While white people are becoming interested in black history as well as the history of America as a bloody empire (this is good!), the 'default' horrifying tragedy everyone refers to still is the holocaust and it's concerning that they need to externalize their examples.

Hitler was deeply inspired by American culture, the ideology was present here too, but by defaulting to the nazis mass murder and ethnic cleansing and ignoring our own, we end up not making connections about American society (which we live) and prior mass murders locally.

Those connections are important, and a big part of why so many popular black and native american historians are pushing for people to understand, acknowledge, and identify our OWN history is because we are still living it right now and those echoes of the past fill our country.

I would like to emulate the push that Germany did in the 90s, while grappling with their nazi past, where they very specifically addressed it as a dark disturbing period, where everyone was aware of what was happening and where agency is not removed. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/09/world/teaching-nazi-past-to-german-youth.html

American education of Nazi germany essentially amounts to "Hitler cast a racism spell that made lots of lovely normal people racist, and they were enthralled under his control" because that's a lot more comforting than the real narrative of people believing a racist ideology.

You see this same continuation in the discourse TODAY, where several prominent liberals will frame Republican voters as people 'voting against their interests' when often that couldn't be further from the truth, they're not being tricked they're voting for what they want.

Republicans are significantly whiter and richer than their liberal counterparts. They are a coalition of people who want some degree of ethnostate and/or theocracy and people with money and direct business interests helped by killing government programs. That's the base.

So forming connections about American history and American tragedies, induced against POC more often than not, is pretty key to making the connection that "Oh, you can literally accurately tell how a county votes now based on how many slaves it has 150 years ago"

By viewing history as a continuation of the past rather than a collection of isolated events, we can actually begin to see the broader picture and waves about what the world has been and more importantly IS like for people and how those systems form and reinforce themselves.

Anyway this thread is a downer, here's Tom Sharpling making fun of Billy Crystal's audio black face in his character "The Jazz Man"

Also, (h/t @Maarak ) the alternative narrative of "Hitler cast a magic spell" is often " Germany and the German people are just portrayed as inherently bigoted and evil and something unique to that nation led them down that path" rather than a process that took time/agency.