Steve Russell: Shocking students with the truth about US history

When I first started university teaching, I was many times the bearer of shocking news to some young woman that her grandmother was not allowed to vote. By the time I retired, the news that I had personally observed black people required to use separate drinking fountains was shocking to many. This is what we get when we agree to shove controversial and inconvenient truths down the memory hole in K-12.

I expect that Indian kids who know that their great-grandparents could not leave the reservation without a note from the Indian agent learned it from their elders and not from the public schools. I was born and raised where Indians were the largest minority population and the Trail of Tears that brought my ancestors and the Creeks I was raised among to Oklahoma was barely mentioned.

The horrors of President Jackson’s Removal and the widespread and sometimes violent resistance to allotment of our reservations that created Oklahoma were threats to our immediate ancestors we learned about at home or did not learn.

Still, women ride the historical bus behind most ethnic groups, even Indians. British women got the vote in 1918; American women in 1920; Irish women in 1922. There are countries where people still don’t vote and countries where the voting population does not include women. Now. Today. As we speak.

How can I say sex discrimination is the hardest nut to crack when LGBT people are still disadvantaged by law as well as by custom? Because the legal status of LGBT people is a prime example of sex discrimination. What the law is doing is disadvantaging a set of human beings because they do not conform to gender stereotypes.