Critical race theory is a previously obscure academic concept over 40 years old. It says racism isn’t just the prejudice of individuals, but is a bias deeply ingrained in America’s history, legal systems and institutions. This should not be controversial, because it’s an indisputable fact — like saying the world is round.

Yet in a development that sounds like something taking place in dictatorships that censor what schools can teach and what citizens can read and view, many Republican lawmakers around the United States are calling for laws to limit what students can be taught about racism in American history and contemporary society.

The states of Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa and Arkansas have already enacted laws barring or restricting the teaching not only of critical race theory, but also of factual information about racism and other forms of prejudice. Similar bills have passed or are under consideration in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia. A majority of voters in all of the states that have enacted the laws and in 10 of the states where legislation is being considered voted for former president Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

In Tennessee, for example, legislation bans teaching that could cause anyone to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” It also restricts teaching that could cause “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people.” The language may sound inclusive, but it is so extraordinarily broad that it could be used to justify the rewriting of much of American history to replace facts with fiction.

If Germany adopted a law like this, or other legislation newly adopted or under consideration in some U.S. states, it could prevent schools from teaching about the Holocaust. Yet Germany has taken the opposite tack. Instead of trying to remove the horrible evil of the mass murder of 6 million Jews from its history books, German schools are required to teach children about this shameful chapter in their nation’s history under Nazism.

The goal of mandatory Holocaust education is to ensure that such evil never occurs again, and to give students an honest and truthful picture of their nation’s past. Education about American racism has the same goal.

Censorship of education about slavery, racism and other forms of prejudice in the United States is reminiscent of the mass book burnings conducted in Nazi Germany, or the suppression of factual information that China, Russia, North Korea and other dictatorships engage in today.

As Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers (America’s largest teacher union) pointed out this month, “critical race theory is not taught in elementary school or high schools.” But history is taught, and teachers need to be free to teach real history, not a whitewashed version, she said. She added that “culture warriors are … bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

Let’s be honest. History isn’t always pretty — it can be ugly and horrific. But we can’t rewrite it. We can’t deny that racism, religious bigotry, and other forms of prejudice have flourished around the world since ancient times. We need to follow the lead of Germany and learn about the sins of the past to keep from repeating them.

Here’s the truth: Slavers dehumanized Africans and treated them as property. Almost 11 million were enslaved and shipped to the New World in chains beginning in in 1514. The major nations taking part in the slave trade were Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the U.S. Even Sweden played a small part in the slave trade beginning in 1646, and did not outlaw slavery until 1847.

Slavery came to colonial America in 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Africans and continued until the victory of the North in the American Civil War in 1865. An estimated 750,000 Americans died in that war, which Southern states fought in an effort to preserve slavery.

My own great-grandparents were among those freed from enslavement as a result of the Civil War, as were the ancestors of millions of other Black Americans. Long after that, Black people in the U.S. continued to face systemic racial discrimination in a myriad of institutions for no other reason than the color of our skin.

American racism, while nowhere near as bad as it was years ago, has not disappeared. Its legacy survives in the form of higher rates of Black poverty, lower life expectancy, lower rates of educational attainment and business ownership, and many other indicators. It is a fantasy and immoral to ignore racism past and present. We must not sugarcoat history by teaching children a fairy tale version of the past bearing no relationship to reality.

Donna Brazile is former Interim Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, an adjunct professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department at Georgetown University, the King Lecture Chair at Howard University and an ABC News Contributor. She was the first African American woman to run a major presidential campaign – Al Gore in 2000 – and worked on the Democratic presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988.