Quotes from James W. Loewen

It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.

Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you'll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.

When you see a roadside marker, take in what it tells but also ask, how might this be wrong? One giveaway is the use of qualifying phrases introducing statements of fact, as in: "According to tradition..." or "According to the legislature..." Visitors can count on the rest of such sentences to be unsubstantiated.

Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called "hyphenated Americans." "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him," said Wilson, "carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready."27 The American people responded to Wilson's

Monuments look static - carved in stone and all - but their meanings change as the present changes and as people enact new rituals at them.

What is interesting about this choice is that Betsy Ross never did anything. Frisch notes that she played "no role whatsoever in the actual creation of any actual first flag." Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Philadelphia, largely invented the myth of the first flag.

The actual cabin fell into disrepair probably before Lincoln became president. According to research by D. T. Pitcaithley, the new cabin, a hoax built in 1894, was leased to two amusement park owners, went to Coney Island, where it got commingled with the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis (another hoax), and was finally shrunk to fit inside a marble pantheon in Kentucky, where, reassembled, it still stands.

loan guarantees by the FHA and Veterans Administration (VA) were the most important single cause of postwar suburbanization, and more than 98% of the millions of home loans guaranteed by the FHA and VA after World War II were available only to whites.

Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform. Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the rightness of our society.

African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—"Negro Village"—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county.

our governments openly favored white supremacy and helped to create and maintain all-white communities. So did most of our banks, realtors, and police chiefs. If public relations offices, Chambers of Commerce, and local historical societies don't want us to know something, perhaps that something is worth learning. After all, how can we deal with something if we cannot even face it?

We must not forget this—not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

If they are left-wing, they can subscribe to Daily Kos and Huffington Post. If they are right-wing, they can subscribe to Breitbart or the Drudge Report.6 Less often do they subscribe to outlets that provide several points of view. As a result, their thinking rarely gets challenged, so they become still less likely or able to assess information critically.

Memory says, "I did that." Pride replies, "I could not have done that." Eventually, memory yields. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE3

Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, "School is in business to produce reliable people."17 Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: "It would be extremely naïve to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically."18 Henry Giroux, Freire's leading disciple

Surely, in history, "truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.

Most textbook authors protect us from a racist Lincoln. By doing so, they diminish students' capacity to recognize racism as a force in American life. For if Lincoln could be racist, then so might the rest of us be. And if Lincoln could transcend racism, as he did on occasion, then so might the rest of us.

the Columbus myth "allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than a historical product issuing from a process that began with Columbus's first voyage."91

The opposite of racism is antiracism, of course, or what we might call racial idealism or equalitarianism, and it is still not clear whether it will prevail. In this struggle, our history textbooks offer little help. Just as they underplay white racism, they also neglect racial idealism. In doing so, they deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the new fault lines that will spread out in the future from the great rift in our past.

In June 1906, the city council of Santa Ana, California, passed a resolution that called for the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown; on June 26 a crowd of more than a thousand watched it burn.

From Myakka City, Florida, to Kennewick, Washington, the nation is dotted with thousands of all-white towns that are (or were until recently) all white on purpose.

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions," Helen Keller pointed out. "Conclusions are not always pleasant."42 Most of us automatically shy away from conflict

Sundown suburbs are the key reason why geographer Jeff Crump was able to maintain that cities in the United States are the most racially segregated urban areas in the world.