Why Schools Must Teach About Racism.

• Author: Miller, Rann

Growing up, I attended a small, private Catholic school in Camden, New Jersey. Although the school was different from the local public schools, what I did find to be similar was what was taught about history. Private school kids and public school kids always compared their experiences and the things they learned. I realized quickly that the history I learned wasn't different from what my public school friends were learning.

We were taught that George Washington was heroic, that Abraham Lincoln was the ultimate leader, and that the U.S. Constitution was the most visionary document in the history of the modern world. We learned that Black history started with enslavement and ended with Martin Luther King Jr.

What we didn't learn was that the United States was a white settler colonial project; that Washington enslaved African people, bringing them back and forth from Virginia to Pennsylvania to not compromise their bondage; or that Lincoln attempted to have Black people emigrate to other countries like Panama, which was an abject disaster.

We didn't learn about the resistance of the enslaved. We didn't learn about the Haitian Revolution. We didn't learn about the bonds forged between Black revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States with those in Latin America and the Caribbean.

I eventually learned these things, but had I learned them as a kid, I imagine that my self image as a Black kid would have been different than it was. I don't think that white kids would have fared worse for my sense of self being better for having learned the truth.

But sadly, some white adults seem to think so.

This past October, Mary Beeman, the campaign manager for a Republican school board candidate in Connecticut, opined that "helping kids of color to feel they belong has a negative effect on white, Christian, or conservative kids." Beeman's comments were made during a virtual forum on the subject of critical race theory, or CRT.

Beeman later admitted her statement was "poorly worded," but claimed it had been taken "out of context." What she actually meant to express, according to her reworded statement, was that children with "Judeo-Christian values" are being "bullied into submission" by liberal teachers and classmates.

Following the national conversation about racial injustice prompted by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, conservative and mainly white parents and politicians (like Beeman) are on a crusade to discredit the...