During a town hall on Tuesday, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) was asked about the Trump Administration's "Whitewashing" of American History.
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00:00There we go. Oh wow, this is a long one.
00:06Alright, so we're going to have, so we're going to say to somebody their name, and then this is actually no name, but it says to Senator Bennett.
00:23What are you doing to stop stradding whitewashing American history and escalating the minority in the most others in the states and history?
00:31If you want to stand up, ask a question.
00:42Whose question was that? Thank you.
00:46Thank you for asking that question.
00:48And I can say, as a former school superintendent, I care a lot about this because they are whitewashing our history.
00:55That's what they're trying to do.
00:58When people come to my office, and I'll let you know a little secret, it's sometimes middle school students, but they come with their parents.
01:08And I'm pretending like I'm informing the middle school kids, but actually it's the parents that I'm informing, not the middle school kids.
01:17But the story that I tell is that the building that I work in, the United States Capitol, is a building that was built by enslaved human beings.
01:25That's nowhere on the tour. Nobody knows that when they come into my office.
01:30And I remind people that this country has as its origin, on the one hand, the highest ideals that have ever been written on the page.
01:40And, on the other hand, the worst impulses in human history, in our case, human slavery and the genocide of Native Americans.
01:50That's not a real history of the United States. That's the history of the United States.
01:55That's the history of the United States.
01:59And if we don't understand it in detail, then we don't understand the fights that have led us to the moment that we're in.
02:08Even as imperfect a moment is that we're now in, I can tell you it seemed a lot more corrupt to Frederick Bell as in 1850.
02:17But he never gave up the fight.
02:20To the women who fought for a hundred years for the self-evident right to vote.
02:28Who died without anybody knowing who they were.
02:34To John Lewis who sacrificed his skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the sake of democracy, not for John Lewis.
02:44And that's the history that we are whitewashing, that they are whitewashing.
02:49And it's critically important for you to teach young kids in America, many who feel right now that the system is so corrupt, that there's not a role for them to make it better.
03:02I'm not here to defend a corrupt system. It is corrupt in many ways. It is corrupt in many ways.
03:09But if all those people didn't give up, think of how corrupt John Lewis must have thought the country was when he was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
03:19And they didn't give up. We have no right to give up either.
03:23And you've got to fight this through the end of the world.
03:30Let's hear it next time.