What's more, there are no genes that are unique to any particular 'race.'"

Ultimately, there is so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other.

In other words, no genetic variants occur in all members of one racial group but not in another. This conclusion has been reached in many different studies. Europeans and Asians, for instance, share almost the same set of genetic variations. As Jablonski described earlier, the racial groupings we have invented are actually genetically more similar to each other than they are different – meaning there's NO WAY to definitively separate people into races according to their biology. Jablonski concludes …

"Our research has revealed that the same or similar skin colors – both light and dark – have evolved multiple times under similar solar conditions in our history. A classification of people based on skin color would yield an interesting grouping of people based on the exposure of the ancestors to similar levels of solar radiation. In other words, it would be nonsense."

(Emma Gryce. “What's the difference between race and ethnicity?”

Live Science. February 08, 2020.)

Let's repeat this important sentence: there is no firm genetic basis behind racial classification. Instead, race is a highly flexible way in which societies lump people into groups based on appearance that is assumed to be indicative of deeper biological or cultural connections. As a cultural category, the definitions and descriptions of races vary.

Also important to understand that geographic ancestry is not the same thing as race. African ancestry, for instance, does not tidily map onto being “black” (or vice versa). In fact, a 2016 study found wide variation in osteoporosis risk among women living in different regions within Africa. Their genetic risks have nothing to do with their socially defined race.

(Alan Goodman. “Race Is Real, But It’s Not Genetic. Sapiens.org. March 13, 2020.)

Professor Alan Goodman, biological anthropologist, says …

“In 1972, Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin had the idea to test how much human genetic variation could be attributed to 'racial' groupings. He famously assembled genetic data from around the globe and calculated how much variation was statistically apportioned within versus among races. Lewontin found that only about 6 percent of genetic variation in humans could be statistically attributed to race categorizations. Lewontin showed that the social category of race explains very little of the genetic diversity among us.

“Furthermore, recent studies reveal that the variation between any two individuals is very small, on the order of one single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), or single letter change in our DNA, per 1,000. That means that racial categorization could, at most, relate to 6 percent of the variation found in 1 in 1,000 SNPs. Put simply, race fails to explain much.”

(Alan Goodman. “Race Is Real, But It’s Not Genetic. Sapiens.org. March 13, 2020.)

Exactly how different are members of what the the world commonly classifies as “races”? A 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region – hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races.

So, when you hear “Black” or “White” or “African-American” or “Caucasian,” think of the “human race” – one beautiful, general classification. The truth is that we, discriminating people, “made up” categories of race. And now, we, the ancestors of those same old scientists and true believers, still perpetuate the concept of racial differences. And, that is extremely disturbing – in fact, unbearable – because in 2020 what we know as “race” can still determine people’s perceptions, their opportunities, and their experiences.

“We often have this idea that if I know your skin color, I know X, Y, and Z about you. So I think it can be very powerful to explain to people that all these changes we see, it’s just because I have an A in my genome and she has a G.”

Heather Norton, molecular anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati

who studies pigmentation

Why History Must Be "Alive"

“For the majority of the twentieth century, Americans thought of the past as foundational to, but separate from, the present, and they learned and thought about history in informational terms.

“But Rymsza-Pawlowska argues that the popular culture of the 1970s reflected an emerging desire to engage and enact the past on a more emotional level: to consider the feelings and motivations of historic individuals and, most importantly, to use this in reevaluating both the past and the present. This thought-provoking book charts the era’s shifting feeling for history, and explores how it serves as a foundation for the experience and practice of history making today.”

This overview of M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska 's History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (2017) asserts an important mission for those who study history: reevaluating the past and the present to make history “come alive.” To bring history out of the textbooks and into lives generates interest and needed change. We don’t want to repeat our past mistakes, and if we have the chance, who wouldn’t want to change the future?

What do you want history to be? Do you want its pertinence to be limited to some documents and other artifacts of bygone events and human affairs? Or, do you want to understand how past principles and beliefs influence the present? This requires interpretation and research that opens new doors of relevance.

Historical revisionism identifies the re-interpretation of an historical account usually by challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or time-span or phenomenon.

A revisionist study may introduce contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. In this manner, the revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which then results in revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments.

It is understood there must be a careful balance between factual knowledge and critical analysis. A quick march through a list of historical events affords no opportunities to understand the “why” of U.S. history, and or to make its deeper meanings come alive. A student of history should learn to carefully compare and contrast the views of leading historians, as well as to debate and discuss historical issues. They should use their knowledge to become active citizens who can apply their understanding of the past to their daily lives.

The goal is to acquire a strong command of historical facts and then to be able to understand, formulate, and critique different interpretations of the past and of its meaning. Thus, the student of history willingly enters the strange realm of studying the past with a sense of their reality as “historical creatures.”

The editors of American Heritage describe the study of a “dead” subject …

“The treatment of history as 'facts' diminishes or destroys the student’s sense of the utility or relevance of history. If 'history' is something embalmed in a textbook, it is difficult to experience as an open process and an essential resource.

“Black students or females or American Indians may see no relation between the events described in the textbook and the experience of their own race or sex. Even when such groups are now included in history texts, a considerable degree of skepticism remains about the claims of the conventional textbook to be a satisfactory account 'of what happened.'”

(Editors. “Is History Dead?” American Heritage. December 1976.)

Carina Whiteside, an educator who is passionate about the impact of social studies education for teaching skills and values needed by America's future citizenry, is a member of the Hope Street Group Utah Teacher Fellows, which works to build connections between classroom teachers and policymakers that will benefit all students.

Whiteside describes her favorite lesson:

“The greatest social studies lesson I have taught was part of my 8th graders' study of the U.S. Constitution. Going into this unit, I knew I needed to address the decision the Founders made to protect the practice of slavery, which was in direct contrast to the American principle of equality defended by the Declaration of Independence.

“I wanted to communicate to my students just how profound this contradiction is, and the implications that it carries for the United States in the present day, by allowing them to dive into that contradiction themselves. I feel like I was able to do just this by adapting a lesson from the Zinn Education Project called 'An Unconventional Constitutional Convention.'”

The Zinn Constitution Role Play asks students to think critically about a number of issues that confronted the original framers of the Constitution. But the role play adds a twist: instead of including only the bankers, lawyers, merchants, and plantation owners who attended the actual Constitutional Convention, the activity also invites poor farmers, workers, and enslaved African Americans. This more representative assembly gives students a chance to see the partisan nature of the actual document produced in 1787.

In the second lesson (“The Constitutional Convention: Who Really Won?”), with the Constitution Role Play as background, students are primed to wade into the actual document and analyze parts of it in a social context.

Whiteside said …

“During this lesson, students felt the gravity of the decision to protect slavery deeply because they had debated it themselves. They had taken on the weighty roles the Founders played, examined their peers' pleas for equality and justice, and were disappointed to see historic figures make a different decision from what they had. With the gift of hindsight, they can see the legacies of slavery our country continues to work through. They wondered, How would things have been different if the Founders had decided what we did?”

History is a living study of human affairs, a study detailing all of the beautiful advancements of civilizations and also a study chronicling all of the horrors and mistakes made by governments and ruthless tyrants. A society dedicated to learning from history requires active participants who study all sides of complicated issues and controversial decisions. Humans breathe life into history as they apply it to their own present and future endeavors. Long live the history that “comes alive.”

"You Can't Erase History" -- Just Read White American Textbooks

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”

– Donald Trump, August 17, 2017

The words of an American president do nothing to address the real problem of systemic racism. Mixing Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee with founding fathers like George Washington shows a lack of sensitivity to the issue at hand. “History and culture” are living manifestations that continue to influence the hearts and minds of all Americans. In these changing times, we must come to grips with monuments that commemorate equality and freedom and those that dishonor those cherished ideals.

“You can’t erase history” is the point often raised in arguments against removing symbols of the Confederacy. People employ this statement in a warped justification to keep these symbols on public grounds. If acknowledging “you can't erase history” is a truism, then this belief also validates the argument as to why many historical figures should NOT be worshiped, idolized or moralized. Historical museums or, if it’s your allegiance, private property are fitting contexts for such images.

Why do some people make Confederates like General Lee more sympathetic and more palatable by stating that the Civil War occurred because of lack of compromise? In truth, there was no compromise by the Confederacy, and all the seceding Southern states made it very clear (in writing) that their primary reason for secession was the North’s discontinued compromise in allowing slavery to continue.

If those who now ignore revisionist's pleas for understanding want “erasure,” they should look to how American textbooks promote, research, preserve, interpret, and disseminate information about Black life, history, and culture to the global community.

The older mainstream social studies curriculum either largely ignored Black history or misrepresented the subject. Early renditions of history textbooks typically classified Black people as docile, uncivilized, and lazy. For example, a 1934 history textbook analysis by Lawrence Reddick observed that Black people were portrayed as being content as slaves; they liked to “sing, dance, crack jokes, and laugh; admired bright colors, never in a hurry, and [were] always ready to let things go until the morrow.”

Inspired by the 1960s civil rights movement, systemic efforts to mainstream K-12 Black history began to build momentum. Some change has occurred since then. However, the Black history curriculum still needs to come from a Black perspective with topics specifically geared towards the Black experience, and many times these narratives need to be independent of the way we (in large part, whites) typically frame U.S. history. The curriculum needs to balance narratives of victimhood, oppression, perseverance, and resistance, but unlike current renditions of the curriculum, it should contextualize issues that connect with the present.

A 2017 study from the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that many classrooms are falling short when it comes to teaching about the United States' history with slavery. It argued that textbooks and teachers have contributed to a sanitized understanding of history by focusing on "positive" stories about black leaders like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and the abolitionist movement.

The narrative is also skewed by an over-emphasis on the experiences of white people before and during the Civil War. Lessons that divorce slavery from the ideology of white supremacy focus on slavery as a Southern institution. These lessons downplay slavery’s impact on the nation as a whole and additionally contribute to a lack of understanding around the origins and impact of slavery in the U.S. – as do teachers and textbooks that do not connect the legacy of slavery to later historical periods like Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration and the Civil Rights movement.

The Southern Poverty Law study found only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Hasan Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University, who led the SPLC report, reported …

“It’s the equivalent of kids not being able to do division. There is no other subject we could teach as bad as we do American history and still be employed.”

Maureen Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance, said …

“Students are being deprived of the truth about our history (and) the materials that teachers have are not particularly good. I would hope that students would look at this and realize that they deserve to know better … and teachers need to know there are better ways to teach this (topic).”

(Jason Daley. “Study Reveals Deep Shortcomings With How Schools Teach America’s

History of Slavery.” Smithsonian Magazine. February 7, 2018.)

Finding out what children are actually learning about difficult issues like slavery can be almost impossible. How schools teach about slavery and racism can be so sensitive, it is difficult to find schools willing to divulge the information. Also, calling attention to the ways in which whites continue to benefit from the legacy of slavery is very challenging for teachers to admit (especially white teachers) and for wider society to deal with.

An erasure of history? No removal of a Confederate statue in the public square will delete or obliterate the original sin of America – slavery. What it will do is help justify the nation's never-ending search for the truth and establish a new and stubborn denial to any commemoration of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy as some noble ideology and to its leadership as exemplars of old-fashioned heroic chivalry.

Correction duly noted. The artifact has been placed in a place where people may learn the truth about the most violent period of American history. No attempt to erase this lesson has been made.