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.
One judge said that ignoring the findings, “… would seem to demonstrate evidence of discriminatory intent.”
You really do have to see it to believe it, and to do so-click here for a link to a video of the oral arguments.
[…]
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.”
As an overall trend, more schools are banning books that deal with topics like diversity, racism, sexism, and gender and sexuality. The latter being needlessly fraught; consider the case of Northville, Michigan, in which a woman tried to get The Diary of Anne Frank banned because she believed Frank’s descriptions of her own body were “pornographic”.
When it comes to history that has already been erased, and people who have already been disenfranchised, consider The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book about the Black woman whose cells are crucial to medical research today (and were taken without her knowledge or consent- I have read the book and it is quite harrowing). A woman in Tennessee is trying to get this book banned from classrooms because, according to her, information about cervical cancer is “pornographic”.
Also recently, consider the case of Chiitaanibah Johnson, a 19 year old sophomore student at Cal State Sacramento University.
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.’
The people who are making decisions about what is and is not learned by students in grade school, high school, and even colleges are often not experts in these topics, but are rather politicians, administrators, and financial advisers.
The people who dictate what is and is not included in textbooks are often the same, and the companies that print them exert financial pressure on the people writing them to include or omit topics in adherence with various political platforms. An entire curriculum can be dictated not by historians, but by people like Don McLeroy, a dentist:
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.