For the last several years, America has been especially burdened by hatred, anger, and resentment from our own citizens. The narrative has insisted, and still does in some quarters, that we were not only racists in our past, but we are all systemic racists now. One major effort to attack the reputation of the U.S. was to remove the tributes to, and recognition of, our countries accomplishments and history, including war memorials, to placate those who want to condemn our entire past.

President Trump, on his first day in office, declared by Executive Order that the time to celebrate our country and embrace its history had arrived. Among other declarations he said the following:

Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order restoring truth and sanity to American history by revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.

[snip]

The Order also directs the Secretary of the Interior [to] restore Federal parks, monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that have been improperly removed or changed in the last five years to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events.

Leftists have used propaganda to try to convince our country that we should be ashamed of being Americans; that our history is one of slavery and hatred; that we have nothing that we can be proud of in terms of the growth and progress of American culture. But President Trump rejects that ugly story:

In the last decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted effort to rewrite American history and force our nation to adopt a factually baseless ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement. President Trump is fighting back by reestablishing truth in the historical narrative and restoring Federal sites dedicated to American heritage.

Citizens in our day do not take pride in slavery, nor in the fact that it took so long to eliminate it. But the fact is, that is precisely what we did. And ever since those days, we have legislated and demanded the acknowledgement of equal rights for every single citizen. Yes, the death of George Floyd was tragic and unfortunate, but what in the world does that have to do with the great progress we have made in race relations? The facts matter:

The most recent, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, found ‘no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,’ and instead determined that ‘race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot.’

In other words, it is the violent crime rate of a given race—not race itself—that determines the likelihood a member of that race will be shot and killed by a law enforcement officer.

If we want to teach the truth about U.S. history, we need to ensure that we have our facts right: we are a democratic republic that serves our citizenry, and we have created legislation that protects our rights and freedoms—even for those few racists who exist. Those statues and monuments that acknowledge all aspects of our history are there to remind us of how far we have come.

We are a great country. We were never meant to be a perfect one.

Image: Public domain.