White panic over kids learning truth about America's racist history has a long pedigree. In 3rd grade, white teachers got angry at me for reading Roots in the back of class during free time. The Black teachers encouraged it but the white ones were enraged (1)
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This was the year the miniseries was on, and the teachers wanted to either bury conversation about it (and its subject matter) or have us "trace our family tree" without thinking of how Black kids might experience that, and w/o confronting the enslavement elephant in the room (2)
I gather that this is what white conservatives prefer: avoiding truth and pain and conflict and contradiction and evil (if committed in our country and in our name or for our benefit). They have never wanted to face it. Not 200 years ago, and not today (3)...
And we just keep papering it over, we keep lying. And we say we do it to protect the kids from painful lessons. But who are we protecting? Not Black kids. Ignoring the experience of racism doesn't protect them from it. It merely makes it impossible for us to address it (4)...
...and that's what white folks are really worried about. If we tell the truth, and not only to kids of color (who often already learn it at home), but also to whites (who don't) it might cause some of those white kids to rethink their attachment to whiteness (5)...
When those teachers lashed out at me for reading Roots, or two years later when one teacher told my mom she was unfit for allowing me my friendships (mostly Black kids at the time), they were policing a border--the border of acceptable whiteness...(6)...
Their fear then, and now, is that their children haven't yet fully bought into the bullshit. Kids still question. They still believe in fairness. They haven't learned to go along with injustice yet. They need to squash solidarity before it grows..(7)...
White folk should view this attack on antiracist education not merely as an attack on folks of color, and Black people especially. But also as an attack on OUR kids and us. People trying to force us back into THIR conception of what it means to be a person of European descent (8)
We must insist that our kids too deserve better than this. We need people of European descent to engage in a special form of European DISSENT...dissent from white supremacy, phony history, and lies in the service of blind patriotism./ END
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