I’m trying to remember what my elementary school treatment of slavery looked like and I’m drawing a big blank. I don’t know if that’s because it wasn’t taught or because I’m getting old. It’s probably the latter.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Kids should learn about this particular part of American history early on. If they don’t know the background story behind the Civil Rights movement until their teens, how are they really going to understand why all the fuss is made about Martin Luther King and other people? What sense will the Civil War make to them beyond a few list of dates and places?
Phew. I thought it had to be there somewhere. I’d have to revise my opinion upwards, although I’m still stunned there’s no regional southern history elective. I’d quibble with the scope and sequence but at least it’s there. Plus it seems like they JUST implemented this in 2003.
Left Hand Of Dorkness. This isn’t that big of a hijack so far, but if you want to discuss this further I’ll meet you in the new thread.
you with the face. Hey, I pay attention to your posts! We’re making progress!
The key difference where you and I disagree is I don’t think racism can be an unconscious belief. Just like with any ideology, creed or organized belief system, someone has to teach it to you, you have to learn it from somewhere. I’m not sure you can have an unconscious ideology. You might have an informally taught one, or share many unconscious, accepted and possibly unexamined beliefs that coincide with a formal ideology, but you can’t (or maybe I should say “shouldn’t”) claim an ideology you’re not fully aware of. Maybe that’s just my hang-up.
I definitely feel that some prejudices, racial bias, xenophobia and bigotry may be unconscious and widepread upon people who aren’t particularly racist and don’t deserve the label. I also think that using racial slurs, spouting racist dogma like blood purity and miscegenation, inciting hate and threatening violence key racist traits.
Another poster-- was it John Mace? – argued about “soft racism” and “hard racism”, which is much along those same lines I’m thinking. I’m just trying to avoid the use of the word “racism” in any racial bias that doesn’t include the key racist behavior I wrote just now. So you definitely have a right to your opinion, and I do respect you for that. Maybe I need to acknowledge that we may both me right and that fine line of key racist behaviors I keep putting between “bigots” and “racists” may not actually exist in all cases.
My father sent me a box of paperbacks of black penned novels, Langston Hughes poems, African and African American history, Puerto Rican families in New York City and black and white migrant workers when I was six years old. This box alone was largely responsible for my early interest in black history and my reading on the sixth grade level in first grade. My mom let me and my bother watch “Roots” when it came on TV, taught us our family history going back five generations, and when she discovered my first grade reader had stories about Hercules and Achilles, she taught us about Horus and Osirus, bought that King Tutkhamen book when it was toruing the states, and the Book of The Dead.
My fourth grade teacher’s big contribution to my African-American history was having the class singa slave work song about picking cotton. :eek: This was up NORTH in Michigan, too!
Thanks God for my parents, man.
Thank God I had the good sense never to tell my Mom what our teacher had us doing that day. She’d still be kicking that poor woman’s ass.
A slight edit and,
Their is an inverse relationship between the time it takes to construct a post and the degree to which it contributes to a discussion. Hentor the Barbarian’s Law of Posting Composition.
True and snarky!
Someone should steal this for a Sig!
I agree that Left Hand of Dorkness has not hijacked the thread. If anything, he has given us something with which we may test our definition. And frankly, reserving studies of African heritage, geography, and influence for more mature minds indicates to me the opposite of racism — i.e., a sensitivity toward and respect of the subject matter. Contrast that with tossing the Indians down to the fourth graders. Simplify the hell out of it and get it over with before the students learn critical thinking skills.
I’m not sure it indicates respect for the subject matter, though. Black people, White people, and Native American people are the three ethnic groups that have had the largest influence on this state’s history. If you’re going to study ethnicities in the fourth grade, leaving one of these groups out while discussing Asian people and Latin American people is weird. How does that show respect for the contributions of African Americans to NC?
Obviously we shouldn’t trivialize it; we don’t want “Pick a Bale of Cotton” to comprise the African American curriculum (Askia, I remember that song from preschool–I didn’t think about it again until I was an adult), any more than the Native American curriculum should consist of, as one kindergarten teacher in one of my classes suggested (she “loves Indians and everything about them!”) having children make paper feather headdresses and use broken English to re-enact the Arawak encounter with Columbus. Here in Asheville, for example, we’ve got the YMI Cultural Center that could be a resource for fourth-graders studying local African American history. Durham’s got the Hayti Heritage Center, and I’m sure that most other NC cities have got similar resources. Get the folks who work at such centers, get professors from the UNC system involved, in creating a curriculum that neither dwells on horrors nor shirks from teaching about injustices.
I’ve been persuaded that if kids don’t see their own experiences reflected in their public education, many will conclude that education isn’t about or for them; and if kids see only their experiences reflected, they’ll conclude that theirs are the only important experiences. It’s vitally important that kids get mirrors on their own worlds and windows into other worlds (to use a cliche from the field) from a very early age.
Wow! I must say that I’m impressed. Surprisingly comprehensive. It assuages my indignation at off-loading the matter onto children. Color me satisfied.
With respect to Left Hand of Dorkness’s viewpoint versus my viewpoint on the introduction of subject matter at what age, I think we both have valid points. I do believe strongly, however, that the issues are of sufficient complexity that a more mature curriculum is warranted.
I absolutely think that a mature curriculum is warranted in high school: kids need to be learning about the complexities of their world in increasing complexity as they grow up.
However, I don’t think that it’s appropriate to teach white-only history when kids are young under the assumption that the history of other people is too complex for young kids to understand. I think that, just as you teach arithmetic in elementary school and calculus in high school, teachers oughtta teach some basic information about different cultural groups in elementary school and more complex information at the high school level.
I think it’s telling that the curriculum only leaves out African-American citizens of all the major groups in our state’s history.
But what is it telling us? Two things jump out at me: (1) are we sure they’ve been excluded? — perhaps the document is arranged in such a way that they are in fact prominently featured as an entire separate curriculum; and (2) is it conceivable that the NC Public School curriculum — the first state to implement forced bussing to achieve integration, the state with the liberal universtity triangle of Duke, UNC, and NC State, the state with a cutting edge school of the arts, the state with an African-American president of the nation’s largest bank, the state with the famous Woolworth’s sit in — was either, at worst, deliberately bigotted with respect to blacks or, at best, negligent with respect to them. Yes, North Carolina has had its share of bad race relations, but so has Pennsylvania, home of the White Aryan Nation. Racism is an extraordinary claim.
Instead of trying to figure out whether this was intentional exclusion or unintentional negligence, whether or not it has a racist or nonracist motivation, or whether Dixiecrat bigots are running the state education department, how about we look at the question of whether or not its a good idea to leave elementary school kids in the dark about a large chunk of their history. It’s not the kind of education that I’d want for my kid.
Dorkness, I think, is looking at this issue in practical terms. Regardless if this issue has occured at the hands of racism or not, he recognizes a problem. I do, too. I find it problematic that blacks aren’t even an afterthought in the curriculum.
But you are still trying to figure out whether or not we should call this an example of racism. As if it can’t be a problem unless there’s certifiable proof that NC is a nest of segregationist bigots. As if the implications of this apparent oversight are not important unless there is sufficient evidence of racism.
Askia, do you see where my frustrations come from? Liberal is hardly unique in this regard.
Instead of rushing to judgment with questions about number 2, how about considering number 1? Have you looked at the document? It is a government document, and therefore huge and indexed by committee. Since you’re the one so eager to pin racism on people, how 'bout you comb through the document and see whether we’ve missed something. Remember that when it was first mentioned, it was assumed that mention of Africa was an oversight. But further research turned up an entire African elective curriculum as well as a standardized African curriculum for seventh grade (13-year-olds). Didn’t Left Hand of Dorkness write someone or something? Why don’t we wait for a response.
I did write to a professor of mine from last semester. WHile the website has an address for the committee that came up with the recommendations, I figured I’d talk to someone I knew first.
I’m halfway in agreement with Askia, I think. Can we all agree on the following statements?
Some people use the term “racist” more broadly than others do.
For folks who use the term “racist” in a strict sense, a person can have unhealthy ideas about race even if they’re not racist.
Similarly, for folks who use the term “racist” in a strict sense, a situation that doesn’t reflect racism may still be racially unjust.
Finally, racist is a more electric charge than racially biased. Some folks think that’s a good thing, as it might galvanize change; others think it’s a bad thing, as it might cause the object of the charge to go into full-on defense.
Where I disagree with Askia, I believe, is in the use of the term “institutional racism.” I think it’s a fine term that has all the advantages from step #4. Since it’s not a charge leveled at a person, and since it doesn’t signify ill intent but rather an unfortunate state of affairs, it ought not cause defensiveness; since it’s a strong charge, it might galvanize change, as people take it seriously.
The committee that came up with the fourth grade SCoS is unlikely to be a bunch of whitesheets. It seems most likely to me that it didn’t even occur to them that they were leaving out African Americans, at least not consciously. But I think the result of their choices creates institutional racism, in which the effect is unjust and can have bad consequences.
No one has rushed to judgement about number 2. No one has made any extraordinary claims about racism.
Based on what I’ve seen in the links Daniel provided, the answer to number 1 strongly suggests that relative to other groups, African-Americans–and the particular history which involves African-Americans–have received short shrift in the NC elementary school curriculum. I don’t think anyone is rushing to judgement since it’s not like we are only going by a few snippets of information here.
Look, the only one who seems overly concerned about figuring out whether to call this racism is you. I am not eager to pin racism on anyone. It is not a word I treat lightly (but I don’t inflate it with grave importance, either). More people have called me racist on this board than I have ever called anyone else. I don’t play that “you’re a racist!” game that is popular in certain quarters.
I’m insulted by your insistence in mischaracterizing all that I stand for, simply because we have don’t agree on all the same things.
Yes, in the 4th grade competency goals. That “assumption” hasn’t been disproven.
Right. But the point is that 13 seems rather old to be broaching the topic of slavery for the first time. By that time, most kids have already started figuring out what their favorite subjects of study are, and as Dorkness rightly pointed out, if black kids don’t see anything about themselves in the history lessons they learn, they are going to have a harder time staying interested in those courses. It could also impact their interest in school overall.
I don’t think its premature to at least have a discussion which considers the implications that such an apparent oversight might have on young kids.
You’re wrong. Racism is itself an extraordinary claim.
Speaking of mischaracterization, there are plenty of people with whom I disagree, but have no problem communicating. I simply do not respect your argument because it is weak and vague.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. I’m not sure whether elementary school kids (especially in American public schools) have the social and intellectual maturity to even comprehend slavery, much less think about it critically. How do you know that the curriculum was not developed in accordance with standards established with respect to the emotional threshholds of little kids versus middle school students? The flip side of the coin is that the topic is desensitized early on by introducing it to children who don’t even know what ownership is, much less ownership of people. By the time they can think critically, slavery will be nothing more than the way things were done.
Me neither. But the point I’m making is that it might not be an oversight at all. And as a deliberation, it might be thoughtful and not racist.
It turns out that the curriculum introduces African-American (and other ethnic) studies as early as grade three, but in the context of information skills rather than sociology. This includes reading and discussing Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry.
I’d quibble that 1) ought to read: “Most people now… MUCH more broadly…” 2) and 3) are very nice summaries of what I’ve been saying. 4) Is precisely why I prefer the “soft sell” of pointing out where a person’s thinking or comments is prejudiced or bigoted rather than racist: I find people are less hostile, less defensive, more receptive to dialogue.
Again, I think we’re waaaaaay closer than “halfway.”
You put it THAT way I might be persuaded not to be so shy about using the term, Dorkness. It’s better to focus on what actions are deemed racially discriminatory that to verbalize “institutional racism” ad naseum. Plenty of people self-identify with their jobs and careers and take charges like that as a personal insult. I’m trying to focus on the perceived problems, not the namecalling, by urging more awareness and use of racist indicators and less provokative labelling.
It’s also a given that since there’s MLK Day and Black History Month in the second semester of most school calandars, the educational reality is that most teachers do not omit African-American history in their lesson planning in the elementary grades, and the concern might just be that Indian Americans and white and Asian immigrants may not get the same focus, and that particular objective is just, for a lack of a better explanation, worded wonkily, mostly likely because they’re overcompensating for all the African American history. It’s absolutely better to explicitedly include them in a Competency Goal that mentions “ethnic groups in North Carolina and how they shaped our culture.” But I don’t think this is a racist or intentionally discriminatory action, just something that needs correcting. A strict adherence to what’s written may result in omitting African-Americans altogether, which was my concern until other people looked at the document and pulled things out of the entire curriculum (Captain Amazing and Liberal.) Realistically, looking at the curriculum as a whole, and thinking about the racial makeup of North Carolina schools, I doubt that’s happening much, given the pedagogical training of new teachers and the retiring of older ones.
you with the face. Have you gotten a chance to look over the other curriculums pulled out? Do you think these have adequately addressed whether African American history is sufficiently reflected in the curriculum?
I notice that it is not until almost high school (8th grade) that the subject of American slavery is a required competency, which means that if learning strictly occurs from the curriculum, kids will not know how African-Americans came to be in this country. They won’t know a lot about antebellum South, because slavery was a big part of that. The Civil War won’t mean a lot to them, either. And it is not until the kids are almost college age (11th grade) that the Civil Rights Movement is covered in depth. To me, those two issues are way too important to not address sooner. The African-American senior elective seems thorough (I wish I had had that class at my school!), but much of that should be required study. Jim Crow, for example, goes hand in hand with the Civil Rights Movement.
It’s not a question of whether this is an example of racism. I don’t know what the motivation is behind the design of the curriculum, but to me, the motivation is not particularly important in my assessment. If the assumption behind the movitation is that African-American history is minor enough to ignore in the early grades, then it wouldn’t be outrageous to say that assumption comes from a racist place. But frankly, we don’t know enough to say that. And at the same time, it doesn’t really matter! If we focus more on the results of the issue rather than on what to call the issue, then the question of racism (or prejudice or bigotry) is irrelevant.
That link to Information Skills is very interesting–thanks! Unfortunately, this is the first I’ve ever heard of Information Skills as a school subject. I am virtually certain that it’s not core curriculum for North Carolina elementary schools, nor is it a required course for elementary teachers to take in college. It appears, in fact, to represent what The Library Media Specialist teaches, not what the classroom teacher teaches.
I suspect it was written by a different committee, then. It demonstrates that learning about slavery, Jim Crow, and other aspects of African American history is developmentally appropriate for elementary-school children; it’s just that the committee designing the SCoS either deliberately or unintentionally left AA history out of the fourth grade competency goal dealing with ethnicity.
