On Sept. 15, 1963, a bomb exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls.
In 2023, on the 60th 60 anniversary of this tragedy, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson returned to commemorate the KKK barbarity: “We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them, and vow never to repeat them. We must not shield our eyes. We must not shrink away lest we lose it all.”
Her plea was not new. For over a century, the “duty to remember” has guided progressive politics. Leftists have exhorted that Western nations must face up to their histories of militarism, economic exploitation, colonialism, slave trade, racism, sexism and heteronormativity.
Evils, of course, have also been committed in cultures other than the West, but progressive thinking demands that we acknowledge injustices perpetrated in and by the West that have impacted millions of lives worldwide.
This invention, sometimes called “memory politics,” has prompted leftists to redefine what history is and how it should be taught.
For centuries, schoolroom history had meant little more than ploughing through kings and queens, generals and admirals, or presidents and legislatures showering their nations in glory — not forgetting the pious pilgrims of the Mayflower, the pioneers of the West and the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plains.
But recent decades have seen this tradition overthrown, replaced by a demand that history requires collective self-criticism.
Chronicles of Western wrongdoing must be explained in the classroom and, more importantly, must be communicated to the widest possible public through initiatives such as street protests, films, radio and television features, and museum exhibits. Yet, how did leftists acquire the privilege to change history classes into ethics lessons? Don’t they have some bleak pasts of their own?
Leftists today reject such suspicions of hypocrisy. They insist that they also engage in self-scrutiny and, to be fair, they usually do disown the wrongs committed under Stalin, Mao, the Kim dynasty, or Pol Pot. But the problem is that they have never engaged in self-criticism in the way they expect the rest of us to do.
They are willing enough to confess atrocities committed by regimes widely supported on the left, yet we find none of the same insistence that these stories, too, must be brought to the widest possible public.
Leftists endlessly push programs and campaigns to teach the rest of us about Western evils. But where are the programs and campaigns that would demonstrate leftists’ own self-scrutiny by educating the public about mass murders, famines, deportations, imprisonments, surveillance, and repression committed by regimes at least mildly supported, when not zealously endorsed, on the left?
Stalin’s famines claimed millions of Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Russians, with devastating effects continuing to this very day. But where are observance days or education programs to teach schoolchildren about this outcome of leftist support of socialist regimes? And this is merely one such example.
Certainly, over time, some progressives have altered their tactics, periodically changing course to curry political advantage. For example, when it became clear half a century ago that leftists would massively lose popular appeal by supporting Stalinism and Maoism, they changed their platforms accordingly.
Yet this kind of strategizing differs starkly from the assumption that the rest of us need to face up to history regardless of whether or how we might draw political gains by doing so.
As many on the left now see it, we must now tell history’s untold stories: This means fewer stories about heroic founding fathers, and more about brutalized slaves, exploited factory workers, degraded women, and pathologized LGBTQ+ people.
There is much to be said for this view. I mostly share it, and I often teach it. But it would be scandalous to claim that we are doing justice merely by replacing one heap of untold stories with another.
Yes, we must teach about the slave trade and the West’s support for it. We must teach about colonialism and the West’s support for it. We must teach about how millions of people today continue to suffer the consequences. Above all, we must bring this knowledge out of the classroom and into public consciousness through educational programs and campaigns.
But then progressives must also spend equal time teaching about the millions oppressed under Stalin, Ceaușescu, Hoxha, Mao, the Kims, and Pol Pot, often with leftist support or acquiescence, and the millions of people today still enduring their consequences.
Above all, the left must bring this knowledge out of the classroom and into public consciousness through the same types of educational programs and campaigns they demand of the right.
Progressives have been entirely right to evolve history from tales of glory to exercises in self-examination.
Collective self-scrutiny is the very reason for democracy, so that we will — hopefully — review past wrongs and plot a better future. Yes, educate the public about Western wrongs.
But progressives must also devise programs and campaigns that teach the public about oppressive histories in which the left was all too complicit. When it comes to critically minded history, don’t tell us — show us.
Eric Heinze is a professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary University of London and the author of Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left.