Erasing the Black Marks on the White Pages

Sometimes it’s necessary to put things in very simplistic terms to bring out their force – to allow ‘65%’ to be enough to not mention the minority of others. So given that:

In 1945 a army of black men marched into France and liberated it from the Nazi occupation.

Let’s try phrasing that differently:

The end of WWII saw Senegal leading allied forces to drive Germany out of France.

Or conversely:

Following Hitler’s invasion of France, a small group of French leaders fled the country and sought help from Africa.

That doesn’t sound like what I learnt in school. Do you remember being taught that? That the armies of Western Africa marched in Western Europe? That the ‘Free French’ were 65% African, and the rest a mixture of North African, Arab, and only occasionally white European?

I only came across this fact with the discovery of documents showing that when they were about to actually enter Paris, the Allied leaders sneakily selected the whitest unit, and removed all the non-white soldiers from it.Because they didn’t want the image of black men doing something heroic – the liberators had to be white.

Learning this leaves me thankful that the terrible bad guys, the side which believed in a European master-race, was defeated.

via. Lenin’s Tomb