"Your ancestors weren't villains," the meme declares. "Don't apologize for them to people who hate you."
Conor Friedersdorf points out that your ancestors probably were neither villains nor heroes, and that it doesn't matter. "You get credit or blame for what you do, not what others did before you were born."
Identity politics lost the election: The Orange Man motivated a multi-ethnic coalition to defeat the Woman of Color.
Businesses have been moving away from DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) initiatives for awhile now. The federal government will be dumping DEI. What about schools?
There will be lots of resistance -- or Resistance -- to abandoning wokeish ideas, such as "white supremacy" as the explanation for the achievement gap, and the importance of tallying and employing victimhood points ("intersectionalism"). On the flip side, I think nearly everyone hates land acknowledgements and thinks "settler colonialism" is stupid.
In very blue California, where I live, schools must offer ethnic studies classes by next fall. It will be a graduation requirement for the Class of 2030. But districts can choose what "ethnic studies" means, and some have chosen a very left-wing curriculum that was vetoed by the governor. Others will go with the approved curriculum, which isn't quite as anti-capitalist or anti-semitic. And some will find alternatives that are more focused on history, less on politics.
The Independent Institute's Center on Educational Excellence is offering a free Comparative Cultures curriculum to teachers who want to a less ideological approach that explores different perspectives.
The curriculum recognizes America's "sordid past" and America's ideals, said Walter Myers III of the Discovery Institute.
Good social humanities & sciences teaching will include culture in North America and American civic history, along with other topics, such as politics, economics and law, in their Social Studies: private schools will be advantaged in not having to meet the incompetent legislature's graduation requirements, and parents will be wise to walk away from California's state schools and into private ones, to avoid the transgressives' extreme indoctrination that was just roundly rejected by the American people, and will be again, if Gavin Newsom decides to run for president.
You would think that those most opposed to slavery would be worried about slavery today, rather than the slavery of yesteryear. Slavery and human trafficking are huge problems today and our political betters spend very little time talking about it. How many of those kids whose parents were allowed to stroll across the border wound up being trafficked? We'll never know, but the number sure isn't zero.
Real history is good and bad, just like most real people.
Few antiracists learn about African slavery and how most who were enslaved were enslaved by Blacks in Africa.
America is great, has been great, but has done lots of bad. Like Democrat KKK and Dem Jim Crow laws, even after Democrats defended slavery in a real shooting Civil War, and lost.