Challenge: Alternate History
FIONA is reading history texts. She is a freshman in college.
FIONA
Grandma, why aren’t we taught any of this in our high school classes.
MARCIA
What aren’t you taught in history?
FIONA
James McCune Smith, the first African American to get a medical degree had to go to Glasgow to get his degree and spent most of his career fighting against black inferiority.
(turns some pages)
Or that there was a law enacted in 1854 that made it illegal for a Chinese person to testify against a white person!
(turns some pages)
Or about Mary Musgrove who was the primary negotiator between the English and Native Americans in colonial Georgia! We never learned anything about these brave people or these horrible acts. It’s all wrapped up in country pride and the American Dream… And I guess I knew that things weren’t really taught in a way that highlighted minorities or women or anyone not straight-white-cis-male, but there is so, so much that we are just never taught. Or taught entirely wrong!
Why were we taught that women didn’t get the the right to vote in 1920? I mean, technically women did, but in practice, black women were stopped by Jim Crow and voting laws, and Native women and Asian Americans and everyone else still had an uphill battle to be afforded what we consider a basic right of being an American?
MARCIA
I suppose they don’t want to make kids ashamed of the country they live in.
FIONA
So they wait until they are adults? Lying to them until it’s no longer feasible and adding the shame with the guilt of not knowing sooner?
MARCIA
Adults don’t know as much as you give them credit for; we’re all just muddling through as best we can.
FIONA
Well, the best isn’t good enough. We should be learning about Stonewall - real Stonewall, not the white-washed bullshit they make a movie out of. And we should be learning about all the reasons we should change the Constitution and install term limits on every government position, and get rid of the fucking electoral college because it’s racist and classist! We should be learning all the ways our country sucks from birth so we can spend our young adulthood figuring out how to make it better, instead of learning what we were taught was a lie.
MARCIA
Maybe you can make that happen for the next generation.