Red states want to ignore history of racism

So the governors of Florida and other “red” states ignore this dire warning about forgetting history. They claim erasing the unpleasant aspects of our racial past are meant to protect their white children from feeling guilty.

Bull. They don’t want those white kids to confront their parents when they go to college out of state and learn the truth. “Why didn’t you warn us about this?” If the kids don’t wake up to the truth, they’ll never know what hits them.

As long-ago Watertown City Human Rights Commission chair during Fort Drum expansion, I believe the past is still with us. Major financial institution Citigroup estimates discrimination against African Americans cost our economy $16 trillion in the last two decades, in terms of underemployment and reduced consumer buying power. Wouldn’t you like for our economy to have that lost money back?

NPR reported last year that the National Football League got caught downplaying the cognitive functioning lost by black ex-players from concussions to save money by reducing its disability pensions. In his Oct. 5 column in the Thousand Islands Sun, famed sportscaster Dick Stockton addressed my involvement in this football concussion business.

In his Aug. 27 column in the Watertown Daily Times, Jerry Moore quoted Richard Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman on Nixon’s War on Drugs aimed at punishing black America. This undermined the civil rights advances of the previous decade and was continued by subsequent presidents unaware of that hidden agenda.

HR5905 is buried in a House subcommittee. It’s intended to address the wholesale shortchanging of the families and descendants of African American World War II veterans in a GI Bill administrated in the late 1940s and early 1950s by all-white local committees. For the most part, black families of veterans were excluded from GI Bill benefits. Will we ever rectify this?

Perhaps I should lie like Gov. Ron DeSantis to comfort people. Would you refuse to yell at me “Look out!” as I stepped off a curb in front of an onrushing truck?

Roland Van Deusen

Clayton