Black History Month dates back to the 1920s in the United States, and it has formally been recognized since 1976. Never, perhaps, has it been so important.
Following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, protests calling for racial justice took place across the country. Those events ignited a reckoning with the United States’ history of prejudice, and they also ignited a backlash of white grievance and attempts to deny that history.
False claims that schools are teaching critical race theory — an advanced academic process for examining social policies — took root. As a policy paper for Brookings Institution stated in November: “Fox News has mentioned ‘critical race theory’ 1,300 times in less than four months. Why? Because critical race theory has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.”
If your fourth-grader is being taught critical race theory, you should be proud. In reality, it is usually reserved for graduate-level courses.
Not allowing facts to stand in their way, nine states have banned instruction in critical race theory. And some of them have taken steps that undermine the teaching of basic African American history — and, therefore, the teaching of American history itself.
“We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said, echoing the trope that learning about American history leads to racial animus.
In Washington, the Mukilteo School District recently removed “To Kill a Mockingbird” from its required reading list for ninth-graders because of its frequent use of the n-word and its depiction of a racist America. Often overlooked in the public comments that have accompanied the decision, the book may still be taught, but teachers are not required to do so.
Other restrictions across the country have a more nefarious impact that draws a line between factual history and how critics wish it to be. According to Education Week, 14 states since last year have imposed restrictions out of a desire to keep students from hearing uncomfortable facts. For example, one expert noted, students could be taught that Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball, but would be prevented from discussing why that line existed.
Such actions not only sell our students short, they present a sanitized version of history — and sanitized history is no history at all. As historian Manisha Sinha told Axios: “These laws supposedly protecting white students from guilt say more about the authors of the law than the students.”
It is undeniable that bigotry has played a role in United States history. That is not an indictment of white people; it is a fact. In the original U.S. Constitution, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for determining population, and slavery existed in Southern states until after those states lost the Civil War while defending the morally repugnant institution.
And in this part of the country, we would be remiss to not teach our children about the colonization of lands owned by Native Americans. A unit of fifth-grade instruction in Washington is called “Encounter, Colonization, and Devastation: Tribal Homelands.”
All of that plays a role as we acknowledge Black History Month throughout February. Because history is not about remembering the past as we wish it to be; it is about preparing our students for the future. Creating a prosperous future depends on a full understanding of history.
