Just a few weeks ago, Republican Gov. Glenn A. Youngkin and Jillian Balow, superintendent of public instruction, were publicly scolded for allegedly trying to distort the history to be taught to public school students.

Democrats, in particular, had a field day, in pillorying the errors and omissions they saw in the Youngkin administration’s proposed standards for history and social studies after reviewing what was to be taught grade by grade in those subjects.

Among other things, the Youngkin administration was accused of proposing standards that downplay African-American achievements, ignore Asian-Americans, give short shrift to Latinos and overall, as one Democratic state senator put it, “delete major components of our history and deliberately omit the diverse perspectives that shape our commonwealth and our nation.”

But turns out that distorting the past is a bipartisan exercise.

Just this week, Virginia’s two U.S. senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, issued a press release celebrating the Senate’s passage of their resolution to designate September as Africa Disapora Heritage Month.

Sounds innocuous enough until you read it and then you realize the purpose is largely limited to recognizing and celebrating the achievements of the newest wave of African immigrants who are making a substantial impact on this country.

Mimicking a similar distorted, but little noticed resolution that passed the Virginia General Assembly, the resolution that the two senators co-sponsored with other Democrats does mention those who came enslaved in past centuries, but the real focus is on the newcomers.

The resolution makes that clear in its first sentence: “The African diaspora population in the United States has grown significantly in recent years, with the number of African immigrants growing at a rate of almost 246 percent from 2000 to 2019,” including the 115,000 newcomers who reside in Virginia.

The resolution also notes that “the African diaspora community is one of the most diverse communities in the United States, inclusive of people who speak multiple languages, whose rich heritage comes from all across the African continent, and whose members practice various faiths.”

Talk about a determined willingness to distort history and the word diaspora, which is defined as “the dispersion of or spread of a people from their original homeland.”

The African diaspora has been going on almost as long as our kind, homo sapiens, have been walking the earth and that goes back potentially 500,000 years ago.

While there is debate about our origins, scientists generally agree that Africa is the Motherland for everyone, white, red, yellow and black, and that humans spread from that continent to the rest of the world.

And many of us are the living, breathing progeny of one the largest waves of the African diaspora that still impacts us today — the trans-Atlantic slave trade—the enormous and largely involuntary transfer of millions of humans from the Motherland to the Caribbean and the Americas.

The impact of that disapora on what is known as western civilization has been on a par with a comet striking the earth.

The huge civil war that was fought in this country, the development of American music and culture, the growth of the cotton and sugar industries are just a tiny sample of the ways that enforced migration has impacted this country and continues to resonate.

The senators’ resolution really is focused on the newcomers from Africa, “thousands of whom are small- and medium-sized business owners,” according to the enthusiastic press release, essentially ignoring the 46 million Black Americans who are children of that previous diaspora.

The resolution speaks of the African newcomers as having a spending power of $40 billion, while failing to mention the $1.6 trillion in spending power attributable to the entire Black population.

We have no quarrel with the senators for deciding it was important to call attention to the contributions of the newcomers, but we strenuously object deliberate mistreatment of the term African diaspora in doing so.

It is far too large a concept to be used in such a narrow way.