This week, in an interview with TMZ, Kanye West claimed that slavery was a choice. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years ... 400 years? That sounds like a choice,” he said.

Much has already been written about West’s recent exploits on and off Twitter. In the past week, he has publicly embraced Donald Trump and tweeted a picture of himself wearing the president’s signature Make America Great Again hat. He has suggested that Democrats are the real racists, citing the fact that Democrats were the party of the Confederacy and segregation (without acknowledging, or seeming to know, that the parties switched their historic roles on racial issues after passage of the Civil Rights Act). As a result, he has invited questions about his mental health and speculation that this is all a cynical performance to sell albums.

But this statement, in all of its ahistorical absurdity, was particularly unsettling. Coming from one of the country’s most famous entertainers, it legitimizes the still-pervasive belief that African Americans are somehow to blame for their condition. In this, West has become the latest in a long, unfortunate line of black people who have become mouthpieces for white supremacist ideas.

West’s apparent ignorance of this country’s past is tied, in part, to the fact that so many of our textbooks are saturated with revisionist history. According to a recent survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. This figure is distressing but it is not shocking. For the past 150 years, there has been a concerted effort to misremember what slavery was and who was responsible, not only to exonerate whites, but to also ensure that white power remains entrenched.

In many of our schools and in our public discourse there is still an inability to grapple with the ever-present threat of violence that loomed over the lives of the enslaved. The recent opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama—the country’s first memorial dedicated to lynching victims—underscores how that violence extended into the Jim Crow era and affects the criminal justice policies of the present day. While West’s comment is patently false, it demands that we counter it with fact, no matter how often those facts have already been trotted out as evidence. To take one example, consider this passage from Edward Baptist’s seminal book The Half Has Never Been Told: