Honest question from an Aussie about the hypocricy.

Here (U.S.) most people don't even know that 12 presidents owned slaves. That's how much propaganda is issued to Americans about the "forefathers". The hypocrisy is never really addressed to school aged children. The civil war which was about slavery, is usually taught as a war about "states rights". If you've noticed a few threads here, white americans will usually comment about slavery when it doesn't make them look bad. Example, white americans love to bring up "well they were already doing slavery in africa" or "the irish were slaves too". When in reality the irish were indentured servants who took on debts to leave the U.K. They may have worked in the fields with slaves, but they weren't subjected to all that came with slavery.

MidnightThud,

Do NOT listen to the above poster, raymondjackso25. They seem to have an axe to grind and an agenda. I'm an American who went to school in Pennsylvania, then lived out of the country, and then went to high school and college (university) in Florida, in the mid to late 1990's. Maybe that was raymondjacks high school but not mine. We talked about the good and the bad in American history and my school was 99% white.

When talking about the different rights of men ideas of the Founding Fathers we spoke about how it really only applied to white, PROPERTY OWNING, MEN. We talked about how the Founding Fathers owned slaves, even the author of the Declaration of Independence. When even talked about how horrible we were to the Native Americans. For example, the Trail of Tears, small pox blankets, and all that. I remember even learning about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and how wrong that was. My American history class in high school and then college was far from propaganda. Now in younger grades sure I was taught all the goofy stories like Washington couldn't tell a lie. But by the time I was an adult I had enough education to know that Washington was our first Lair-in-Chief.

Maybe I just went to a good school or paid better attention in class? I once worked with a British guy once and he told me I was pretty educated for an American. I know other nationalities like to say we Americans our dumb. Which I would tend to agree but not all of us are.

erikwm,

Exactly. Great post.

Our Founding Fathers were human and not perfect. They knew this. They knew they fell short. That is why they made our Constitution a living breathing document that is changeable. Jefferson even said we should change things even more drastically than that every like 20 years.

All in order to get closer to those ideals and a "more perfect Union."

I will echo the last two posters. I attended an all white school in an affluent area. There was no attempt to sweep anything under the rug. What would the point be? The double standard was at the forefront of teachings regarding the constitution, slavery, and the founding fathers. To not understand this as an educator or student would be intentionally obtuse. We learn from what we are exposed to, not simply a classroom, and fortunately most people are exposed to different perspectives. The history of the US is full of discrimination of all types. Ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, socioeconomic, physical, and anything else you can imagine. Some things we as a country have moved on from rather successfully. Some not, but that's a different conversation.

JayfromtheBay - all the things you listed re discrimination are still happening. Granted some may not be as blatant, but they are still very much so alive and breathing.

I think the thing we as Americans miss quite often is everyone's experience with discrimination is different. Often times people that may not have experienced any form of discrimation will be quick to tell those that have to get over it. Or perhaps try to minimize its existence and the effects, which are still present today.

I thank God for my American History teacher, Mrs. Thomas. She was blunt about President Lincoln's motives for emancipating slaves, which I appreciated. She was black and I was fortunate to have her as my teacher, but some of my classmates didn't have her and they were taught the same thing. I went to a very diverse school with a large graduating class - 386. Thanks for indulging my rambling.

I remember in history class the teachers reminded us only White men were free. I can't speak for my past fellow class mates but I was always made aware of the hypocrisy. I believe there are those who are oblivious, I remember my professor was having a discussion on the 60s which she lived through. She stated once JFK was assassinated innocence was lost, she and "they" realized the world was not safe. In reality she was living in a bubble.

[deleted]

That's an unwittingly loaded question. The US is roughly the same size and population as Western Europe (WWII definition, not modern UN), with probably a wider range of cultures. Education is handled on a local level with oversight at the state level, and guidelines and regulations handed down from the federal level. There is no one true answer to your question, because it varies from one school system to the next.

That said, what I was taught included blacks fighting on behalf of the colonies in exchange for their freedom (not something this miniseries ever mentions), founding fathers who believed that slavery was wrong, founding fathers who owned slaves, founding fathers who believed slavery was wrong because it makes white people weaker, blacks fighting on behalf of the Union in the American Civil War in exchange for their freedom, and some rather archaic rules regarding voting rights.

The ACW was primarily fought over maintaining the Union, but slavery was one of the various reasons that was pitched to various peoples to convince them to support the war. Even so, while slavery was abolished in the South as punishment for attempting secession, it was left alone in three states that had not joined the South, and remained legal there for quite some time. Even then, the US ended up with probably the most strict black/white segregation outside of South Africa's apartheid. There have been instances of blacks saying they should return to Africa and their ancestral cultures, and there have been instances of whites saying we should exile blacks back to Africa by force.

And in the 60's we had the Civil Rights Movement, which is when everything went screwy. I worked with a black guy who was a kid in Mississippi at that time. He was sent to live with relatives in Detroit because his family felt it was too dangerous for him to stay there. He never moved back, and he never graduated from high school (he did get his GED because that was a requirement to get hired in where we met). Rosa Parks was the first black to commit an act of civil disobedience by refusing to sit in the back of the bus...except that's wrong on two counts. She was the second (the first was a young woman who was pregnant out of wedlock and so deemed unsuitable to be held up as a hero), and she has gone on record as only doing so because she was too tired to walk to the back where she was required by law to sit. When I was growing up, the back of the school bus was favored by blacks and whites because it kept you farther away from the eyes of the bus driver. Blacks have been granted equal rights by the federal government, but have systematically had them taken away by blacks and whites. In some places they are threatened with violence if they attempt to vote, and in Detroit they just had their first districted election for city council in my lifetime (previously all city council seats were elected "at large", which meant entire swaths of the city had no one campaigning for their office, and the only thing the Detroit City Council truly represented was the Detroit City Council). Segregation is outlawed, but some politicians have taken that to mean that if a school is predominantly black or white, some of the students should be bussed to other schools miles away from where they live in the name of desegregation.

Things are still pretty bad, depending on where you go, and there's a lot of disinterest on both sides in improving anything.