Sean Arce won the 2012 Myles Horton Education Awared for “Teaching People’s History”. He was also dismissed the same year. The award, given in the spirit of Howard Zinn, honors teachers who give voice to the those left out of traditional history courses. The Arizona legislature has banned the teaching of such studies, which makes sense. After all, you never want to see your victims’ faces or hear their voices. You want the story of the indigenous populations and the enslaved populations to be as muffled and vague as possible.
“Arce maintains he was fired because he spoke out against what he saw as a discriminatory law targeting Mexican Americans and Latinos. “I, along with many others, stood up and [saw] this law as unconstitutional,” Arce says. “And because we stood up, the district has retaliated.”
America doesn’t just have a race problem, America has a white supremacy problem. It’s in our history,it’s in our religion, it’s in our culture. How do we eliminate the problem? First we must face it in ourselves. Regardless of our skin color, we have been propagandized and we need to face that terrible fact about almost every one of us. Then we must stop the propaganda of white supremacy by lifting up all the other voices in our common history. Finally, those of us who are white people, must learn to stop singing lead, and learn to sing harmony with our entire human family.
As a white man, I’ll do my part. We are all the same underneath, regardless of skin color. We all have children, loved ones. We all have feelings, and emotions. One of my friends told me that most people just want better life for their family, so that their children have a future. Most people are not out there spoiling for a fight!