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As America has a reckoning over its legacy of racism and enslavement and the telling of history, along comes a story that should outrage us all, and open our eyes. Black people have long known that many textbooks our children read fail to tell our story, leave us out and render us invisible. As white conservative Christians move to ban Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project in schools, they are writing textbooks that disrespect and slander Black America, and tell history from a white supremacist point of view.

A report from The Guardian found that many private schools, particularly Christian schools rely on textbooks supplied by Christian textbook publishers Abeka, Accelerated Christian Education and Bob Jones University Press. Bob Jones University once banned Black students and prohibited interracial dating and marriage, losing its federal nonprofit status because of its racist practices and only regaining its status in 2017. And these publishers are producing textbooks with materials that are not only racially biased, but are full of outright lies.

For example, one textbook refers to slavery as “Black immigration,” while another calls Islam violent. Other textbooks depict Black Lives Matter as racially divisive, describe Malcolm X as a “black supremacist” and the civil rights movement as “war between the states,” in which many “black supremacist” civil rights organizations were prevalent.

One textbook claims Nelson Mandela was responsible for bringing “radical affirmative action” to South Africa.

According to HuffPost, at least one-third of private voucher schools - thousands of schools around the country - purchase textbooks from one of these publishers.

This is nothing new. But that it is still so blatant in the twenty-first century is a reason to pause, if not a cause for alarm.

Education has always been a battlefield for the minds of the youth. When children are taught certain things and conditioned in specific ways about history, society and culture, this is how practices, policies and institutions are perpetuated.

A nation that wants to reinforce the superiority of white people and legitimize land stealing will claim that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. The truth is Indigenous people had inhabited the Americas for thousands of years, and Africans had arrived long before Columbus, as scholars such as Ivan Van Sertima have taught.

In a country that hopes to teach respect for the founding fathers, it is far more convenient to say George Washington never told a lie and chopped down the cherry tree, rather than disclose that he owned Black people, and wore dentures made from the teeth of enslaved Africans.

And the United Daughters of the Confederacy spent decades reshaping textbooks in the South to glorify slavery and white supremacy, justify the Jim Crow police state, and promote the Lost Cause narrative - an alternate reality which paints the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and Southern whites as victims.

White Southerners established private schools called segregation academies rather than allow their children to attend integrated schools with Black children. Now they are writing the textbooks, erasing Black people from history, denigrating our name, and keeping the history books as white as their schools.





David A. Love, JD - Serves

BlackCommentator.com as Executive

Editor. He is a journalist, commentator,

human rights advocate, a Professor at

the Rutgers University School of

Communication and Information based in

Philadelphia, a contributor to Four

Hundred Souls: A Community History of

African America, 1619-2019, The

Washington Post, theGrio,

AtlantaBlackStar, The Progressive,

CNN.com, Morpheus, NewsWorks and

The Huffington Post. He also blogs at

davidalove.com. Contact Mr. Love and

BC.