“The past is never dead. It’s not even past, ” said William Faulkner. He meant the past lives in the present. There is still contempt for people of other colors, still resistance to racial cohabitation in classrooms and neighborhoods, still schemes for denying some people the privilege of voting, still disregard for the over-representation of gun deaths and medicaid expirations among people of color. It’s because so many privileged people believe that the past is over with, and the present should display America in the best light, the light that Makes America Great Again.
In the iconic news photo Elizabeth Eckford attempts to enter Little Rock Central High on September 4, 1957. If you were a news witness to this event 66 years ago you remember the agony of school integration and the suffering of the Black pioneers entering white public spaces for the first time in the Deep South. Maybe you were one of those who broke the color barrier against inhumane harassment. 
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a white graduate of Little Rock Central High School who has emerged a victor in Arkansas history. “I’ll never forget being a student at Little Rock Central High and watching my dad, a Republican governor, and Bill Clinton, a Democrat president, hold open the doors for the Little Rock Nine, doors that 40 years earlier had been closed to them because they’re Black,” Huckabee Sanders said in a campaign ad.
When American history is taught, what version should our children learn? The version told of the white hate that almost stopped the integration of Little Rock Central High School or the version, which is a memory of the Little Rock Nine willingly returning to the scene of their pain and persecution during Sarah Huckabee’s blissful high school years?
The suffering of the Civil Rights movement is what Huckabee Sanders wants to forget and what some will call “critical race theory,” because it makes us focus on moments of prejudice and incivility. The airbrushing we do to make history a patriotic lesson is what some partisans like Governors Ron DeSantis and Sarah Huckabee Sanders expect to see in the school lessons of American history K-12.
It is the airbrushing of slavery as career development that the Florida Board of Education wants to institutionalize in the public schools.
An infamous 1950 textbook by Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager said:
As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.'” (The Growth of the American Republic)
Perhaps one of the most egregious Lies my Teacher Told Me (James W. Loewen, 2018 ), but consistent with the narrative of American history textbooks that assures high school students that our history has been nothing but progress. Until the 21st century this narrative has contributed to glaring misrepresentations and omissions of our history in our textbooks that have come back to haunt us in the public spectacle of white domination in the killing of George Floyd. What we have forgotten or never knew about racism has to be re-taught to a shocked classroom of white citizens.
Scenarios like this remind me most of present-day Russia, which is trying to restore its past by invading Ukraine. In the minds of some Russians the Soviet Union once ruled Europe through its satellites, which we called the Iron Curtain countries. But the Russians remember them as a Pan-Slavic union, uniting people of similar faith and political allegiance. They, too, want to make the crumbled Soviet Empire “great again.”
To sell his ambitions in Ukraine Vladimir Putin has to reframe the post-World War II occupation of Eastern Europe as a willing alliance of diverse nations, some of them unable to hold themselves together within their own borders. When we refer to the “Iron Curtain,” the Russians claim we make “revisionist history;” they don’t admit their own version of the Soviet Empire is revised to their satisfaction.
We want a revisionist history in our country, where the old days of civil struggle and inequitable voting and living conditions did not matter if you were white. We remember a country that matched our limited version of democracy, and we disapprove of anyone who remembers without revisionist glasses. We call those people “woke” or “haters” of America. They are killers of the dream of democracy for our kind of people.
When we remember the Civil Rights Movement, we are asked to remember the day the Little Rock Nine returned to Central High School, and they were honored as if we had never screamed at, or spat on them. That was not a good memory. So revisionists think about the outcomes of the struggle, not the struggle itself, that martyred and traumatized so many. They congratulate themselves for their enlarged hearts and forget that the past is not dead.
It is not even past.