One of our Founding Fathers’ “four foundations of freedom” was Widespread Education. They felt that every generation needed to grow up learning the history of this country so that the origin of and reasoning behind our democracy would be generally and broadly understood by every schoolchild in America. And that by the time each schoolchild became old enough to vote, he (until 1920 anyway) would know who was in politics because of self-aggrandizement and who was in it to fulfill the Constitution’s mission of governing for the general welfare of all the people.

How has this fared? Seems that some of us grew up learning U.S. History, as it was taught in the public schools, and some of us did not. In our case, Kathryn remembers the subject being taught every second or third year starting in elementary school and going all through high school, and college as well. But John remembers little to no history being taught in his youth, certainly not in public school, and only as an elective that wouldn’t count toward his major in university. We found that disparity instructive and wondered how many native-born Americans—as opposed to naturalized citizens who have to learn it expressly to take the test before they are sworn in—have no concept of our history. Even as it is taught in public schools.

Why do we keep stipulating “as it is taught”? Because, “History is written by the victors,” as Winston Churchill purportedly said. And while that doesn’t have to be true, particularly if what we are interested in is “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” it is certainly true in the way American History is taught in American schools. So we have to ask a most pointed question: whose history?

When we learn “American history,” we learn the noble motives of the white settlers “seeking religious freedom,” the courageous imagining of the white Founding Fathers struggling to devise government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” where “all men [sic] are created equal” and endowed by certain “unalienable rights” by no less than a Divine Creator. Yet, we learn little of the indigenous civilization that populated this land the settlers “discovered,” except that they were “savages” that were ultimately subdued by brave white families, at great cost and suffering.

The names of those peoples who were already here are hidden in the names of our rivers and states, towns, and sports teams. The Meramec, the Penobscot, the Mohawk; these are but a few. We label the hundreds of tribes that lived from sea to shining sea, each with different languages and customs and different trade relations with the others, Indians, when we’re being generous, and savages otherwise. And we paint an image of them for posterity with a white supremacist’s brush. It’s all so far from the truth it couldn’t set us free if our lives depended upon it. And you know what? It might.

But it doesn’t end there.

We learn of the evils of slavery, but not that our Founders shipped Black human beings from Africa to this country in chains and forced them to build our country and create its wealth, and then to further enslave their American-born descendants, selling them for a profit while conferring upon them a fraction of personhood—three-fifths, to be exact. Or how slavery never fully ended, continuing to this day through a loophole in the emancipating Thirteenth Amendment that legalizes enslaving the prison population—forcing them to work without pay, even for private corporate profits—a population that has always been disproportionately Black and Indian, incarcerated regularly on lesser charges than white inmates are.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg of the history we don’t learn in school.

So we have been educating ourselves over the last couple of years. Starting with Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race, by Debby Irving, which is a personal memoir of a typically liberal teacher who learned how much more deeply entrenched discrimination against Blacks was than she had ever imagined. Even in her own heart.

Then we read An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, where we found out the myth of the English settlers arriving on a basically uninhabited coastline where “primitive” tribes of Paleolithic peoples savagely defended their turf was just that, a myth. We learned the other side of the story, which was mind and heart shattering to know. But we must know these things about our history, because these centuries of bloodshed, betrayal, and genocide are what got us to this divided era we now find ourselves in.

And now we are reading This Violent Empire: the Birth of an American National Identity, by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, which links these violent beginnings to the divisions that are tearing our country apart today. Here’s what the publisher says about this impeccably researched and written book:

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans’ national sense of self.

Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of “Others” (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders.

We find fascinating this idea that our very identity as a nation has never been identified and never unified without a manufactured enemy or “other,” despite our name’s assertion as a United States of America. When an identification with the historical, white, masculine power center dissolves, for example, we notice the different countries we are living in, the different things we mean by America, particularly when it comes to “making it great again.”

For example, a large percentage of the country can assert we have always been an “English-speaking and Christian nation,” and they have centuries of actual evidence in the fact that Indians and enslaved Africans were alike forbidden by law from speaking their languages and practicing their religions—with punishment swift and severe, including death—until these laws were repealed in middle 1970s. Those who say that seem to be proud of that legacy. But another large percentage can assert we are multicultural, free to believe whatever we want, pointing to the guarantees in the Constitution and all the founding documents that were used to set us up as a purposely secular nation without an official language, with any preference for a specific religion—including non-religion—left to the individual to decide, without state interference. Both perspectives are right; in fact, those who want to control the behavior of others might leap from one identity to the other for the convenience of winning their argument.

But perhaps the biggest result of this shifting identity is that the horrors of the past have never been addressed in any comprehensive way. Sacred, life-sustaining land was stolen and turned into property for white owners to create wealth. The bodies of human beings were stolen and then sold to create wealth for their white “owners.” Enslaved Black people’s labor was then stolen to create wealth for their white owners and the ancillary industries that thrived around their product. For more than two hundred years, land, the slave trade, and cotton combined to create the foundation of wealth upon which our superpower nation stands. The industries of banking, shipping, and agriculture are the direct result of this wealth. Our military might and strategies were developed in the efforts to control, squash, or exterminate enslaved Black people and Indians.

But unlike the Germans who pay reparations to the Jewish victims of the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich, who teach about the Holocaust in school, and who remain remorseful and mindful of the dangers of white supremacy and dreams of world domination in their political discourse and policy making going forward, the United States practices denial and complacency toward the holocausts of our making. America continues to propagate a mythology of its innocence and innovation, its liberty and justice for all mentality, while continuing to amass white wealth at the expense of the remaining lands of Native Americans, a fraction of their original territory, and at the safety and security of Black Americans, who remain under continual threat of policies and practices that treat them like runaway slaves.

If you think we are overstating the damage done and the ongoing harm, then you too are guilty of making those outside your experience the “other,” whose reality is dismissed only because it is not yours. As a citizen, it is your and my and all of our responsibility to learn the true history of our country and have open discussion about how to repair the crimes of the past with new practices going forward. How do we create an identity that includes all of who and what we are? It is not by sweeping the dead bodies of our past under the rug. That decay festers and will only lead to another civil war, played out in Congress and state legislatures, as it has for the past thirty years, in presidential elections, as this current one is demonstrating, or overtly with the spiritual descendants of slave catchers and Indian killers packing their weapons against the rest of us. There is no sitting this out; your silence puts you on the side of genocide.

In part 2, we’ll deal with some solutions going forward that you can do to start addressing these deep problems in our country that have been festering ever since the birth of our nation.