If you're in the 45- to 60-year-old crowd, chances are you grew up watching and singing along to “Schoolhouse Rock.”
The Saturday morning educational series began airing in 1973 and was originally developed to help children with math before expanding to other core subjects such as grammar and science. The three-minute vignettes earned a Grammy nomination and were embraced by educators as a supplemental learning tool. To celebrate America's 200th birthday in 1976, the creative force behind “Rock” decided to focus on American history and began its third season with the episode and song “No More Kings”:
The pilgrims sailed through the sea.
To find a place to call your own.
On his ship Mayflower,
They hoped to find a better home.
Finally they played
On Plymouth Rock
And someone said, “We're there.”
It may not seem like home
But at this point I don't care.
The only visual recognition of the people who already lived on this land was during the three seconds it took us to sing the phrase “but at this point I don't care.”
The catchy song spoke of prosperity and growth in the 13 colonies, but made no mention of the transatlantic slave trade that fueled the global economy for centuries. No recognition of the kidnapped Africans who worked in the fields before and after the arrival of the Mayflower or the tribes and free blacks who fought alongside the colonizers during the Revolutionary War. Later episodes of “Rock” highlighted the construction of the railroad system during the California Gold Rush, but not the thousands of Chinese immigrants from the province of Canton who made up much of the workforce.
In 1976, some of the most powerful people in the media decided to tell the next generation of Americans fairy tales about who we are, not the truth. And here we are, 50 years later, preparing to celebrate our 250th, and powerful people in the media face the same test of integrity: tell the truth to the next generation or double down on revisionist history.
“We have relegated DEI to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it belongs,” Vice President JD Vance recently told the crowd at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest 2025 event in Phoenix, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Of course, diversity is what made this country possible.
The real threat to America has always been racial hierarchy and a white supremacist worldview that encourages commerce without virtue, something that Montesquieu, the French philosopher whose book “The Spirit of the Laws” shaped the American founders' vision of society and provided the infrastructure of the Constitution, warned against.
“It is almost a general rule that wherever there is kind morality, there is commerce, and that wherever there is commerce, there is kind morality,” he wrote.
This explains why Montesquieu was one of the strongest critics of slavery during the so-called Age of Enlightenment. He noted that it is not natural for one human being to dominate another and that slavery encourages cruelty, not unity, in a society. His words were published 30 years before the American Revolution, more than a century after the first kidnapped Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia.
The only way to justify writing “all men are created equal” while maintaining an economic system that represented the antithesis of Montesquieu's teachings, was to tell future generations of Americans a fairy tale in which people of color were savages without virtues; or better yet, convey to them that they didn't even need to be recognized or considered.
That harmful worldview would underpin not only domestic politics but also foreign exploitation. For example, John Watson Foster, who was secretary of state for only eight months, led the United States to overthrow the monarchy in Hawaii in 1893, writing that “the native inhabitants had proven incapable of maintaining a respectable and responsible government.” The monarchy had been internationally recognized for almost a century before a group of businessmen from the United States and Europe (backed by our military) wanted the land for sugar production. Instead of trading for the benefit of all, a fairy tale was told to justify cruelty.
Fast forward to 2025, and the current administration tells us that the people of color sent from the United States to El Salvador's mega prison, CECOT, were all gang members, rapists, and other criminals. It turns out that less than 10% had convictions for violent crimes or property crimes and that 80% had never been convicted of anything, not even an immigration violation or a traffic violation. The fairy tale of white supremacy, that mentality poisoned since the founding of our nation, causes real harm to this day.
It is the same worldview that led to the overthrow of democratically elected leaders in countries across the Caribbean and Central America and in Iran. It's the same worldview that has always distanced America from its true promise.
Maybe by our 250th, instead of treating ourselves to parades, ballrooms and fairy tales, we should focus on telling the truth to the next generation.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
