On The Importance of History

 We Learn from History

Let’s not repeat previous mistakes

 

Our legal system, like many others around the world, is a social construct designed to maintain the status quo. Ours came from Anglo-Saxon England and started as rules established by Kings to maintain order, punish violators, and provide mechanisms to resolve disputes. What developed over time, was a series of decisions that came to govern resolution of current disputes. If a past decision was based on a previously established rule and was based on a certain set of facts, a current dispute with similar facts should be resolved in the same way. Order is maintained and affairs become predictable. 

 

The rules and decisions of Kings gave way to written laws passed by Parliament and written decisions based on them were handed down by courts to punish violators and resolve disputes. The written decisions became the precedents used to resolve later disputes. The goal was the same, maintain order and predictability.

 

As English colonial expansion spread out of their island kingdom, the English legal system followed. Parliament and the King sought to maintain order and make sure that the colonies continued to support the homeland by passing laws governing the affairs of colonials. They were enforced in the colonies by appointed governors who appointed magistrates to resolve disputes and were backed up by standing English armies in local garrisons. 

 

We all know how that system ended here. Colonials in the Americas rebelled. The legal system tried to keep order but became largely ignored and military force failed to bring the rebellious colonials back in line. 

 

Our ancestors started to create a “more perfect union,” declaring our independence from the Crown and deciding that rule by monarchy should be replaced here by a democracy where laws were passed by elected representatives and disputes resolved by judges appointed by an executive with the “advice and consent” of popularly elected senators.

 

We would not know about these basic tenants of our form of self-government were it not for the study of history. Studying history is important so we know where we came from and how we got to our present state of affairs. It is critical so we do not repeat some of the mistakes all societies make as they develop. Hence the old saying, “those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.”

 

There is another old saying that comes to mind, “history is written by the victors.” 

 

No one likes to be cast in a bad light. Americans are no different. We don’t want to be seen as having created our “more perfect union” on the backs of enslaved Africans on land stolen from those people who were here long before our English ancestors invaded. We don’t want to be remembered for the genocide and forced relocation of indigenous populations as white people moved from East to West in pursuit of our “manifest destiny.”

 

What we did as the victors was to write a history of slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples that did not make us look so bad. Africans became inferior beings that needed discipline and were better off as slaves here than they had been in their homelands. Indigenous peoples became savages to be conquered or “Tonto” like helpers to white saviors. When gold or oil were discovered on lands the “savages” had occupied for millennia, we just stole the land and moved the original inhabitants to reservations for their own good.

 

If we jump forward a couple of hundred years, the descendants of those enslaved Africans and displaced indigenous people have been joined by those of us who have studied the real histories of our ancestors’ mistakes. What came out of that collaboration is something called “critical race theory” which is merely a vehicle to keep us from making some of those same mistakes our ancestors made by studying a more accurate version of our history and learning how racial distinctions became embedded in our institutions.

 

Right wing extremists, recognizing that knowledge is power, have organized a public campaign to get school boards and states to ban teaching about the accurate American history to perpetuate principles of white supremacy that form the core of their platform. 

 

We need to recognize that our system of government made mistakes and that our legal system was complicit in them. In the desire to maintain the status quo, our Supreme Court approved of slavery. It approved of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It approved of how we treated indigenous peoples. Racial segregation was enshrined in “separate but equal” schools. Poll Taxes and literacy tests prevented newly freed slaves from voting. Labeling a social practice “legal” does not make it right.

 

We have not yet become “a more perfect union.” The study of our real history and the lessons it teaches may just help us get there.