The caller was panicking. I was then a reporter for this newspaper, and she needed my help. Her son, who was white, was being transferred to another school and attending said school would be detrimental to his health, she pleaded.
I can’t remember which school he currently was attending, but he was being transferred to Dudley High School, which was at the time and is still today predominantly Black. It seems anytime he’s around “large numbers of Black people,” his mother said, her son gets “headaches.”
Obviously, she couldn’t discern from my voice that I was Black. While I had no intention of writing a story, I headed over to her address. After all, I’d checked my watch; I had time. I knocked. She opened the wooden door but kept the aluminum screen door locked. I introduced myself, and you could see the blood drain from her face as she mentally replayed that cockamamie story she had told me earlier. She wouldn’t let me in.
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After reading a column printed in the Nov. 9 edition of the News & Record from Take Back our Schools-GCS members, I recalled this incident.
It seems they are concerned that our schools are teaching critical race theory and “indoctrinating our kids to see everything through a racial lens”?
My question to them: So what else is new? In America, everything is seen through a racial lens. It’s just that we’ve only been looking at the view you painted. We’ve been taught your version of history.
The way I see it, critical race theory — or inclusive excellence, or diversity, equity and inclusion — aren’t teaching that one race is right and one is wrong. Instead, they simply are undoing what has been done for so long.
They are the vaccine — yes, I said the vaccine — to the racist teachings so many of us were indoctrinated with.
We were told Christopher Columbus discovered America. As if the Native Americans weren’t already here. And additional research has shown that other explorers from Europe, Asia, and, yes, Africa, were here before the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria left port.
We were told Abraham Lincoln singlehandedly, with the stroke of a pen, freed all the slaves. Well, not all of them. It applied only to the 10 states that had seceded from the Union.
We were told that the Pilgrims came here with noble intentions and that everything that’s been done since then has been great.
We were told that Rosa Parks didn’t get up because she was physically tired, having worked all day. She says in her autobiography that she wasn’t physically exhausted. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
We were told that the first Thanksgiving was a peaceful dinner among friends. In fact, colonial soldiers were feted by Massachusetts colony Gov. John Winthrop after they had slaughtered 700 native men, women and children. This was a victory celebration for them.
We were told to equate racism with Southern slavery and that once the latter is eliminated, the former will disappear. The truth is slavery existed in every colony. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery, and in 1729, approximately one-fifth of New York’s population were slaves. And no, everything wasn’t magically fixed once slavery ended. Then came voter disenfranchisement. And Jim Crow. And lynching. And segregation. And redlining. And so on.
We were never told about the significance of 1619. Did I dare use those four numbers? Aug. 20, 1619, was the date the first documented slaves arrived near what is now Hampton, Va.
We were also told Pluto was a planet. That Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. That Albert Einstein was a poor student who failed math. That Henry Ford invented the automobile.
Basically, we were told to remember and learn the information you presented as facts. Partially because it supported your narrative that white was always right, and America was always great. We were given a soft-pedaled, oversimplified version of reality. We were not told that we could think and assess and consider these facts as a hypothesis.
In his book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” which now in its third edition, James Loewen examined U.S. history textbooks to determine what’s taught in America’s classrooms.
The way the textbooks present history “promoted racist attitudes among white people,” Loewen concluded.
“By providing students an inadequate history education, America’s schools breed adults who tend to conflate empirical fact and opinion, and who lack the media literacy necessary to navigate conflicting information.”
Essentially, what we learned made us idiots unable to separate truth from lies, a malady manifested today.
So rather than remove books about alternative lifestyles that keep Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson up at night, we should consider removing the books responsible for teaching these lies. Or maybe, just maybe, finding material that teaches students to think, assess and hypothesize might help correct the damage done.
You can call it critical race theory or diversity, inclusion and equity. I call it setting the record straight. Finally.
Fast forward 30 years later, and I wonder if that young man still gets those headaches?