Educators, lawmakers, activists and faith leaders have launched efforts to teach Black history after a crackdown on more inclusive lesson plans.
Educators, lawmakers, activists and faith leaders have launched efforts to teach Black history after a crackdown on more inclusive lesson plans.
Weird how we never get taught about any of the bad things white people do unless they do it to other white people, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, propagating ignorance is useful as a tool to keep change from ever occurring.
I’m a white dude that lived in the South for 42 of my 51 years. I was fortunate that my parents were flower children that didn’t fit in with the hate scene of the time, and they taught me to respect everyone.
Their biggest hurdle was the limit of their knowledge. Like me, they weren’t taught the history of atrocities that we’re perpetrated against our citizens. The advantage that I had as a parent, over what my parents had, was the good fortune to live in an age of enlightenment through information.
I did my best to make sure that I passed on that part of my parents legacy to my, now adult, children while also making sure they understood what the actual history looked like in our country. I’m hopeful they’ll levy their advantages to continue to help break the cycle.
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Slavery in the US is widely taught in the US public school system. That fact alone completely devastates your idea the US does not ‘teach about any of the bad things white people do unless they do it to other white people’. It is also pretty common to teach about the Japanese internment camps in WWII, albeit less so.
But the quality of that education depends on where you live. For instance I grew up in Birmingham, Al. We were taught slavery happened, and some places it was bad, and some places it was ok. We were taught about the civil war, and how the south was just fighting for states rights. But that was about it. Our history books were a decade old.
We didn’t learn about Japanese internment camps at all. If you want to really learn about the problem a non standardized book situation causes in America. Look up the states that use PragerU books. Then look up PragerU.
That’s basically exactly what I learned. The civil war was all about states rights, but they refused to say what those rights were. They also “taught” that after the civil rights movement, everything was perfect and there was no racism anymore.
It is taught and Civil Rights is taught, but we didn’t really learn about ongoing injustices against the black community (redlining and imminent domain, racial biases in the war on drugs, sund9wn towns, etc.) so US history classes painted a picture of it all being largely over with.
For us, they didn’t cover “modern” history at all. For example, neither Korean norVietnam wars were covered
My husband, who grew up in the south, was taught about The War of Northern Aggression (that is what his teacher called the Civil War).
I am having our kids read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and A People’s History of the United States.
ETA: My kids’ Elementary and Middle schools taught the book Stamped.
ETA2: Are students in Florida going to know what the Underground Railroad even was?