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.
