My friend started an anti-racism book discussion group, and we just finished reading that very book. Now we’re reading Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper at my suggestion. I follow Brittney and I would follow her to the ends of the earth. Just today my friend handed me a copy of Stamped from the Beginning also by Ibram X. Kendi.
silenus beat you to that answer, for which I thanked him. 
It’s been almost 30 years since I graduated, so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I was in a similar situation. I didn’t hear of Tulsa until sometime in the late 1990s, I think by watching the History Channel back when they didn’t have so many ancient aliens. And I don’t recall hearing about sundown towns, sitting in the bakc of the bus, the Green Book for Negro Travelers, or many of the daily indignities suffered until I went to college. As a kid, I could understand why it was bad for people to be denied the right to vote, but for me it was somewhat abstract as I couldn’t vote either. It would have been helpful to learn about such treatment at an earlier point in my life.
I am sure plenty of people never learned about these things. I think it’s also important to accept that lots of people probably did, but after a few weeks, months, years, or decades that information fell into the same place that lots of facts/trivia/history goes when it doesn’t make enough of an impact in the moment to stick around.
The amount of factual things and historical narrative I’ve forgotten (and probably forgotten that I’ve forgotten) is immense.
I am sure I have classmates who were in the classes I was in where we learned about Emmett Till, or the Trail of Tears, or other injustices wrought upon the people of America by America, who know nothing about them as adults. You could tell it to them as if it were the first time.
Education is a piece of this puzzle, but I also think it’s a little naive to think that having kids learn some historical narratives is going to work some magic on racism in America.
I was going on the basis of, as I live my life by, the principle stated by Ādi Śaṅkarācārya:
The only cure for ignorance is knowledge.
And nobody here seems to be in disagremeent with your goal so much as they are with your method. Here in Arkansas, recently sworn in Governor Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order prhobiting indoctrination and critical race theory in our schools and will be looking into the content of the AP courses in African Studies offered. We’re in a fight to keep the courses we have now, adding another course is pretty much out of the question.
Totally agree. If the complete, true, and accurate history of this nation was taught throughout grades 1-12, we wouldn’t need a special course in “Black Studies” or any other culturally specific studies for that matter. I think they should be available as electives for those who want to delve deeper or become specialized in one particular area, but they shouldn’t be necessary to teach things that should be taught in history classes.
Because educators have become slaves of the brutal task master called, “Standardized Testing”, they spend 90% of their time concentrating on reading and math because they are the areas aimed at in standardized tests, and the results of those tests determine whether or not teachers and admins keep their jobs.
And it’s taking longer than we thought
Today I learned with great interest that the Florida Constitution requires the teaching of Black studies.
Gift article:
In the winter of 1966, a Black Texas native named Jimmy Garrett enrolled in what was then San Francisco State College. Already 23, Garrett had been a Freedom Rider and a fundraiser for SNCC in Los Angeles, where he sought support from Hollywood liberals such as Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Now, he was determined to win a bet with a fellow SNCC organizer that he could form a Black student union on a predominantly White campus. When he circulated a manifesto entitled “Justification for Black Studies,” Garrett recalled, it was at first a bid to foster “collective consciousness” among a tiny Black student population that at the time was balkanized between jocks, wonks, and fraternity and sorority types.
With the rise of Black Power in 1966 also came a White political backlash that helped elect Ronald Reagan governor of California and propelled a rightward swing in midterm voting that set the stage for Richard M. Nixon’s presidential run two years later. As that backlash grew uglier, Eugene Genovese, a well-known White scholar of American slavery, predicted that the study of Black history would provide a refuge for Black people on campus who might otherwise turn to violence, answering calls to armed revolution from the likes of Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers. “We may expect to arrive, therefore, at a new view of Afro-American history, whatever the political outcome of the present turmoil,” Genovese wrote in a prominent academic journal.
A half-century later, most states have accepted the value of teaching some African American history, and Florida’s constitution even requires it. So why the attack on this AP course? DeSantis told reporters that it was because the proposed curriculum promotes a far-left “agenda” without presenting opposing views. A quick scan of the draft framework shows otherwise. On its last page, the framework recommends 25 books and texts that have achieved a “strong consensus” among educators as essential to the African American studies canon, including such classics as “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
That statement appears to be inaccurate - the Florida Constitution itself doesn’t require the teaching of any particular subject. It basically says ‘there shall be laws and regulations on public education’. The culmination of the laws and regulations are the state standards I cited in post #157, which require history classes to cover certain topics touching on African American history, which is not quite the same as “Black studies”. “Black” and “African American” studies are interdisciplinary - more than just history, they might include learning about geography, philosophers, authors, musicians, etc. A feature of Black studies you have touted in this very thread, but not required by Florida.
Furthermore “Black” studies is distinguished from African American studies, the latter of which would probably not go very deep into African culture (another feature of Black studies you have touted in this thread). Note we do have state standards on African history as well. For example all middle schoolers are supposed to learn about Egypt, Kush, and Axum in World History. The West African kingdoms were covered in high school, as I recall from a decade ago.
~Max
They can’t mandate curricula to the States like that- it’s not within the Federal purview.
Well, the feds can condition grants on meeting whatever criteria they want. I think that’s what happened with Common Core.
~Max
History is not physics. The idea that there is a complete, true, and accurate history of any nation is something out of 1984.
Now, there are certain ideas — slavery was bad — that AFAIK everyone in my high school U.S. history class agreed with. But that wasn’t because the teacher gave a lecture on why an essay we read, favoring slavery, by John Calhoun was inaccurate, and one by Frederick Douglass, against it, was accurate. I believe in teaching how to think, not what to think.
If African American Studies AP presents history as something complete and true (and I don’t know that it does), I’m against it.
Uh, yeah, I personally interpreted Jasmine’s statement not as implying the existence of any perfectly objective and comprehensive history, but rather in the sense of “a significantly more complete, true, and accurate history of this nation than the existing standard curriculum warped by centuries of racist propaganda permeating American culture”.
Part of learning how to think is learning to sift through the BS and figure out who doesn’t need a platform to spout nonsense. I would put John Calhoun’s thoughts on slavery into that category. Children don’t need exposure to #bothsides to understand the evils of slavery.
Thank you, that’s exactly what I meant.
There never was a standard curriculum. If I described how history was taught me in the 1960’s and 1970’s, it was not that similar to what another poster might recall. And yet it wasn’t that unusual.
The idea that there ever was a standard curriculum seems being used to suggest that it would be OK to have a new and opposite standard curriculum that maps contemporary progressive ideas. This is likely to have a similar paradoxical effect to workplace sensitivity training,.
I don’t think there is an ideal or necessary curriculum, and in that sense agree with you. While students need exposure to both sides navigation in the abstract, and I favor assigning disagreeing primary sources, students don’t need to read both sides, or three sides, or four sides, on any particular issue.
A common essay assignment in a college-prep-oriented history class is or was — was the U.S. Civil War more attributable to conflict over slavery, or to a dispute over states rights and national unity? We read primary sources to address that kind of question, not to be able to write a paper on why slavery was cruel.
I imagine that a good African American Studies class might concern itself with the question on Civil War causation, but, as the question seemingly has a white focus, and could have been covered in the U.S. history class, maybe not. More likely the competing views would include Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White. As long as there isn’t some potted history where the goal is to ID the bad guys, I’m fine with a different mix than when I was in school.
Well now you see that right there is something that causes me to worry about the quality of your school’s curriculum. Unless of course students who opted to write that it was more about states rights got Fs and were required to repeat some or all of US History.
As a matter of fact, I do think children should be exposed to sources that highlight the cruelty of slavery, and that they should be helped to understand that it was inherently so, and that there was no such thing as “positive” or good slavery, not even under the masters who wrote self-serving essays about just how kindly they were to their property.
When it comes to the Civil War and slavery, schools no more need to teach white southern narratives enshrined in the Lost Cause than they need to teach Intelligent Design as a counter to evolution in biology. That so many of them do is perhaps as good an argument as any for the need for African American Studies.
Looks like we have a profound disagreement.
At one time, the idea that the Civil War was about
states/regional rights tended to track with liberalism, and conservatives were more likely the ones who thought Northern whites non-racist enough to actually care about the welfare of enslaved people. But the political views of who gets an F due to turning in an essay, arguing that the Civil War was about states rights, is irrelevant to me. What’s relevant is the idea that those who disagree, on an old historical chestnut, must be reeducated.
I wonder if Ted Cruz would have ever gotten to Princeton if his teachers had adopted the suggested grading rubric. And I suppose he would have had no hope of graduating with high honors in poly sci, as he did. I have no idea how this would sound to you, but to me it would, if it became common, amount to living under tyranny.