Quote:Feel free to dig up any history book that's currently being used in government indoctrination centers.  I'm sure you embrace the lack of content they're teaching when it comes to American history.  You remove the monuments and other symbols from public view because their offensive to someone, and the history is forgotten.  The one thing about history that those of your mindset tend to ignore is that when you don't know your history, good and bad, you're bound to repeat it. 

At times, it's easy to forget that my high school experience (in Duval County) was well over a decade in my past. At the same time, I recall my US history teacher reciting over and over again how slavery was not the primary motivator behind the Civil War; states' rights was. She had it pretty well stuck in my head, so when I left for college and took my first US history course--at a private university in South Carolina--it surprised me that a professor with a clear leaning to the right literally laughed when someone in the class tried to argue that the Civil War was about states' rights. His exact words, which have stuck with me ever since:

 

"Yeah, the right to own slaves!"

 

I took four more US history courses in college, at both the original school and the larger school in the southwest that I eventually ended up at, including one specifically on the timeframe from 1850-1900. Once again, the professor strongly rebuked the idea that the Civil War was caused by anything other than slavery. There were other reasons behind it, some of them major, but had the United States legalized slavery and guaranteed its legality indefinitely, the Confederate traitors would not have seceded. It really is that simple, and that's not coming from a "government indoctrination center." That's coming from educators of diverse backgrounds in different parts of the country, with PhD's from different schools.

 

Have things changed? I'm sure they have. Common Core is perhaps the dumbest thing to happen to education in the US since, well, ever. Even before Common Core was a pipe dream, educators at higher levels were no longer clinging desperately to the states' rights argument to justify the actions of the Confederate traitors as being motivated by anything other than the desire to maintain slavery.

 

Quote:You'd never know it based on where the bulk of the accusations are targeted. 

I'm not blind. There are black people who are extremely racist against white people, and a few of them proudly fly their Black Panthers flags. The difference is that those flags are flown on private property, and their dead are in private cemeteries. The Confederate flag is flown by governments over graveyards for Confederate soldiers that are maintained by taxpayer dollars. That's the inherent difference here, and why that argument's not going anywhere. The black symbol of racism is flown by private citizens. One of the strongest white symbols of racism is flown and honored by state governments that use the taxes of black citizens to maintain the graves of people who fought to keep them enslaved.

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