Bill Moyers on Confronting our Past

"Americans have a very selective version of history. We live with the mythology of the benign and benevolent side of the American experience to suppress those darker demonic impulses, which have marked a great deal of our history. The fact of the matter is, the white man who came to this country drove the Indian out of his culture, far from the reservations of his god, into the reservations of containment and isolation. The treatment of the black slave for 200-300 years was never treated in the textbooks that I read in my childhood in East Texas…the Anti-Semitism that has always been just below the surface and not always below the surface of the American experience, the brutality of the Puritans to the Indians, the atrocities of the Indians to the Puritans – all of these conflicts, clashes, this inhumanity, of which we’re capable, we tend to suppress…to stress the affirmative, the ideal, the humane values…It’s only when we’re willing to face history, that we’ve been willing to face ourselves, these twin forces of good and evil that are captured in human personality."