We Must Critically Engage With the Past or We Are Doomed to Repeat It

In order to understand the present and prepare for the future, we must understand the past and the ways that the past impact the present. As Frederick Douglas put it in his 1852 speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” When we deny students the opportunity to learn about the nation’s past, warts and all, we deny them the ability to fully understand and navigate the present. As James Loewen puts it, “The upbeat happy endings in our textbooks send a message about history itself.” That message is that the past happened and it has not impact on the present.

Loewen and Nate Powell drive this home in the graphic adaptation of Lies My Teacher Told Me, specifically at the end of chapter 11, “History and the Future,” where Powell depicts two scenes from history. The first shows police violently attacking marchers during the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, and the second shows insurrectionists attacking the United States Capital on January 6th. The captions under each image read “Violent subversion of democracy,” with 1965 and 2021 under each panel respectively. Over these images, Loewen writes, “By avoiding serious discussions of events and trends in our past, and by implying that no real thinking about our history needs to be done…