Teaching Racial Truth in America: This Year’s Black History Month Is a Clarion Call
Black History Month this year follows a long disturbing year of violence against Black Americans and an appalling rise of White supremacy nationally, culminating with the White nationalists’ attack the U.S. Capitol in early January. Clearly, there is much to talk about, in and out of schools.
We agree with critics of Black History Month who argue that the magnitude of Black history cannot be contained within just one month. More to the point, in schools, Black history needs to be understood as central and inseparable from U.S. History — and, thus, should be threaded throughout the curriculum year-round. To that end, we urge educators in all subject areas and grade levels to reexamine their curricula with this goal in mind.
Until that day, however, having Black History Month is better than nothing at all. This year, in particular, February offers educators the opportunity to start the process of digging deeper into Black history and culture in America — including Black contributions in all areas of study — while also examining with students, in age-appropriate ways, the incidents of racial violence and injustice in contemporary society. For educators, we also think it’s worth connecting the dots between some of the problematic curricular practices within K-12 American education and the White supremacy that fueled the sedition by White nationalists at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. These insurrectionists, after all, were educated in our schools.
To date, it seems, we have collectively lacked the will to dispel American myths about race and racial history — including the myths embedded in the culture at our nation’s founding. Our Declaration of Independence, to take the most glaring example, invokes the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as reason for the colonies independence, while these very same colonists stood on stolen land and offered no such dignity to the human beings who had been living here for 10,000 years or more. The Declaration of Independence also pronounces that “all men are created equal” while most of our founding fathers enslaved Black people. Ten of the first twelve U.S. Presidents owned enslaved people. The other two, the Adamses, rented them. Yet to date, schools still downplay this racist dichotomy — or, as the Trump White House’s disturbingly politicized 1776 Commission Report does, excuses such behavior because slavery was in wide practice at the time.
When it comes to Black history in America, our schools have been willing take small steps in recent years, acknowledge some core elements of Black history and culture, but we continue to dismiss its centrality in American history and society. It makes good sense to teach about Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but we need to go far beyond and much deeper than a barebones outline of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. We need all Americans to have a clearer perspective on the full range of our racial history from the founding of our nation, through major historical moments and movements, to current events and contemporary culture. We need to make this curricular shift because it’s the right thing to do. We also need to make it so that when future politicians try using fear, lies, mythology, and conspiracy theories to divide us by race for their own political gain, we will collectively see these immoral acts for what they are. We won’t rise to the bait as so many Americans did this past year.
With a day left in the Trump administration, the White House published its 1776 Commission Report in a last-ditch effort to create division and promulgate myths and lies about our history while simultaneously attacking those of us who are asking that the telling of our history be honest and inclusive of all people. To add insult to injury, the administration released the report on Martin Luther King Day. Mainstream historians are clear: what the commission calls a “pro-American” curriculum is in reality politicized propaganda, a pro-White Supremacy curriculum. Boston College history professor and Substack phenom Heather Cox Richardson, writes, “Made up of astonishingly bad history, this document will not stand as anything other than an artifact of Trump’s hatred of today’s progressives and his desperate attempt to wrench American history into the mythology he and his supporters promote so fervently.”
We are glad that the Biden administration has moved quickly to disband the 1776 Commission and take the report off the government website, but the fact that it came into existence at all speaks of the power in politics — that a group with a bully pulpit can widely promote political views that aren’t aligned with truth. American citizens can only resist these efforts if they are offered a yearly diet of truth — and schools are central in this work.
At Teaching While White, we see the 1776 Commission Report — and all related efforts to diminish or erase the history of People of Color in America — as forms of curricular violence. The omission of not only Black history but that of Native Americans, Latinx, Asian-Pacific American, and other historically marginalized people is designed to render the contributions and realities of more than 42% of the American population as insignificant, at best.
Of course, the erasure of historical truth also threatens the grasp on reality for White people. Once the myths are solidly planted, then reinforced, many White people can come believe that the country’s accomplishments, progress, and history is owed to them. Then, when presented with a more accurate, factual information on race, White people can start to believe that they are the one’s under threat, the ones at risk of being erased. Allowing White people to believe that that they are at the center of everything and reinforcing that myth in the telling of American history is also violence. As James Baldwin says in A Talk to Teachers, “As long as our intention is to maintain the myth... [it] means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children — some of them near forty — who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.”
Our childish belief in White domination and superiority has been on full display for far too long, and racial maturity is long overdue.
Our schools are designed to educate students for both their personal success in life and for engaged citizenship. We can’t do this well if we don’t teach students the truth and if we don’t help them — each and every one — develop a strong, honest sense of identity and belonging.
It’s right to examine the steps the founding fathers took in establishing our nation on democratic principles. But it’s also right to examine the shortcomings and missteps at the start of our nation that continue to reverberate today. We must teach explicitly about power, systems of advantage, colonization, and marginalization and their role in American history and today. We need to equip our students with the critical-thinking skills to analyze and call into question media and political messages that aim to prop up the myths of meritocracy, White saviorism, and rugged individualism. We also need to acknowledge and celebrate the full-range of contributions of Black Americans to society — over time, in all fields — as well as the contributions of Americans from other currently marginalized groups.
In his Talk to Teachers, James Baldwin also notes that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” This February seems like the ideal time for all of us to commit to the process of long-needed curricular reform. Below are some resources for talking to students about the insurrection on January 6 as well as for teaching the truth of our country’s “larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible” history.
Resources for Teachers for the Days After the Attack on the U.S. Capital
How to Teach Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb”
Jenna Chandler Ward is the co-founder of Teaching While White. Michael Brosnan is the Senior Editor.