Condemned to Repeat

First learned it more than 30 years after leaving school. Not just one thing, a lengthy list of things that should’ve been taught in school but weren’t. Not what you might be thinking. I took a bookkeeping class, learned how to balance a checkbook, file taxes, manage personal finances. I took shop classes covering the basics of everything from carpentry to engine repair. I took home ec for boys where we’d cook, sew and even go on field trips to the grocery store to learn how to be savvy shoppers.

What I missed out on were things I didn’t even know existed. Was never taught about Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and the race massacre there in 1921. Knew nothing of the history of sundown towns, even though it was clearly pertinent to my upbringing since nearly every community I grew up around once fit the description, with either written decrees or unwritten rules keeping blacks and other non-white ethnic groups out. If you weren’t white, you couldn’t be there after dark.

Was left unaware of another essential part of American history that was left out of social studies lessons, namely the circumstances surrounding white supremacy’s invention. Was oblivious even to the part of the story having to do with my own ancestry, how people with my ethnicity and skin color went from being despised outcasts to a recognized part of the white majority by aligning with oppressors rather than fellow oppressed classes to gain social and political standing.

Some living in places like where I grew up say teaching this kind of stuff will hurt kids’ self esteem, make them feel bad about their cultural heritage. Nonsense. Learning later in life about the Tulsa massacre or racial covenants in property deeds did not bring on self-loathing, it helps me properly understand the world I share with so many others. I needn’t have been spared this truth; I could have handled it in my youth. Discovering how indentured Irish immigrants sold out Africans they’d fought side by side with in Bacon’s Rebellion did not load me down with shame, it further opened my heart to sympathy and tolerance.

At no point in school was I taught the African proverb about how history is used to perpetuate the power of dominant groups.

Until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

The wisdom in this saying comes into sharper focus as we now witness the whitewashing of history, the defunding of reality, the erasure of the glories of lions.

It’s not just what wasn’t taught in school that left me woefully uneducated. It also was the many things taught that just weren’t so. I was taught about Adam Smith, superficially, beginning and ending with his invisible hand theory. The indoctrination I received had me believing that Smith was extolling the virtues of market capitalism free of government interference.

Turns out he was doing nothing of the sort. Turns out the understanding I was given is wrong. Turns out this lion of moral philosophy needed his own historians. The ones who told his story twisted it to their advantage, made him into a mascot for a mythology that served their purposes.

I discovered this more than 40 years after my formal schooling was complete, too late to spare me the indignity of knowing an article I wrote for this journal in August 2025 did Smith’s work a considerable injustice. I now can only acknowledge my ignorance and seek to correct the record.

The Adam Smith taught in school is the father of economics. Truth is, he was not trained as an economist and didn’t consider himself one. The story we all were told says Smith viewed unregulated commerce as the purest form of human progress, tying him to laissez-faire, the idea that markets should be left alone. Truth is, laissez-faire was not his idea. He didn’t believe greed rules the world, he believed morality does.

Adam Smith wrote volumes. He mentioned the phrase “invisible hand” only three times in everything he ever wrote. And not one of those three references described a universal law of markets, none said deregulation is the path to prosperity. In fact, in his most famous text, The Wealth of Nations, he spent page after page warning about corporations becoming too powerful. He warned that merchants, when left unchecked, would distort markets to enrich themselves. He argued that markets are human creations that require careful oversight and moral boundaries.

The three invisible hands Smith did identify were superstition, fear and the physical limits of gluttony. Not exactly the holy trinity of free-wheeling greed-is-good capitalism. The whole purpose of The Wealth of Nations was to shine light on why markets fail, how monopolies form, how cartels manipulate prices and corrupt governments, how economic power concentrates. He argued for markets strong enough to innovate, governments strong enough to restrain, societies wise enough to demand fairness. In death, he was made into something he never was while alive, by people who wanted nothing to do with the kind of balance he favored.

This most recent shoring up of my incomplete and insufficient education does not bring on self-loathing or load me down with shame, it drives home how important it is to keep an open mind, be wary of certainty, stay on the lookout for new revelations. And it reinforces for me how genuine truths are lions that need their own historians.