Teach History. Democracy Requires It.

At 85 years of age, having been a civil rights lawyer virtually all my professional life, at times my mind wanders toward despair.

How as a nation have we fallen into such a place? How have we simply watched as one of our political parties has embraced election deniers who seek to undermine our democracy and mortally weaken our public schools and public universities? How have we watched abortion rights and voting rights come under the gun of right-wing political power?

How is it that members of both our major political parties voted to let Congress and a Republican president weaken banking regulations designed to protect our citizens to the point where a major banking failure threatens us? How could President Biden authorize a massive drilling project for more oil in Alaska, which will only exacerbate the climate emergency?

Teaching history is vital to the common good, not least because it’s a step toward encouraging political engagement at all levels.

Certainly, there are many factors involved. There is the overwhelming desire for political power of some, which negates all else. There is the endless racism and belief by many in white superiority, which tears our country apart.

And even for those of us who believe we think rationally and without prejudice, whether we do or not, there are old but continuing myths that divide us.

On the conservative side, there is the myth that we are a nation of rugged individualists who pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps through hard work and self-reliance alone. These people believe that our problems are caused by a government that taxes their hard earned funds to support those who live on the dole.

On the progressive side, there are too few that stray far from the center of the Democratic Party.

Too many moderates believe in the myth of equal rights in the United States even as voting rights and women’s rights to control their own bodies are violated systemically. Many have rightly denounced the Supreme Court for its backward rulings, but still fail to see the court as anything other than a political body standing at the ready to destroy progressive dreams on many fronts.

Meanwhile, the right-wing war on “wokeness” carries a serious threat to public education, the teaching of history, and our nation's understanding of racism in the United States. State legislatures and governors keep passing laws to limit what teachers can teach at the risk of criminal charges.

So where do we go from here? Why not start with reclaiming that single word, "woke"?

That word, which originated in African American culture to mean “awakened to the injustices around you,” has been bastardized by right-wing politicians to mean virtually anything they don’t like. Today, extreme Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have been weaponizing white fears of "wokeness" to criminalize basic teaching about slavery and other American history.

Yet that teaching is vital to the public’s understanding of the true history of this country since the Civil War, when slave-like conditions were reestablished in the South, enforced by Jim Crow laws and the Klan. That teaching is vital to understanding that racism still exists all over America despite the passage of the 1960s Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Put simply, whites need to understand that clever spin doctors have turned "wokeness" into grounds for reducing, discarding, and sanitizing history.

This is where we must fight back.

Knowing our history means acknowledging our country’s many injustices. But it also means learning about the times when white people worked together with Black-led movements to pass the 1960s civil rights laws — and continue to do so today in spaces like the Poor People’s Campaign. That knowledge points the way to building a more just country today.

Knowing this other history — of effective social movements — can help people to come together across races to address the wounds caused by police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, discrimination, and other injustices today.

In short, history is a tool that can help people come together to work for a better America. It is not a "weapon" to keep them apart.

Teaching history is vital to the common good, not least because it’s a step toward encouraging political engagement at all levels. This engagement takes time. But without that effort, our common dreams will remain just that: the dreams of people who do not understand how "woke" has become "woke" and how to return it to its original meaning and broaden it in the process.