The more interesting question to me is how some of these misconceptions began.
The article didn’t mention the portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with long, straight, medium brown hair, white skin, and sometimes even blue eyes. That is how we picture him. That almost certainly is another “ridiculous lie.” He is likely to have had short, curly, very dark hair and a swarthy complexion made even darker by being out in the sun constantly.
In terms of Native Americans, I’d go so far as to correct the corrections. I don’t think it is appropriate to picture them in any particular way. It’s not fair to say they were peaceful, nor is it fair to say they were warlike. There were hundreds of tribes in the Americas, nearly 600 in North America alone, and any given tribe would encounter few others, perhaps no others outside a relatively small radius. You can’t create many generalizations about a group consisting of Aztecs, Inuits, Apaches and the Iroquois nation. Some tribes were violent and primitive, others were civilized and peaceful. We tend to picture them all under the blanket term of “Native American,” but at the extremes they were at least as different from each other as Athenians were different from Vikings. Perhaps much more so.
What kinda schools are y’all going to if you’re taught all this crap? I often hear these crazy ideas about what we teach in American schools, but all it does for me is reinforce the fact that most students don’t care about history class (or rather, aren’t given a reason to care). I’ve worked in schools for over two decades and never seen anything like this being taught, but inattentive students are a daily occurrence. No wonder their understanding of history comes from pop culture. It’s possible there are parts of the country where this is reality, though.
Don’t you know everything is clickbait these days, if it isn’t a flash, grabby weekly world news style headline it doesn’t grab people’s attention.
“If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead”
So don’t believe everything you read. Edward R. Murrow weeps.
I believed some of these things in elementary school although, to be fair, I went to a very poor elementary school with poorly educated teachers.
Well, I do remember some of these things being taught. Like Columbus telling the King of Spain that he believed the world was round while everyone thought it was flat, and then he discovered America. And the pictures of Jesus on the wall (as well as Mary) were always white, European people. I don’t remember ever learning about Cleopatra though, although we probably assumed she looked like Elizabeth Taylor (although we never believed that Genghis Khan ever looked like John Wayne in yellowface. Well, at least I didn’t).
I think a bunch of these misconceptions are based on art. People see the art and immediately think that’s what they looked like. Kinda like how modern day people see a graphic declaring a statistic about presidential post-term salaries and how they compare to veterans and get up in an uproar, when the information was actually totally fake.