Why Does History Have to Be Uncontroversial?

During our class discussion yesterday a number of thoughts crossed my head about the idea of retelling the stories of people as a way to fill in the gaps that popular history has left us with. Who is it that shapes popular history and when does it become standardized as the history we are going to teach and tell? The only time stories are revised to more closely share the voices and experiences of that time is when our society has come quite far – in time and in ideology – from that past. Often times it seems that history is supposed to remain apolitical and propositions to revise these histories are deemed as politically motivated, specifically of a liberal nature. These notions are immediately rejected as biased and unfounded – which is ironic because the only legitimized sources are the preexisting incomplete histories. Once these notions have drifted so far from controversy and entered a realm of apolitical they can begin to be accepted into traditional historical narratives.

So then I begin to think, what about all the narratives we see in television and film; it is a great source to fill in these blanks of history that the academic institutions are so resistant to accepting. However, even looking at film and television we see the same ideas being reproduced, even in their attempt to write history, they still fall into the trap of giving a new story, but with no illumination to the complexities of these experiences. Specifically I am thinking of the film Mississippi Burning (1988) that tells the story of two FBI Agents looking to find the perpetrators of the murder of three Black civil rights leaders. In the end the FBI agents are victorious and are the heroes to the helpless and constantly victimized Black citizens. While this story seems to work to tell the stories of brutal killings and senseless violence against Black people during the Civil Rights Era, it forgets basic facts of history, regarding the relationship between Black communities and law enforcement during that time. So I wonder if this film can be made and countless other films about “history” what needs to be done to begin making films that do the work of telling a history that actually occurred?