Education

What Is Wrong With Acknowledging America’s Past?

Education in America has been increasingly more inclusive for years, why is this a problem?

I’m not all that interested in the debate surrounding Critical Race Theory (CRT). Like so many issues right now, there are competing choirs on the public square singing their versions of what CRT is or is not. Some say CRT is a graduate-level theory and it isn’t actually taught in schools.

And there are those, such as this conservative journalist, who falls in the camp that insists CRT is being taught in schools. She ups the ante by pointing to the Virginia Governor’s race saying that Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost in large part because he lied about CRT.

The smoking gun? She came across a Virginia Department of Education memo from 2019, that said: “We know that our students continue to be inundated with racist images linked to Virginia’s history of civil rights oppression.” Further, the memo listed Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me as a resource which she calls a CRT manifesto.

But I wonder, did she actually read Between the World and Me?

I ask because I’ve heard and seen some clips of Coates and I don’t agree with him all the time. I also have no problem admitting that some of it had to do with tone. In-person he was more strident than I recalled in his book, and I didn’t care for it.

But so? There are plenty of people I don’t sync up with completely. And let’s be clear, I have read Between the World and Me, it’s good. It’s riveting perspective outside of my own; what it’s like to be black in America. I read it, in part, because my daughter was reading it in school.

She also read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie* which many people have tried to get banned in schools. I have no idea why, it’s Judy Blume for native kids. But white kids should read it also. It’s a story of a young native boy who deals with addiction, poverty, and racism while becoming a pariah in his own community because he chose to leave it to get ahead. What is so scary about that story that it should be banned?

I was glad my daughter read Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Between the World and Me. Schools should have curricula rich with perspectives. And there was plenty of time for her to also read Ramona Quimby, The Giver, and the Black Stallion books.

When she was coming of age, I looked forward to sharing some of the favorite movies of my youth such as Breaking Away, Dead Poets Society, and the Breakfast Club. But I made sure she also watched Smoke Signals and Boyz n the Hood. And then we talked about them.

I remember seeing Boyz n the Hood in my early 20s and being stunned at how the Los Angeles neighborhood was policed by helicopters. Safe in my white suburb, I just didn’t know.

Smoke Signals, adapted from another work by Alexie, follows Thomas and Victor as they grow up on the reservation. They are not friends, but they are often companions, stuck with each other as much as they are stuck in the dysfunctional world of the reservation. And yet, there’s a melancholic sweetness to the story.

My upbringing included travel, museums, art, and opportunity. I was exposed to culture, but I was not exposed to the truth of other people’s existence in quite the way either of these movies portrayed them. I wanted my daughter to see the world outside the bubble of our college town. I couldn’t travel with her to the same extent my parents were able to with me, so it was books and movies, and education that gave her a broader worldview.

So let’s get back to the subject of education, in Virginia.

After my father got out of the service, we settled in Northern Virginia. Not the old south, but within the beltway. I went to a public school likely gerrymandered into existence in the 1950s. Virginia in the 50s was the epicenter of massive resistance to public school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954.

In school, I received the message that the Daughters of the Confederacy propagated about Robert E. Lee, that he only chose the South because of his love for Virginia. We were taught he said:

“If Virginia stands by the old Union so will I.”

And not that he also said:

“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.”

I still remember a field trip to his childhood home in elementary school. They had a really cool hands-on learning exhibit on lath and plaster. While I never empathized with the Confederacy, it took a long time for me to deprogram the notion that Robert E. Lee was a reluctant southern hero.

Robert E. Lee was a racist who believed the subjugation of blacks was necessary, yet his statue on Monument Avenue, in Richmond, Virginia did not come down until September 8, 2021. It never should have been put up in the first place, and this is what we still need to fix about America.

Conservatives want to talk about Critical Race Theory as if it’s part of some plot to overthrow America. It’s not.

We have been offering a fuller accounting of the American experience in our schools for some time now. We are a nation of many peoples and varied experiences. Including everyone and recording our history correctly will not lead us to ruin.

Refusing to acknowledge the wrongs of America, and not make amends is what will be our undoing.

* In 2018 Sherman Alexie was accused of and admitted to sexual harassment. While I recommend The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Smoke Signals for the Native perspective, I don’t condone his behavior.