I see no sense in dismissing history with a little red cap and proclaiming some vague moment in the past for America’s ”greatness” that we should strive to re-achieve.

Vice-president Kamala Harris’ father was Jamaican, and taught at Stanford. Her mother, the daughter of an Indian diplomat, was a cancer researcher. For convenience she is referred to as “Black,” although her complexion tends toward white — as that’s the way things go.

Recently on a trip to Africa, she looked through the back door, down into the dungeons of a colonial fort on the coast side of Ghana. Millions of enslaved Africans were confined there before being loaded onto ships bound for America. “The horror of what happened here must always be remembered,” she said. “It cannot be denied. It must be taught. History must be learned.”

She didn’t get much news space, just around several inches without a headline — but at least it was at the top of Page 2 of The Seattle Times. And my mind flashed back to Miss Midgarten’s third-grade classroom — where my single memory is coloring the countries of Europe with different-colored pencils. I don’t remember any history involving Blacks during grade school, junior high, high school or a couple of colleges. Seems a little something would have been appropriate, judging from what I’ve learned since during the latter stages of my life.

Following are briefs from an illustrated story published a full 100 years after my father was a teenager in Salem, Oregon. See “Burned from the land” on the Internet. I was unaware of this affair until just the other day.

“On May 31, 1931, Tulsa, Oklahoma, became the site of a horrific massacre that was shrouded in silence for decades. A white mob descended on the city’s prosperous Black enclave of Greenwood and proceeded to burn, loot ad kill until scores were dead and 35 city blocks were destroyed. . .

“Tulsa is still reckoning with this violent history. As it does, Americans across the country face another truth: Tulsa wasn’t alone. Between the Civil War and the 1940s, the destruction seen in Tulsa happened in various ways to communities of color across the country. These acts of racial violence took aim at the roots of generational wealth. . .

“An angry lynch mob formed in downtown Tulsa after a 19-year-old Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman. That night, thousands of White Tulsans launched an all-out assault on Greenwood with rifles, machine guns, torches and aerial bombings from private planes . . .The rampage lasted into the next afternoon, leaving Black Tulsans homeless and their community burned to nothing but ash and rubble . . . ‘

It’s estimated that 300 people lost their lives. Read the Internet story for a true picture of this racist massacre here in the good old U.S.A. back in 1921 (See “Burned from the Land . . .”).

Just 20 years later, along came Hitler. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some 6 million Jews across German-occupied Europe. A few of us lived through World War II and Adolph’s Holocaust.

Donald Trump was born a year after that war, in 1946.

As America slowly returned racial superiority interest to readily identifiable Blacks, the public has seemed led in large part by the likes of Trump. He settled a rental discrimination case out of court, has regularly faced criticism for his treatment of the Central Park 5, beginning with an $85,000 ad campaign to bring back the death penalty in 1989 . . . etc.

The Central Park Five — Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise — were all teens under 18 (Blacks and one Hispanic) when they were falsely convicted of raping Central Park jogger Trisha Meili. In 2002, they were exonerated after Matias Reyes confessed to raping Meili, which was confirmed by DNA evidence. New York City awarded the men $41 million in 2014, after some of the men initially sued the city for how it handled the case.

Meanwhile . . . We have Donald composing lies in capital letters, threatening death and destruction resulting from his recent arraignment . . . supporters threatening death to Judge Juan Merchan and Prosecutor Alvin Bragg (who is Black and by Trump is described as a “beast”).

And down in Tennesseee a Republican state legislature voted out of office two black elected Democratio members following their support for gun control — after three 9-year-olds and three adults were shot to death at a Nashville school.

And I am temporarily out of space.