Posted on the White House website on Monday, the national holiday to honor the civil rights leader, the White House said the report was aimed at countering what it said were efforts “to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.”
“It is very hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America, in a time in which the idea that all human beings have inviolable rights and inherent dignity is almost taken for granted, to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times,” the report says. “But the unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.”
The report was blasted by historian Ibram X. Kendi, author of the best-selling “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. He wrote on Twitter:
“It claims America is ‘the most just and glorious country in all of human history’ — the nation’s great founding truth. But anti-Americans are disregarding this great patriotic truth, the report argues. But it CONTINUE READING: Trump’s ‘patriotic education’ report excuses Founding Fathers for owning slaves and likens progressives to Mussolini - The Washington Post