# All Americans need education in Black studies

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/all-americans-need-education-in-black-studies/978888>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [January 27, 2023, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/all-americans-need-education-in-black-studies/978888 "2023-01-27T13:53:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 157

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**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2023, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/all-americans-need-education-in-black-studies/978888/157 "2023-01-28T01:10:49Z")

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> [@Johanna](#):
>
> I see social studies credits in that scheme can be divided into halves. So if there’s one credit in American history, make it one half credit for the usual stuff and one half credit for Black studies. That’s fair, I think.

Your proposal, then, is to condense U.S. History into a fall class and cover Black studies in the spring?

U.S. History teachers struggle to meet the state standards in the time they’re given already. [Here](https://www.cpalms.org/public/search/Standard) are Florida’s state educational standards. Alternatively you can look at the list of standards U.S. History currently meets, [here](https://www.cpalms.org/PreviewCourse/Preview/21665). I think it’s wildly impractical to cut the time in half while expecting them to cover the same ground. How do you solve this problem?

Work with me here. One thing I am thinking of… there is substantial overlap between the standards satisfied by U.S. History and African American History courses ([compare](https://www.cpalms.org/PreviewCourse/Preview/21791)). It _may_ be possible to do both as semester courses - timewise - if we remove from U.S. History abolitionism, the slave trade, plantations and the antebellum South, the slavery motive for the civil war, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, racial tensions, the civil rights movement, etc. and cover all of these topics in the spring course.

However I fail to see _any_ benefit of separating the African American history from the rest of U.S. history in this manner. It disrupts the natural flow of U.S. History as usually taught chronologically. It unnecessarily removes context from the rest of the U.S. History course - will the U.S. History course skip over the civil rights movement when describing Johnson’s presidency? Not only that, but covering all of these U.S. History standards in your Black Studies class means you lose time to cover new topics, thus defeating the very purpose of having a separate class. But the problem remains, you can’t simply cut U.S. History in half. What do you propose?

~Max

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