Tea Party Groups In Tennessee Demand Textbooks Overlook U.S. Founder's Slave-Owning History (click link to read)
A group of Tea Party activists in Tennessee is seeking to remove references to slavery and mentions of the country’s founders being slave owners.
According to reports, Hal Rounds, the Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said during a recent news conference that there has been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”
“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” Rounds said, according to The Commercial Appeal.
I can’t. I absolutely CAN NOT!!
Let’s call this what it really is: racism.
You can’t erase history just because it makes the ancestors of Caucasian-Americans look bad, especially since it would completely disregard the struggles of the Native Americans as well as the enslaved ancestors of African-Americans.
Speaking as a descendant of BOTH slaves and Native Americans (as well as the slave owners, but that’s a WHOLE other topic), I find these Tea Party strategies completely disgusting. To even SUGGEST downplaying the history of slavery in the United States from the textbooks is unacceptable.
