"It’s no accident my students learn a narrative that stops in 1965. Most history textbooks end their chapter on the Civil Rights Movement with a short one- or two-page section on “Black Power” that covers Malcolm X and a few post-1965 events...
Textbooks reinforce the Voting Rights Act-as-the-end-of-the-movement narrative when they draw a line between the Civil Rights Movement and the call for Black Power. One example is Teachers Curriculum Institute’s widely used History Alive! The United States. One page after extolling the virtues of the Voting Rights Act, the authors write in their “Black Power” section:
By the time King died, many African Americans had lost faith in his vision of a society in which the color of a person’s skin didn’t matter. Angry young African Americans looked instead to new leaders who talked about black pride and black power.
Missing from this passage is the angry young King, who reminded us after 1965 that his dream had “turned into a nightmare,” who attacked segregation in the North, who opposed the Vietnam War, who advocated for a massive redistribution of wealth, who called for Black pride, and who worked closely with Black Power proponents...
The broader curricular crime is that History Alive! teaches students to accept the turn to Black Power as the end of the successful Civil Rights Movement, and therefore not worth spending class time exploring...
One of many disservices done to non-white kids in US history classrooms. There are so many ways that the curriculum assumes a white audience, which not only prevents those of us who are not white from developing strong identities as Americans, but reinforces the marginalization of Americans-of-Color in the minds of white students. We exist as victims and activists an tightly prescribed historical "incidents", if we exist at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment