In response to “History of USA is What Makes it Great” which appeared in the July 18-24 issue of North Country This Week: The writer states “history is taught…to shape the identity of a nation.”

She also states “…a handful of people are attempting to erase the history that has made our country great.”

What she fails to address is that the history we were taught in school was the “white history of America.”

I am a white male and Republican to boot!

Although I had a black classmate in high school, contact with other people of color was rare.

When I graduated in 1968 the country was in turmoil with protests over the Vietnam War and racial inequity.

Because of the bias in our education, I had no idea of the true history of suppression of minorities in our supposed free country.

The writer states “radicals, looters and criminals” are attempting “to erase our history.”

She sounds like Trump when she uses these labels to portray protesters exercising their freedom of speech.

And yet Trump says the Confederate flag is free (hate) speech.

The protesters are not erasing history but shedding light on the extreme bias in our history books.

The history of lynching, murders, beatings, and other criminal acts towards Native Americans, African Americans, other people of color and many religious minorities are lacking in secondary school education.

Again, the writer says, “America is a place where all people have the freedom to dream and accomplish [their] desires.”

The problem is that not “all” people have that opportunity now nor in the past.

White America has systematically had their knee on the neck of black Americans since the first slave ship arrived in 1619.

The black poverty rate is 21% vs 8% for whites.

The economic knee of the 1% (Trump and his rich cronies.) limit financial advancement for average Americans let alone the historically oppressed.

When slavery was finally abolished, whites began using overt/covert violence and Jim Crow Laws to maintain their white supremacy for the next 100 years.

It was in this environment that statues to the Confederacy proliferated in 31 states even though the CSA had only 11 states.

Why is there no museum of slavery, no memorial to the thousands of lynching victims or statues of black Americans who worked to make America free for all.

History books need to include their names (Medgar Evers, Ida Wells, Charlotte Brown, Angela Davis, Lawrence Joel, etc.).

Why was I taught that Stonewall Jackson was shot by one of his own men but never knew of black Civil War Medal of Honor recipient William Carey?

David Bolesh

Lisbon