A Washington State University Vancouver instructor hopes to bring the past into the present with the launch of an independent summer program exploring how black history in the United States affects modern life.
Sky Wilson, an English instructor at WSUV, will teach a series of lessons called Black History @ Woke, a pilot summer program for Vancouver-area black teenagers ages 15 through 19. The weekly workshops will explore topics ranging from “hip-hop to Homeland Security, from the politics of prisons, to political prisoners, and from street to Wall Street hustlers,” according to the program’s Facebook page.
Those who participate will receive a free desktop computer to keep. Students who meet income restrictions will receive three months of internet service.
Wilson will draw from his own experience growing up as a young black man in Minneapolis during the 1980s and 1990s. Wilson said standard history teaching tends to look at the past as “that’s what happened back then.” As a young man, it was difficult to root his own experiences witnessing drug use or violence without grasping the history that came before it.
