(London Guardian) — Oklahoma House Republicans on the Common Education Committee voted on Tuesday to ban advanced placement US history courses, because they think it shows “what is bad about America”. If I were Oklahoma, I’d want to forget about “what is bad about” American history, too, especially in my corner of it!
In its “good” history, Oklahoma can boast being the basis of a Rogers and Hammerstein musical and the home of Oral Roberts University. But if Oklahomans were to purge all their local stories which reflect “what is bad about America”, their history pages would be wiped as white as a Tulsa klansman’s hood. Oklahoma was the extremely violent home to a number of lynched African-Americans, as chronicled by America’s Black Holocaust Museum; the Native American men, women and children slaughtered at what is now Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site; and the white people who killed them and likely went to church that very week. It is where Timothy McVeigh committed the largest domestic act of terrorism in recent years and blew up, killed and wounded hundreds of people in the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building. Oklahoma is chock full of reservations where Native Americans were forced to relocate. It’s where, just last year, a botched execution took 45 minutes and left condemned Clayton Lockett “a bloody mess”. And it’s where the violent fracking of its natural resources may be the reason why Oklahoma has gone from having “one or two perceptible earthquakes a year” to “averaging two or three a day.”
