[Our failure to address a legacy of enslavement and racial
oppression makes the US ill-equipped to deal with present-day
injustices and challenges.]
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AMERICA PAYS A PRICE WHEN SCHOOLS FAIL TO TEACH ABOUT SLAVERY  
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David A. Love
March 18, 2023
LA Progressive
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_ Our failure to address a legacy of enslavement and racial
oppression makes the US ill-equipped to deal with present-day
injustices and challenges. _

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Another February has passed, and once again too many Americans view
Black History Month as a footnote, impacting African-Americans but
insignificant to the greater country. Slavery was not merely a chapter
in US history, it was an institution that created America.

However, children are not learning about slavery, its impact, and its
relevance today, and it shows.

Our failure to address a legacy of enslavement and racial oppression
makes the US ill-equipped to deal with present-day injustices and
challenges.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has sounded the alarm by releasing a
report, “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery
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SPLC insists the country needs an intervention, and urges states,
school districts and textbook publishers to stop avoiding the hard
truths about slavery. According to the report, the white supremacy and
racism afflicting America today stem from the racial theories used to
justify the enslavement of African and native peoples.

“Slavery’s long reach continues into the present day,” the SPLC
says. “The persistent and wide socioeconomic and legal disparities
that African-Americans face today and the backlash that seems to
follow every African-American advancement trace their roots to slavery
and its aftermath. If we are to understand the world today, we must
understand slavery’s history and continuing impact.”

The United States teaches slavery in a way that lacks historical
context, accentuates historical positives while ignoring a troubling
legacy, and covers a difficult past only to the extent those problems
were resolved, the SPLC notes.

Schools teach slavery as a purely Southern phenomenon, and focus
exclusively on white experiences, with scant attention to the impact
on Black people. Some teachers lead students in re-enactments
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involving slave auctions and the Middle Passage — the forced journey
across the Atlantic in which at least 2 million
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died -- which could traumatize children and impede learning.

Further, history curricula ignore the role of white supremacy that
justified racial violence against African-Americans, and the
connections between the past and the present.

A survey of high school seniors, social studies teachers, state
history curriculum standards and widely used textbooks tells the
story. The report found that only 8% of high school seniors identified
slavery as the cause of the Civil War and 68% were unaware a
constitutional amendment ended slavery. Moreover, fewer than
one-quarter could identify how specific parts of the Constitution
benefited slave masters.

Although more than 90% of teachers claim they are “comfortable”
teaching slavery to students, 58% of teachers found textbooks
inadequate, and 40% said their state provides inadequate support.

SPLC developed a rubric for textbooks to determine how comprehensively
they covered slavery and the plight of enslaved people. The best
textbook the organization reviewed achieved a score of 70%, with the
average textbook earning a paltry 46%.

Of course, states have their own standards for textbooks. But none of
the 15 sets of standards that were analyzed by the SPLC addressed how
white supremacist ideology justified the institution, and “most
[state standards] fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning
about slavery, about the lives of the millions of enslaved people, or
about how their labor was essential to the American economy.”

This clear disconnect from reality is what happens when the school
system fails to teach how the trading of human beings fueled US
capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and made America a global
economic powerhouse
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Think about what would happen if students opened a textbook and found
that in 1860, nearly 4 million enslaved people of African descent were
worth $3.5 billion — more than the nation’s railroads and
manufacturing combined, and the most valuable single asset in America
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Banks, corporations and universities profited from slavery, providing
inherited wealth for whites, with centuries of unpaid wages for black
labor, helping explain today’s racial wealth gap.

With post-Civil War Reconstruction came black empowerment and federal
troops to protect the newly emancipated in the South. When the troops
withdrew, whites re-established slavery through the economic
exploitation of sharecropping, criminalization of African-American
men, black disenfranchisement, and a reign of domestic terror
including lynchings [[link removed]],
massacres and assassinations of black elected officials.

“In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white Southerners
looking to bolster white supremacy and justify Jim Crow reimagined the
Confederacy as a defender of democracy and protector of white
womanhood. To perpetuate this falsehood, they littered the country
with monuments to the Lost Cause,” wrote Ohio State University
professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries in the report.

If young people don’t understand the history behind racial tensions
in America, they become adults who don’t understand why NFL players
kneel in protest against repeated racial injustices.

As students saw Charlottesville explode, they should have been able to
call to mind history lessons on Jim Crow, a time when white
supremacists erected Confederate monuments honoring the “Lost
Cause.”

The 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” glorified the KKK and the
Confederacy, and President Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal
government, screened it at the White House, declaring, “It’s like
writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so
terribly true.” Learning about Wilson’s views on the Klan would
help students understand why there was such an outcry by civil rights
activists when President Donald Trump proclaimed there were “very
fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville.

Without this historical knowledge, students cannot understand why 6
million African-American refugees fled the South between 1916 and 1960
in the nation’s largest mass migration, or why we even needed a
civil rights movement.

We are being forced to refight old civil rights battles. Wealthy
landowners constructed race and white supremacy to “divide and
conquer [[link removed]]”
and keep enslaved Africans and European indentured servants from
banding together for economic justice. Poor Southern white men --whose
labor was rendered obsolete and wages kept low by slavery -- fought
and died to preserve the plantation police state.

Today, we see how racism manipulates the white poor and working class
to believe people of color are the cause of their problems
[[link removed]]. Trump’s
anti-immigration policies of “the wall” and mass deportation for
undocumented immigrants from nonwhite “shithole countries” harken
back to the laws advocated a century ago by white supremacists and
eugenicists to preserve “pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon
stock,”stop the “vast hordes” of brown people from Asia, and
promote the illegal deportation of 600,000 US citizens of Mexican
heritage.

[1968 Olympics Tommie Smith John Carlos]

Fifty years before Colin Kaepernick took a knee against police
brutality, three athletes at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City
— two African-Americans, one white Australian — protested against
racial oppression with their iconic Black Power salute during the
National Anthem. Just as these Olympians were shunned and subjected to
death threats for their bold stance against injustice, today’s NFL
athlete-activists are criminalized, labeled ungrateful and
un-American. That anti-racism protests engender more outrage than
racial injustice demonstrates this nation must do better.

George Santayana
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who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Never will
America address its fundamental challenges if it refuses to learn the
lessons of history and teach its children well.

_DAVID A. LOVE, JD, is the Executive Editor of BlackCommentator
[[link removed]], a weekly commentary
dedicated to issues of economic justice, social justice and peace
affecting Afrcan Americans and the African world.  He is a lawyer
and journalist based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the
Progressive Media Project, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, In These
Times and Philadelphia Independent Media Center. He contributed to the
book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St.
Martin's Press, 2000). His blog is davidalove.com._

* Public Education
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* African American history
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* whitewashing
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