SF Chronicle Op Ed

“Lest We Forget”

When I was 15, my father took me to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. When I saw

Marcelle Swergold's "Torah," at first I thought it was a sculpture of a thorny bush, until we were

close enough to realize they were twisted bodies and barbed wire. I am haunted to this day by the

exhibits — the piles of shoes from those killed in the gas chamber, a lampshade the Nazis made

from the skin of dead Jews and the eternal flame inscribed with three words:

"Lest we forget."

Many in this country want to forget. There’s been much controversy over America’s fraught

history with race and how or if we should even teach about it in our schools. One teaching

concept is critical race theory, and it has become the scourge for conservatives and derided by

those who refuse to accept our country’s history of racial inequality and how that past shapes our

present moment.

Critical race theory is not a means for teaching children to hate white people or America. It

simply points out that racial inequality is not the result of biological difference but rather a

symptom of age-old racist practices that have become entrenched in the laws, rules and

regulations of U.S. social institutions such as housing, education, labor, healthcare, or the

criminal justice system. These practices can lead to differential outcomes based on one’s race,

according to critical race theory.

Passing laws that prevent our children from learning about the history of racism in America will

not help them understand why people are marching in the streets for Black lives. Protesting for

voting rights or equal justice under the law is not new. If teachers are not allowed to answer

students’ questions with nuance, what are we going to tell them when they ask? James Baldwin

once said that "Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is

faced.”

When my son, Stefan, was in the second grade, my father took him to Washington, D.C., for the

same reason he had taken my sister and I when we were in elementary school — to turn the

history we were learning in the classroom into something real and personal. Stefan and my father

visited Mount Vernon, the Smithsonian, Arlington Cemetery, all of the memorials; the National

Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Holocaust museum.

When Stefan returned, he didn't hate America or white people for the things he learned about our

history of slavery, plantation culture, the civil rights movement, Indian removal or the sins of our

"founding fathers." Stefan returned with a sense of awe, pride, empathy, but more than anything

else, an absolute conviction that equality and human dignity matter. He loves the United States of

America, with all her beauty marks and blemishes, just like his father and his grandfather do.

Our children deserve the truth. They must learn to handle the truth or else they will repeat our

worst mistakes, "lest we forget."

Teaching us history is something my father did throughout my childhood. For the 40th

anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, we went to Hawaii. We visited I’olani Palace where

we learned about the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the treatment of Asian indentured

laborers on the sugarcane plantations.

On Dec. 7, 1981, my father and I stared down at the remains of the battleship Arizona at Pearl

Harbor. I was 11. We stood beside a family of Japanese tourists. Their son was my age, and I

wondered how it felt for them being at a site so emotionally charged for what it represented to

the Americans standing in silence. Later, they sat three seats from me in the memorial's video

viewing room. I remember feeling angry at them. The son smiled at me and I didn't smile back.

"Gomen nasai," he said. I didn't understand Japanese when I was 11. It meant nothing to me at

the time.

In October 1993, while stationed in Okinawa, Japan, as a U.S. Marine, I visited Hiroshima Peace

Park and stood beside a Japanese family. I wasn’t alive when the atomic bomb dropped, yet I still

felt sorry and a sense of responsibility for that place and what it represented. Some people

around me were in tears. I turned and apologized to the family beside me. The grandmother had

surely been alive in 1945.

"Gomen nasai (I’m sorry)," I said. I bowed to her and left.