Race in Public Education
As I drove to work this morning, an episode of NPR’s Planet Money titled “Reparations for Police Brutality” struck me as interesting. This episode covered the story of Darrell Cannon, a Black man from Chicago who was maliciously tortured into a false confession of murder. A militia of twenty Chicago police officers, known as the “Midnight Riders,” busted into Cannon’s home, then kidnapped and abused him with a shotgun and cattle prod until he falsely confessed. He then served over 20 years in prison, along with 118 other Black men who were tortured into false confessions, until this story was uncovered by a Chicago journalist who had received letters from Cannon and a few of the other imprisoned men. Even today, reparations have not been fully made. While this is wildly unjust, there is one thing all of the men unanimously requested: for their story to be taught in Chicago Public Schools, so that others can learn about this cruelty and violence, and educate themselves on American racial inequality.
In our nation’s public schools today there are evident racial imbalances, racial gaps in gifted and talented programs, a serious lack of education, and an endemic school-to-prison pipeline.
The whitewashed, religious nationalism that is preached in nearly every public school across the country contributes to the spread of ignorance about America’s true history. In most American public schools today, Black history, by which I mean history of the origins, traditions, and cultures of Black and indigenous people of color, is taught for a few weeks or a month at most if a school is fortunate enough to have that diverse of a curriculum. It is not repeatedly touched on in every unit the way white American and European history is.
In my “world history” class in primary school, I learned about countries that were not predominantly white only for a few weeks of the entire school year. The rest was dominated by the history of white Europeans and American WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). It was only in my AP history classes did I learn in depth about other races’ histories, both nationally and globally. It was still nothing compared to the years I spent learning white history. Many schools across the nation do not offer AP courses, or if they do, they may not be as thorough as my school’s had been. AP courses also systematically favor white history, as they do not adequately balance the amount of white history taught with the amount of history focused on people of color. This educational bias makes Americans ignorant about the role people of color had in shaping and building our country.
By suppressing the history and legacy of people of color in this country, white people and the public school system have been single-handedly suppressing the entire race of Black people.
Take Juneteenth as an example. I had never heard of the holiday until last year, at eighteen years of age, in a college course. Never was it taught or mentioned or even thought about in my American public school, and that seems to be the consensus among my peers. I learned about things like the Mayflower and the French Revolution every single year, but never was something so pertinent to Black history ever taught to me. This is unacceptable! It is disgusting and unjust that an American holiday so monumental and significant to the Black community is overlooked and ignored, not taught in schools, and excluded from American history. And this is just one example. There are many other days, events, and stories that I do not know and may never know because of my American racist education.
White washing history for children has been a great skill of white people for a long time, always turning the story and placing blame on others, when there is lots to be ashamed of. If younger generations are to learn and lead from past mistakes, we need not only teach the atrocities and crimes committed against the entirety of the Black race, but we need to recognize and lift up people of color. These people who history has forgotten deserve to be given their due diligence when it comes to the things that they have done and are continually doing for our society.
The stories and the facts surrounding Black history, racism, and civil rights have been buried. There is no way to justify this, it is blatant and deliberate racism and prejudice. By suppressing the history and legacy of people of color in this country, white people and the public school system have been single-handedly suppressing the entire Black race.
Black History Month is just not cutting it anymore.
In my home state of Alabama, every fourth grader spends the year learning “Alabama History,” 75% of which commemorates the grand confederacy, while the remaining 25% covered the revolution for racial justice, where violent and savage Black people aggressively rioted and stormed cities. I have grown up in Montgomery, the Capital and the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, and I remember so vividly going on my school’s “tour of Montgomery” field trip and visiting and learning about the First White House of the Confederacy. We never went to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached every Sunday. I remember reading a book about the church bombings in Birmingham, but that was my extent of public school-given knowledge when it came to the civil rights history in my state, its birthplace.
Too often, on the rare occasions when Black history is taught in schools, it is made to portray Black and brown people as barbaric, and typically the first exposure any student has to Black and African history is the topic of slavery. This narrow focus is absurd. There is so much more to Black history than slavery, the civil war, and the civil rights movement.
As W.E.B DuBois argued, the best way to liberate and celebrate Black people is to teach their history. This clearly has not been a widely held belief, as one can see from the current state of our national public curriculum. Black History Month is just not cutting it anymore.
Black History Month was founded by Carter G. Woodson, who thought “if a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” While Black History Month is responsible for much of the Black and brown history that public school children learn in schools, it is nowhere near enough.
This issue with inadequate Black history education in schools is not the only issue I have with America’s public school system. I have a problem with the fact that even if we were to make public school curriculum more racially equal and inclusive, so many people of color who do not have access to adequate public education due to their socioeconomic status or geographic location will not benefit from this change.
Here are a few things that should simultaneously shock and simultaneously enrage you. Across America, only 57% of Black students have access to college preparatory and readiness courses. The limited amount of times when students of color have access to honors and AP courses, they are widely underrepresented. More often than not, Black and brown students are gerrymandered into districts with schools that have underfunded, undertrained, and inexperienced teachers. In 2015, 61% of Black students who took the ACT did not meet the four benchmarks for college readiness. Not to mention the fact that in many places, like my home state of Alabama, public high schools are a direct feeder into federal prisons for many young Black men and boys.
There is a clear racial disparity in America’s public school curriculum and education, and it can no longer be ignored by the majority of white America. With this new resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, I hope that education will be on many people’s minds, because it is a key step towards righting the many, many, many wrongs that have occurred in this country, and it is a vital reparation that must be made to America’s Black communities.
I truly hope that as we move forward with this revolution for racial equality, states like mine, filled with people with a prominent “us vs them” mentality, who place confederate flags and 1-800-MY-SOUTH billboards up and down our highways, will begin to learn and listen. I hope that they will grow from their ignorance and understand that to be an accepting and equitable society, we must first educate ourselves and our children and generations to come. We must accept our racial biases and tendencies and purposefully correct and change them, and we must work together to make Black lives matter!