“The overall narrative goes something like this: America overcame slavery, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped usher in new civil rights laws, and then we elected the first Black president. This story gives a false sense of progress, or “post-racialism.” And it has real-life effects: When students are unable to connect the past to the present, it’s harder for them to recognize or fight against the oppressive systems that harm Black people to this day.”
Dillard, Coshandra. “Why We Need Black History Month.” Learning for Justice, 11 Jan. 2019, http://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/why-we-need-black-history-month.
We’ve entered February, the month widely recognized as Black History Month in American schools. It’s treated like a timeout, a side note to the year’s history curriculum in a nod to the civil rights movement, and therein lies the problem.
Black history IS American history. Instead of chunking it into twenty-eight days of “holidays and heroes” we need educators to do a better job the rest of the year teaching a more complete version of our country’s history. It isn’t always pretty but the truth rarely is.
There are a number of ways American history is whitewashed. Here are just a few things you probably didn’t learn about in school.
Riddle from the Middle 
Thank you, Laura, for this post.
Stay safe,
-Shira
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Thank you for visiting!
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My pleasure: I hope to see you in my neck of the woods, especially if learning styles or Babylon 5 is of interest to you. I also post on restorative justice as part of a greater whole.
Best regards,
-Shira
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I agree. I love that my son’s Italian teacher teaches them black history ask year long. Every holiday he finds a way to incorporate black history.
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He sounds like a fantastic teacher. We need so many more like him!
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On top of being non-Protestant, Italians, like many multi-generational citizens of almost every other European nation, sometimes have a dark(er) complexion (with brown eyes), as opposed to that of the more Anglo-Saxon white complexion, usually accompanied by blue eyes.
If I’m correct, the dark(er) complexioned Europeans, though their continental heritage can go back decades (if not centuries), are to some degree descendants of Middle Eastern settlers, or even those from the times of the Ottoman Empire.
Regardless of their blood being just as red as every other human being, they would be considered and readily referred to by the KKK, and those of like mind, as simply “Turks” or, at best, “dirty whites”.
It is depressingly awful that such ugly racial/ethnic perceptions and treatment of others persist even in modern times!
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It really is.
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Fortunately, at a very young age I was emphatically told by my mother about the exceptionally kind and caring nature of our black family doctor.
She never had anything disdainful to say about people of color; in fact she loves to watch/listen to the Middle Eastern and Indian subcontinental dancers and musicians on the multicultural channels.
Conversely, if she’d told me the opposite about the doctor, I could’ve aged while blindly linking his color with an unjustly cynical view of him and all black people.
Thus essentially by chance I reached adulthood unstricken by uncontrolled feelings of racial contempt seeking expression.
Not as lucky, some people—who may now be in an armed authority capacity—were raised with a distrust or blind dislike of other racial groups. …
Remove the greatest difference among humans—race/color—and left are less obvious differences over which to clash, such as sub-racial identity (i.e. ethnicity), nationality, religion and so forth down that scale we tumble.
(Add a, say, contemporary deadly disease to the ugly equation and there’s a real potent fuel for the hateful fire.)
Therefore, what humankind may need to suffer in order to survive the long term—indeed, from ourselves!—is an even greater nemesis (perhaps a multi-tentacled ET?) than our own politics of difference, against which we could all unite, attack and defeat—all during which we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and witness just how humanly similar we are to each other.
Before non-white people became the primary source of newcomers to North America, thick-accented Eastern Europeans were the main targets of mean-spirited Anglo bigotry.
I’m no Stanley Milgram, but I hypothesize that if the U.S. and Canada were to (God forbid) revert back to a primarily-white populace, if not some VDARE whites-only utopia, the stereotypically thick Slavic accented Eastern Europeans would eventually again become the main target of the dominant Euro-Canadian ethnicity.
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It does seem like the ugly side of human nature always looks to build a hierarchy. That’s an interesting theory and one I’d never want to test. My father used to tell me about how the KKK targeted the Italian Catholics where he was growing up. Their brand of hate has caused more damage to this country than we can imagine.
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We have to learn from the past or we just end up making the same mistakes
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Absolutely true.
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Very well said.
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Thank you.
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Laura, well said. Those folks who want to whitewash history, which is an apt name, fails to understand how we learn from our past. Someone wrote a letter to the editor in defense of the whitewashing saying there is no more institutional racism which is not even close to being true. Adding to a few of yours:
– few know why the Jim Crow period and age of the KKK came about after Civil War reconstruction was ceased as the result of a political power move in the 1870s
– few know that in the 1920s, 24 US senators had allegiance to the KKK in some form, while there were over 100 US Representatives with similar standing (per historian Jon Meacham in his book “The Soul of America.”
– few know that today, the US military is very concerned about the number of white supremacists in their ranks (a story appeared two days ago)
-few know the police forces hire from the military, so even white supremacist are not vetted out, the do find their way on some forces.
-few white people recognize the dog whistle racist terms used by the former president and his sycophants. His attorney said under oath, “Donald Trump is a racist, he is a con-artist and he is cheat.” Why did he start with racist?
We must do better and shine spotlights where needed. Note, the vast majority of military and police are good people, but to say white supremacists are not in their ranks is not a true statement. Keith
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I find it surprising that anyone would try to argue there isn’t a white supremacy problem in the police or military forces. The police started from recapturing runaway slaves, for heaven’s sake. The only way to argue that our law enforcement is “pure” is to bury your head in the sand and refuse to see the very real threat. White supremacy is so deeply ingrained in our society that it takes actively naming it to shine a spotlight. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.
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Well said.
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such an important post
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Thank you, Beth. There are some people on social media doing really great self guided study this month. Check out Rachel Cargle’s Instagram if you’re interested.
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I will, thanks
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I think it is a very important point and American people need to look at it closely.
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I’m actually terrible at history. It’s a bit overwhelming to see how much unlearning I have to do.
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Yes, this trend of being really honest about our past is remarkable but we have to unlearn a lot of things.
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