Philocalist

“The widely circulated timeline created by @Zerflin does a great job in showing how recently slavery & segregation occurred & that they lasted longer than the modern era. 

“I'd like to offer this timeline as another way of viewing the same period of history to show the constancy of both Black resistance in US & efforts of the white power structure to maintain racial caste since 1619.”

The earliest I can remember was "A Long Walk to the Water", set during the Sudanese civil war. It basically teaches the readers that everything in Africa is horrible and the main character is only able to survive by being adopted by an American family in New York. Weirdly enough it also has Coca Cola product placement. It fits into the western narrative that Africa as a whole is just so horrible and can only be fixed by American saviors, completely ignoring that Africa is a collection of many countries several with a wide array of experiences that aren't suffering and war.

Then of course I was made to read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Which just so happens to bad mouth one of America's number one geopolitical enemies and spread orientalist ideology. Many people have critiqued the book better than I could, but the jist is it wants you to hate Islam and Iran.

Lastly, not actually American propaganda, but the way in which we read it pissed me off. American Hunger, also known as Black Boy (because they wanted it to sound less critical of America, even though that's the whole point) by Richard Wright. It's actually a very good autobiography by a very interesting man, however we stopped reading the book at the EXACT MOMENT BEFORE HE BECAME A COMMUNIST! It was quite literally the chapter before where we stopped. I obviously read ahead but I was quite angry that such a spot was chosen because it meant that the average student would never know that their beloved author was a Communist, and he actually had a very positive experience in the Communist party because they were practically the only people that didn't hate him because of his race.

Joseph René Gockinga (1893–1962), “Visitation”

pen, brush & black ink on paper, n.d.