“What is ‘dem white peoples teaching you in history?” My grandmother would ask me that every time the calendar hit January 15 and celebrations for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday would start. She would ask it again in February when schools turned their attention Black history.
It was never an easy conversation.
I come from long line of Black educators. My great-grandmother taught newly freed slaves how to read during Reconstruction. My grandmother taught preschool in rural Oklahoma. My mother was a special education teacher in Oklahoma City. My family made it a point to teach the real, dirty history of Black folks in America, and they passed those tools down to me for my own teaching career.
I learned about The Black Panther Party’s critiques of American capitalism and how Ida B. Wells brought attention to the lynchings that were happening in the South. Not just about the fairy tales about Black people that white people today teach in history classrooms.
My grandmother would lament the integration of Black students into white schools. She knew that, economically, it was a good thing. She cheered when it happened, but slowly she begin to sour on the idea when she learned what those white schools started teaching Black students about history.
If there are no other alternatives, it is possible for white people to teach Black history correctly. If they have the right politics and are thoughtful in how they present the material, it can be done correctly. But let’s keep it real: White supremacy is so deeply embedded into the fabric of this country that it would be better if Black folks oversaw teaching our history.
One can never be sure that a white teacher tasked with teaching our history (whether benignly unintentional or maliciously intentional) will say or do something that misrepresents what happened in the past. Schools still can’t get teaching slavery right and the truth of happened in institution is well documented and undeniable. And yet, somehow, there is debate about how to teach it.
Maybe it is because some are concerned that telling the truth of race in this country might make white students feel bad about what their ancestors did. Yet, the truth is that they should feel bad about what folks who looked like them did in the past.
Maybe those feelings of shame will inspire them learn from the mistakes of their ancestors.
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Lawrence Ware is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Center for Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University