In 2022, Texas educators suggested replacing “slavery” with “involuntary relocation” or “black immigration” or referring to slaves as “workers” in textbooks. This suggestion was part of efforts to “revisit” specific language choices in order to make the study of racial inequality accessible, but more age appropriate.

The past, they say, is a foreign country. They do things differently there. It is understandable for a nation to have moments of its history that don’t exactly stir pride and that successive administrations would prefer they were not associated with. It is also true that policies are easier to realize when the people of a country support it. But what these people are suggesting, is as critics pointed out, no mere re-visitation, but a revision – one that would diminish the significance of a major historical tragedy of the human race.

Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky once suggested that identity, knowledge and reality are shaped collaboratively by cultural context and interaction, a…