On Thursday, MSNBC host Joy Reid said that “the right” is in a “knockdown, drag-out fight to shutdown intellectual pursuits like critical race theory” to avoid repairing America’s “raw, racial violence.”

Reid said, “We in America are having this big debate right now about history, and fundamental to that debate is a question. What is history for? What is its purpose? The answer is that it depends.”

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Reid: ‘Too Many People Want To Keep Americans Blindly Numb’

She continued, “History, as Jon Meacham has said on this show, can either be a bedtime story meant to buck up your patriotism and make you feel good, or it can be a lesson, a caution, and an instruction on how to avoid the perils of the past and how to achieve repair.”

“When it comes to the racial history of this country, there’s a real fight going on,” Reid said. “Lots of Americans, particularly on the right, want the bedtime story.”

“They’re insisting on it, and so they’re in a knockdown, drag-out fight to shutdown intellectual pursuits like critical race theory, which simply asks how our racial history intersects with the construction of our laws or journalistic, historical reckoning like the 1619 Project,” she said.

Reid added, “Too many people want to keep Americans blindly numb to the raw racial violence in our collective past.”

The 1619 Project has been dragged by historians as both painting a false narrative and making basic factual errors.

The MSNBC host then said too many Americans did not want to deal with their country’s “true history.”

“They want Americans to just shut up and feel good about America’s founding and sing from the hymnal, so they don’t even have to think about dealing with the repercussions of our true history and the need for repair,” Reid continued.

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“They want to keep comfortably living off the profits of what Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly calls piracy, with no one ever asking to examine the contents of the loot box.”

Reid Warns Of ‘Violent White Nationalism’

Reid then took U.S. history to task.

“But the past just won’t die no matter how hard The Daughters of the Confederacy fight to rewrite slavery as happy Blacks singing in the field in our textbooks or how persistent the gauzy myths about the slave-holding Founding Fathers remain,” she said.

“We do bedtime stories,” Reid said. “That’s why we don’t understand the way we are, the gun violence unique in the western world, the racial mistrust, the poverty that breaks down along racial lines.”

Reid ended with, “The persistence of violent white nationalism that today threatens our national security. These things have deep, ugly roots inextricably tied to slavery and its aftermath.”

“We’d be better off just unearthing it and airing it out if we really want repair,” she finished.

 

This piece originally appeared in ThePoliticalInsider.com and is used by permission.

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