One of my professors in college, a tiny little man from the Delta named Dr. Bo Morgan, said one of the most accurate and poignant statements about history to all of us historians-in-training on our first day in his class:

“History is tragedy, not melodrama.”

Melodrama: think of all the westerns from the 1950s and 60s. There were good guys and bad guys. And you could easily see who was who.

Tragedy: real people with real flaws acting the way humans do… And their flaws destroy them in the end.

History isn’t a Western, as much as our politicians would like to treat it that way. There are rarely obvious villains and heroic good guys that you can easily spot. It’s full of good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things. Flawed humans acting as such.

Acknowledging the bad things we’ve done doesn’t harm America. It doesn’t make America or Americans “bad.”

Acknowledging the Holocaust doesn’t make all Germans or Germany bad. Why would recognizing our history of systemic racism or chattel slavery or the destruction of Native Americans harm the US?

If anything, acknowledging it helps us because we can learn from it and improve the present.

There is no point in erasing or hiding any of it except to please a small fringe on one side of the aisle.

And it’s also true that labeling our country as pure evil is equally wrong, something an equally tiny fringe of extreme people on the other side has tried to do as well.

History is tragedy, not melodrama.

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This post was inspired by Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter from March 28.