I think we should stop teaching high school students about 9/11.

It’s just too divisive and… I think we should stop teaching high school students about 9/11.

It’s just too divisive and dangerous. Hate crimes and hostility toward Muslims and Arabs have been on the rise since the event — there’s no need to make it worse by reminding everyone about it all the time.

While we’re at it, the bombing of Pearl Harbor should probably be phased out of the curriculum. It’s just too easy for a high school student learning about these atrocities to get the idea that regular Muslims and Japanese-Americans — their classmates, even — are somehow to blame for the deaths of their countrymen. Teaching such awkward histories will only foster division and racial animosity.

If you think I’m an extremist lunatic and that sort of sacrifice-the-facts-to-avoid-discomfort reasoning doesn’t belong anywhere near the United States school system, you’re half right.

I absolutely do not advocate removing 9/11 or Pearl Harbor from our public schools’ history curriculum. Like you, I believe you’d have to be nuts to censor history to avoid breeding racial tension among impressionable teenagers. History is history, and an even vaguely competent educator should have no difficulty teaching a high school student the difference between the terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Muslim-American student sitting in the next row, if it isn’t already self-evident.

This is why I think it’s nuts that an Arizona judge recently ruled that teaching Mexican-American history in high schools is a violation of state law, arguing that the program promotes racial resentment against white people by accurately teaching the history of white-on-Latino racist oppression in the United States.

Judge Lewis Kowal found grounds to withhold 10 percent of the already-cash-strapped Tucson Unified School District’s monthly state aid until it comes into compliance with the ruling and eliminates courses “designed primarily for one ethnic group.”

The comparison to the teaching of 9/11 and the Pearl Harbor bombing was first proposed by anti-racist author Tim Wise in his recent essay, “Telling White Lies: Patriotic Correctness and the War on Ethnic Studies.” As Wise points out, U.S. courts only see fit to edit history to protect the reputation of an ethnic group when that ethnic group happens to be white people. When the perpetrators of unpleasant historical events don’t look — or practice religion — like the archetypal God-fearing white American, we’re all too eager to ensure that their trespasses are, to paraphrase the famous slogan, “never forgotten.” Yet we’re happy to forget decades of colonialist military interventions in Latin American countries, the colonialist intentions and white supremacist flavor of the Mexican War and the deportation of countless Mexican-American citizens in the 1930s to free up jobs for white men.

Those historical truths are omitted in mainstream history classes — and not just in Tucson. “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” an alternative textbook by James Loewen, showcases the way high school history textbooks gloss over important facts when they’re ugly — like Woodrow Wilson’s affinity for the Ku Klux Klan  — or inconvenient — like Helen Keller’s ardent socialism. The book illustrates the scope of the problem by picking apart the flaws and omissions in specific textbooks — among them “The American Pageant,” which was used to teach my own AP U.S. History class in a high school that sends dozens of students to Pitt each year.

That’s because, as opponents of the Tucson schools’ ethnic studies program seem to forget, standard high school U.S. History classes are already designed primarily for one ethnic group. This is probably why the Tucson Unified School District developed the ethnic studies program to begin with: The district was concerned that Latino students would feel alienated in classes that were obviously taught from a white American perspective, resulting in disengagement and poor performance. The ethnic studies program was designed to give Tucson students the option — did I mention that the program was optional and perfectly welcoming to non-Latino students? — of learning about a variety of subjects from a Mexican-American perspective.

And the program worked. Mexican-American students in the district’s ethnic studies program graduated at a higher rate than Mexican-American students who weren’t enrolled in the program and were more likely to pass state proficiency exams during their junior years, according to reports by David Scott, the district’s director of accountability and research.

But apparently, these students’ success is a lesser priority for the likes of Judge Kowal and Superintendent John Huppenthal than the responsibility of Tucson schools to teach about oppression “objectively.” This is a ludicrous request. Jewish groups would justifiably be outraged if schools tried to present two sides to the story of the Holocaust and outlawed any engagement with that sordid history that was too “emotionally charged” or “political.” It’s insulting to require that decades of oppression, to once again quote Tim Wise, “be discussed objectively, as if their perpetrators perhaps had a point, or dispassionately, as if they were no more fraught with moral meaning than, say, the Pythagorean theorem.” As if white supremacy in America never hurt anyone.

That Judge Kowal, Superintendent Huppenthal or anyone else believes that such “objectivity” is possible or desirable is a stronger argument for the necessity of programs like Tucson Unified School District’s than I could ever make.

Contact Tracey at [email protected]