2/12/2022
Docuseries "Everything's Gonna Be All White" Challenges Recurrent Historical Denial
Historians in the Newstags: racism, documentaries, teaching history, television, Whiteness
There’s a difference between not knowing something and actively choosing not to know it. The early-aughts film Memento, for instance—about a man with a brain disorder that prevents him from making new memories—perfectly illustrates this concept. It ends with its main character destroying hard evidence about what happened in his past so that he can go on believing what he’d prefer to believe about it forever.
His instincts are reasonable. Learning the truth can be scary! Especially when it’s a truth about one’s past that carries unflattering implications about one’s present. Actually acting on that instinct, though—and suppressing historic truth—is not reasonable. It’s cowardly, deceitful, and just plain wrong. Nevertheless, conservatives around the country have spent the past two years trying to Memento the evidence of America’s racist foundations out of their kids’ classrooms, out of the public discourse, and out of their own consciences.
They will never fully succeed as long as projects like Everything’s Gonna Be All White remain available.
Debuting February 11 on Showtime, Everything’s Gonna Be All White is a three-part documentary about the history of whiteness in America, as told exclusively by people of color. Because the series is critical about race, it will inevitably be dismissed by the crowd that would most benefit from watching it. They’re missing out on a gem. EGBAW serves as both a rejoinder to the conversation on critical race theory and a comment on its historic lineage.
“The biggest lie is that we already know everything we need to know about American history,” says Nell Irvin Painter, a history professor at Princeton University, at the beginning of the doc. “And I think one of the definitions of American whiteness is not knowing American history.”
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of