Given that the o.p. has not even defined what would be comprised in a “course in Black studies” (A history of European and American slave trade? Reconstruction and the Black Diaspora? The Harlem Renaissance? A history of vocational, educational, and housing segregation?) there isn’t even a clear premise to debate. And racism is scarcely an outrage exclusively applied to Blacks; in fact, the first culture to be suppressed and devastated by European colonists were the Native Americans who are still today treated like third rate peoples in their own lands.
I think a better approach is to get down to brass tacks and start with a course based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and from that basis that the United States was built on the labor of slaves, indentured immigrants, and resources stolen, cheated, and taken by force from the original owners go into the specifics of the post-Reconstruction Black experience of peonage, lynching, systemic repression and denial of basic rights, et cetera.
Thou hast said it. You’ve just posted a nice course syllabus there, for starters. Clearly you have knowledge of the subject. That’s what we want to see.
That’s what I’m saying. When there are 4 semesters, say, of American history, devote one of them to Black American studies. Let it be the focus for once.
But there aren’t. Using my high school in California as an example - 9th grade is World Geography/Freshman Seminar, 10th is World History/AP European History, 11th is American History/APUSH, 12th is American Government/Economics. Where do we put a semester of Black History?
It was mentioned way above, but Native Americans deserve study as well. Where does that semester go? The only way to get at this is to a) incrementally add courses like AP Black Studies as voluntary classes while b) rewriting the entire US curriculum (K-12) to include Black History et al. Needless to say, this would be met with substantial push-back, including a lot from people who aren’t racist.
Part of the knowledge of Black studies is the self-recursive knowledge of the history of student activists trying to get Black studies added to the curriculum in the first place. This was first achieved at San Francisco State University in 1969. I remember Black studies being introduced in my Scholastic Weekly Reader the next year; it devoted a whole issue to the subject. I remember the passionate feelings of the Civil Rights movement in which I was caught up while it was happening, and the urgency of getting Black studies on the curriculum, of how it was the next logical step after desegregation and the Voting Rights Act.
I disagree with the OP. Instead of replacing American history class with a class addressing one portion of society, I think American history - and civics/social studies - need to be revamped to more accurately and comprehensively address the experiences and contributions of all portions of our country throughout its history, and to address how each portion can/should contribute to our current society.
The OP has not yet said anything to convince me (and apparently others) that the need for Black studies is such that it requires its own curriculum replacing another portion of the curriculum.
Each of those topics could easily be a semester long course without even getting into the deeper understated premise of cultural superiority stemming from the original (mostly English, Dutch, and French) European colonists over both the native populations and human slaves imported from Africa, notwithstanding the use of Asian (predominately Chinese) labor that fueled the construction of the railroads which facilitated Westward expansion but typically gets only a couple of paragraphs in high school history texts.
As a way of offsetting DeSantis’ attacks on education in general and his attempt to latch onto the cultural Zeitgeist of the supposed feeding of Critical Race Theory to impressionable schoolchildren (which is several shades of nonsense), mandating high school students to read a semester of historical survey of Black experience isn’t going to reverse deeply entrenched cultural attitudes and prejudices, and will only feed the manufactured narrative that cis-gender white students are being forced to hate themselves and coerced into accepting and adopting alternatives to traditional Christian values, et cetera, ad nauseam. As a budding proto-fascist who has been following the MAGA movement snd taking detailed notes on stoking cultural outrage, Ron DeSantis would love this as a way of validating his claims that ‘wokeness’ is being forced upon the country and requires an authoritarian response to put a halt to it. This sells even better than pushing anti-vaccine sentiment or threats that allowing any discussion of gender roles will lead to ‘grooming children’ into becoming transexuals.
I’m not opposed to the idea of a history course focused on Black experience in the United States but it really needs to be in the larger context of a more frank exploration of American history that includes the discussion of how our Constitution was written by exclusively white, mostly slave-owning men largely to protect their own interests rather than offering “… Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” for all, and specifically ”…that all men are created equal…” is far more exclusionary than generally understood.
It’s the common heritage of all Americans to read the works of great Black thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, to name some of the brightest lights in the firmament. How can anyone ever understand America without taking in Black thinkers’ perspectives?
This response impresses me as likely to alienate a number of folk who are favorably disposed to agree with many of your values, just not WRT your specific proposal.
The fact that you feel strongly about this and feel we are misguided/ignorant/whatever, does not impress me as posing a persuasive case.
Knock yourself out. Meanwhile I’ll continue to try to find sensible ways to be a better person and lead a good life.
So, you seem to be trying to stifle any actual discussion or debate by mischaracterising all responses—including well reasoned and thoughtful ones that deal with both the practical issues and cultural response or requiring a Black-specific curriculum—as implicit and coy racism.
This thread feels a lot more like witnessing than any kind of honest debate regardless of the virtue of the premise.
I took a class on “Institutional Racism” in college. It was fascinating and opened my eyes to a lot of things. I did my term paper on Blacks in the labor movement, and I certainly learned how the labor movement intentionally (and sometimes unintentionally) hindered progress of Black workers.
I think high schools could do a much better job of addressing the Black experience in America. It could be a full course, or simply more attention in literature and history classes. I took AP US History, and racial issues were downplayed to the basics, Malcolm X and W.E.B. Du Bois and MLK Jr.
This is absolutely part of the subject, to be sure. Something all Americans need to know about.
I’m a believer that to drag students kicking and screaming to knowledge is better than letting them remain ignorant. I hated math class in school, but it did me no harm and even set me up with useful life skills.
The essential thing is to get the knowledge to the young brains. I’m a believer that the knowledge itself will start to crowd out ignorance and eventually produce the desired effect. That we just have to spread the knowledge, and it will defeat the resistance and take root.
Allow me to agree with those who cringed a bit at this.
“All Lives Matter” seems to me to be an explanation for why doing nothing is the best course of action – an implicit defense of an intolerable status quo.
What I’ve seen here are people evaluating equity, broader issues, root causes, and the likely responses of important stakeholders to an inherently reasonable proposition (ie, yours).
I do see a difference between letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and trying to understand how best to allocate what are inarguably scarce resources and to anticipate the same objections from the same people … as we get every single time.
The same objections are raised against Black Lives Matter. I’m not seeing any difference. The response to them is the same as the response to “all lives matter”: it’s missing the point.
No debate taking place here. Just one poster witnessing. And if everyone BUT the OP wished to participate in a meaningful exchange of views, that would be hijacking.
There clearly is a vigorous debate going down at this moment, with various minds bringing various angles of view. Your post calling it not a debate is 1) objectively untrue; 2) verging on threadshitting.