You’re Not Equipped to Talk About Slavery and Black History
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” — Maya Angelou
America’s latest pathetic attempt to have a national discussion about race has again been reduced to an endless stream of ahistorical commentary by the people least equipped to talk about Black History: white Americans.
On talk shows, cable and network news, and of course on all the major online platforms, readers and viewers are being subjected to commentary that is not only factually wrong, but also harmful, offensive, and racist.
The latest offence to Black people and educators everywhere is Ron DeSantis and the Florida school board — including multiple Black board members — gleefully proclaiming “Some slaves used the skills they acquired being human chattel slaves for better lives after slavery had ended.”
Nevermind folk captured and purchased on the African continent were skilled farmers, builders, blacksmiths, and possessors of other useful skills and abilities.
And America being what it is, people on the right and left — white people — are chiming in agreeing with the absurd, racist, offensive whitewashing of history.
But it is always this way, isn’t it?
It goes something like this:
Person states something that is incorrect about any recent or past Black person or issue.
White conservatives jump on the bandwagon loudly proclaiming that said issue is actually true and accurate.
Mass media asks white conservatives to expound on their incorrect facts while giving them uninterrupted airtime to repeat all the lies while offering no pushback or corrections.
Black people everywhere are up in arms about the lies and share their dissatisfaction with each other, while spending countless hours trying to correct mass media for pushing lies, false narratives, and proven historical inaccuracies.
Media ignores Black people.
Black scholars, writers, and authors publish papers, blogs, and books correcting the lies.
Media ignores Black people.
White parents demand their schools teach the lies that all started with…
…Person states something that is incorrect about any recent or past Black person or issue.
An exhibit at EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, features more than 200 sculptures by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo memorializing those who died during the Middle Passage. Almost two million Africans died during the Middle Passage — nearly one million more than all of the Americans who have died in every war fought since 1775 combined.
America has never been good at writing history or teaching history. The nation prefers to mythologize past atrocities and make heroes out of the people who instituted chattel slavery, who sustained it for 400 years, and who set up a system of government and laws that were specifically designed to harm every enslaved person, and then modified to harm every descendent of an enslaved person.
Every American knows the basic facts about American history and yet the majority of white people prefer to remain in a place of blissful ignorance rather than deal with reality.
It does not harm white people to know America’s real history. Read that again.
But denying the truth of America’s history of enslavement and post emancipation actively harms Black people.
We know there was a concerted effort to rewrite history as it was happening. The Founding Fathers were so ashamed of their oversight and acceptance of enslavement and of owning humans (and raping, beating, killing, trafficking, abusing) that they cynically made certain the words “Slave and Slavery” were not in the constitution.
They wrote loftity about freedom and rights granted to every man by his Creator even though most of them owned humans and denied them freedom in life and their descendents freedom when they died. The constitution Americans love to promote as a universal god-inspired document that should govern all lives.. was ridiculed contemporaneously by others, both foreign and domestic, who saw the appalling hypocrisy of the document.
Furthering the early spreading of lies, immediately after the civil war, the Daughters of the Confederacy wrote textbooks that glorified the traitorous confederates, demonized the work for freedom Black people fought and died for, and made certain school textbooks were inaccurate to such a degree that lies are still being taught in schools and believed 150 years later.
And then Daughters of the Confederacy begat Moms for Liberty who are continuing the work of ensuring lies are taught, that white students are coddled and protected from real history, and that Black history and achievement are reduced to a few men, a few paragraphs, and lots of lies.
The very people who revel in their ignorance and limited understanding of actual American history are the loudest buffoons declaring they know best what should be taught to kids/students. People who cannot define CRT, cannot tell you about slave rebellions, how white people used to eat slaves, defecated in their mouths, forced them to wear steel masks so they couldn’t talk, or how our skin was used for clothing, want to tell us that slaves benefited from their skills after they won their emancipation.
White Americans are among the most educated people in history. They occupy most education positions, they have the most published textbooks in schools and universities, they have the most jobs as principal and university president, and they control the vast majority of school boards. And they own and operate almost all private and religious schools.
And yet as a group they know the least about Black and Indigenous history.
But they collectively demand that only they are allowed to define what is the truth of those histories and what should be taught. It is dissonance on a national racial scale and it has kept Americans ignorant about its history.
The nation could do as England does. There, one can receive an advanced degree in Royal Family history. If you watch the BBC during any story about the Royals you’re likely to see a person whose credentials look like -“PhD, Royal Monarchy, 1653–1656.”
But here teachers so unequipped to teach about American enslavement that lessons have been reduced to “I don’t want to teach it because it makes white students uncomfortable.”
Teachers spend a few moments talking about slavery and might mention Harriet Tubman, then skipping to the emancipation proclamation, before ending with Dr. King and Civil Rights and finally ending with “Now everyone is free and equal. Let’s discuss the Roman empire again, kids!”
Therein lies a big part of the American problem: people who should never be allowed to dictate what should be taught about American/Black history have the most influence on what and how will be taught in our schools and universities. And people who have voted to underfund majority Black schools by hundreds of billions of dollars should not be allowed to dictate what we should be teaching our kids about Black history.
The nation is relying on people who have little to no interactions with real living Black people, who have never learned Black history from a Black professor, teacher, or educator, and who have never had a Black person in their home. The people dictating what kids are taught only know about Black people and Black history through the lens of other people like themselves — white people.
There are, of course, some who have learned via reading Black authors and still fewer who had Black teachers or professors — because American education is still incredibly segregated.
After hundreds of years of data and proof, white Americans should not be allowed to teach Black history, to approve any books used to teach Black history, or be allowed to decide what any child learns about Black history unless and until they’ve been specifically taught and trained, certified, mentored by a Black scholar, and been certified. And recertified every few years as a requirement to be able to continue to teach Black history.
Integrating people without integrating our histories was and is the most critical mistake of educational integration.
Imagine how it would look to see an expert on cable news and their credentials are PhD, American Chattel Slavery, 1730–1760, and knowing they studied the social, political, uprisings, and significant people and events of that time period.
It would be powerful and a testament to riguous study, research, and discipline.
There are tens of thousands of Black scholars, teachers, and educators who are equipped to develop curriculum and syllabus, write books, create learning videos, and provide research materials that can be used in American education, including K-12 classrooms.
White people know this is a better solution than what we’ve witnessed over the past hundred years but you could never get the majority of white people to admit it or accept it no matter their political persuasion.
In fact, much of the pushback against critical race theory — CRT can be traced directly to Nikole Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project — her Pulitzer winning deep dive into the origins of the nation and the origins of enslavement and how they are inextricably intertwined. White scholars were (are) so angry that a Black woman dared research and write about American/Black history, they galvanized the movement to further whitewash Black history leading to white people demanding that CRT not be taught in k-12 even though it never was. Not satisfied, they moved on from do not teach CRT at all to what we are seeing today: demanding schools teach *their opinions about Black history.
The least qualified people demanding that they be the final and only voice on what and how Black history is taught.
White america is too invested in the mythology, in the positive narrative, in the nation’s hero’s journey they’ve been taught to celebrate to allow any other factual and more complete narratives to be taught.
They don’t want to remove themselves from the fog of self-delusion and enter into the light of factual, actual, American history.
And the nation suffers as a result of this system of ignorance because they control what is taught.
Every Black person can recount a tale of a white history teacher absolutely butchering the attempt to teach Black history. Some tried and were awful, but many were awful simply because they were not equipped to teach Black history in any capacity.
It is sobering to think that all the rest of us — Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, Jewish, and Mexican, seek to learn our histories — the good, bad, and ugly — and we are able to manage our emotions, get up and go to school and work, and function as good and honest members of society.
So it begs the question: why can every other racial and ethnic demographic learn and handle their actual histories but white Americans cannot?
Why do white children and adults need to be protected from American history? Why can’t they be required to learn the truth and handle the truth like everyone else?
What harm would be caused?
None.
What would change though is the unearned inherited supremacy and “ownership” of all good things American. And it would necessarily be replaced with intimate knowledge of unearned privilege and of current systemic issues that continue to harm fellow Americans.
And maybe that deep level of awareness could lead to improvements in all facets of American life as equality and equity would be better understood and accepted.
If only.
But as long as fear, mythology, inaccuracies, and lies dominate we will get ignorant commentary from morons like Ron DeSantis, everyone on Fox News, and all those folk still attending Trump “rallies.”
It is imperative that our kids know their history and we will never stop teaching them regardless of what white activists force schools to teach. We have always done so.
But we also want white Americans to know our shared past so that they better understand our shared presence, and can be better partners in planning our shared futures.
We can standstill in ignorance or move forward in knowledge.
We’ve tried the former for far too long and we are reaping the poor results that are being loudly displayed by politicians and national media, so it is past time we tried another more thorough and more inclusive and accurate method created and authored by Black Americans.
