Witness history being made now because we know what oppressors will attempt later.
Most of us learned incorrect and incomplete history in our textbooks. The ones that are supposed to teach you intentionally. But what’s different now most people KNOW that we haven’t been taught the truth.
First oppressors will try to edit history.
They will embellish it with “workers” instead of enslaved people, with the exchange of “gifts” instead of theft of land, and with “deliverance” instead of erasure.
They will hide behind the idea of “diversity” and the melting pot, which in reality espouses assimilation as the goal. No, the Empire doesn’t want our differences and variation, it wants us to conform.
Then they will try to deny it. There will be those who will say it never happened. Or they will claim it never happened THAT way. They burn and ban books, subjects, and words to erase it.
They will claim they brought “enlightenment” and “civilization” to people who were already centuries ahead.
We know our history books have been manipulated, controlled, fabricated, and erased when it comes to Black enslavement. We know some people outright lie about the history of Indigenous genocide. We also know there are holocaust deniers. That Japanese colonizers deny sexual enslavement of women across Asia. That Empires revise histories of colonization and religious wars to make them seem like benevolent missionaries, saving the “uncivilized.”
Then they will outright lie about their role and change it. They will claim they were defending the people, that there was no genocide, that the enslaved were there voluntarily to learn, and that the land was always theirs.
We will have those who silently change their stance. Then there will be those who get louder and say they always supported Palestine. Changing your mind because you learn is not the same as changing your story and lying about the past.
We know this because it has already happened. We know there are white people who, after the fact, switched their stories about marching in the civil rights movement.
And of course, history will be erased, rewritten, and adopted in the voice of the oppressor. As it always has. They will co-opt the messages and struggles of the oppressed by saying they were there during the marches, that they were always on the side of freedom, and that they were fighting for peace.
But we always recognize this co-optation because you cannot mimic liberation.
Edit, deny, lie, change their stories, and co-opt ours. This is the cycle.
But we can stop that. We each have our voices. We each have tools, including social media and organizing, we can each document, we can share, we can seek out news and truth ourselves. We can witness history ourselves. We are witnessing it happening now. We are in it. We are history. We are revolution.
Comments are closed.