Who Exactly is Ignorant of American History?

To the Editor:
A July 29 letter writer claims that “America is on the verge of being destroyed and taken over by the left,” that unlike those who “fought in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan against tyranny” the younger generation “know nothing of this great country.”
My daughter is 19 and a Black Lives Matter/defund the police activist. She and her peers are hard-working, thoughtful, and knowledgeable.
They studied and earned admission to Ivy League colleges and universities, even though many of them are working over 25 hours a week while maintaining high grade-point averages.
My daughter knows our history well. She knows that her grandfather and great uncles fought in World War II in segregated armies, only to return to segregated and redlined communities, where they were denied GI Bill benefits and mortgages.
She knows that her uncles and her friends’ fathers were drafted into Vietnam while their white counterparts got draft deferments. She has traumatized classmates who enlisted to fight in Afghanistan because they were told that was the only way for them to get an education.
She knows her grandfather was almost lynched when he was barely her age, and that family members lost property in the Tulsa riots. She knows that all of her male friends and cousins, whether the sons of the working class or the sons of lawyers and politicians have been harassed, profiled, stalked, and manhandled by the police.
The letter writer is right about one thing: young activists hate what this country is – racist at its foundation and stubbornly ignorant about the debt all Americans owe to Black Americans for slavery, illegal convict labor, systematic dispossession, and government policies, which drained wealth from Black communities.
This does not mean they hate the U.S. itself, it means they want to remake the hypocritical, unjust version into the nobler vision embodied in a Declaration of Independence written by slaveholders and a Constitution that considered them to be three-fifths of a person.
This, too, is part of American history.