History and historical fiction

I wouldn’t say PragerU and the Florida Board of Education are whitewashing history. That assumes they’re starting with actual history to sanitize. At best, you can call it historical fiction. They use historical figures to come up with a made-up story, like what Quentin Tarantino did with Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. You wouldn’t refer to either of those movies for information about World War II and the Manson Family. Anyone who takes an objective look at history wouldn’t refer to those PragerU videos for factual information either.

Like all historical fiction, PragerU uses the past to present its views about the present. If they can convince kids that slavery was just a fact of life back then, the Founding Fathers didn’t really like it but permitted it anyway, slavery wasn’t really that bad and gave Black people useful skills and Christianity, the Civil War was just about states’ rights, and although there were a few mean people who were racists, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a beautiful speech that ended racism forever — they can ignore Black people’s demands for reparations, justice, and the end of inequality.

There is historical fiction, and there is historical fact. And you don’t have to go far to find it. I only have to go as far as the town where I grew up, Reseda, California. Homes in my neighborhood were subject to redlining…