Why don’t they teach in schools what you blog about here?? If I had been given a more accurate version of past history in class, maybe I would have been more interested in the class, let alone much better informed on what medieval history really looked like.
Assuming that your question is not rhetorical, the reason(s) you might not learn anything about people of color in your history classroom might be because it is actually illegal in your state. For example, in Arizona anything considered “Ethnic studies” is banned by law. As in, it is illegal to teach. The case is currently ongoing, and according to the most recent update I have read, the fact that these laws are openly discriminating against students of color is painfully and embarrassingly obvious:
The Cabrera Report and the Cambium Audit
are 2 major studies that prove Mexican American courses helps students
pass standardized Math and English tests and graduate. Arizona fought to
keep the findings from being used as evidence in court.
Arizona’s justification for ignoring the data was mind-blowing. Arizona argued that “student achievement is irrelevant.”
Evidently, generations of teachers have the concept all wrong. Here we thought just the opposite.
The sense this makes is nonsense. And the judges thought so, too.
The judges asked AZ counsel, “Suppose you had a class in Chinese
Language, one that helps Chinese students, would that be illegal in AZ?”
The lawyer for AZ answered-“Yes.”
Even on his last day of office, outgoing Education Chief Huppenthal notified TUSD that an African American Studies course was breaking the law by teaching KRS-One Lyrics.
The political and financial battle over what is allowed to be learned also exploded in Jefferson County in Colorado last year, leading hundreds of students to stage protests and walkouts over whitewashed and inaccurate American History courses.
Activists behind the recall effort say the three have violated
open-meeting laws, spent lavishly on legal expenses and hired a new
superintendent at a salary significantly higher than his more
experienced predecessor.
But the conflict that drew national
attention to the state’s second-largest school district came last fall,
when Newkirk, Witt and Williams indicated they wanted to “review” the
content of the AP U.S. History course taught in county high schools
because it failed to promote patriotism.
The College Board, which
administers exams to students upon the completion of AP courses,
revised the history curriculum in ways that have angered conservatives,
who say it paints a darker picture of the country’s heritage and undervalues concepts such as “American exceptionalism.”
The
revised AP history curriculum adds two periods: life in the Americas
from 1491 to 1607, which addresses the conflicts between Native
Americans and European settlers, and from 1980 to the present, which
includes the rise of social conservatism and the battles over issues such as abortion, as
well as the fight against terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
and demographic and economic shifts of the 21st century.
Newkirk,
Witt and Williams wanted to set up a new committee to review the
curriculum with the goal of assuring that courses — in the words of
Williams — “present positive aspects of the United States and its
heritage” and “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits
of the free enterprise system.”Williams also wrote that “materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder [or] social strife.”
When she told her U.S. History
Professor Maury Wiseman that she disagreed with his assessment that
Native Americans did not face Genocide, the professor said she was
hijacking his class, was accusing him of bigotry and racism and she was
expelled from the class.
“He said, ‘Genocide is not what happened.’ I stood up and started
reading from an article by the United Nations that said: ‘Genocide is
the deliberate killing of another people, a sterilization of people
and/or a kidnapping of their children,’ and he said, ‘That is enough.’
“I said, ‘No. You have to tell the truth.’
“He said, ‘If you want to come talk to me after class, now is not the time, you are hijacking my class.‘”
After a bit more discussion which Johnson says became heated, the
professor dismissed the class. Additionally, other students defended the
professor.
“He said, ‘You know what class? I am so sorry to everybody that this
is happening. Please everyone come back on Wednesday have a good
weekend.’”
After the class was dismissed, Johnson said she was expelled from the course by her professor.
“He said, ‘I do not appreciate this in my classroom.’ He began
shaking his finger at me and said, ‘I don’t appreciate you making me
sound like a racist and a bigot in my classroom. You have hijacked my
lesson, taken everything out of context and I don’t care what kind of
scholarship you have, or what kind of affiliation you have with the
university, you will be disenrolled and expelled from this classroom.’
History, Winston Churchill famously said, is written by the victors. Don McLeroy no doubt agrees.
McLeroy is a dentist from Bryan, Texas, a self-described Christian
fundamentalist, and an outgoing member of state school board of
education (SBOE). Over the past year, McLeroy and his allies formed a
powerful bloc on the 15-member elected board and pushed
through controversial revisions to the statewide social studies
curriculum.
“Sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have,” McLeroy recently boasted.
To many Texans, however, what’s more mind-boggling are some of
the revisions. Critics charge that they promote Christian
fundamentalism, boost conservative political figures, and force-feed
American “exceptionalism,” while downplaying the historical
contributions of minorities.
And that is why they don’t teach this in schools.
It’s worth putting it this way: the reason the state of Arizona attacked Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program is because not only were its students graduating and going to college after taking this program, but also because poor Latino high school students were standing up for themselves and politically active from this knowledge. (Instead of just dropping out–the Latino dropout rate in TUSD is so high the district was found in violation of Brown v. Board of Education in 1978. Which is the whole reason they started the MAS program in the first place, because they recognized it was so effective in boosting graduation rates and desegregating the school).
State Superintendent Tom Horne first went after the program in 2006, when students organized a event against the Sensenbrenner Bill and all the shit that was happening then, and they invited Dolores Huerta to speak and apparently at one point she said “Republicans hate Latinos.” Horne organized his own republican/anti-immigrant assembly and required all students come hear all his ppl talk about shit and didnt allow questions, so students protested at the event. So whats that? Brown high school students standing up against this crazy police state shit that the right wing is organizing to attack their families? Just as Tom Horne was planning to run for AZ Attorney General? No, we cant have that, not in our state. So thats literally what made him push all the bills targeting the program, saying it encourages kids to overthrow the American government and shit. Thats literally what scares and enflames the right wing so much that Horne won the election after his bill passed, and put a guy in charge of Arizona schools who believes Phoenix has been “nuclear bombed by illegal immigration.”
Critical ethnic studies programs gets students of color to graduate and stand up for themselves, and throw a wrench into this school to prison pipeline/white supremacy shit. That’s why it’s illegal, thats why all you hear about in school is this whitewahed shit. White supremacy needs whitewashed education to survive
Key and Teeth 