What would it have done to Jewish kids if they had been taught to revere the Nazis who committed genocide against Jews? Now ask yourself what teaching black kids to revere enslavers has done to them.

The American flag and the Confederate flag

I love this flag display at a house in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area just down from where I live. They put it up right before Independence Day every year. It’s when I appreciate the American flag most, because it is a kind of a visual cleanser in a place where the Confederate flag still flies throughout the area. I’ve long had mixed feelings about the American flag and what it stands for - the good and ugly - given our history. But the contrast between those two flags is so stark that having to contend with the Confederate flag makes me love the American flag more.

Those mixed feelings also motivated me to write this piece below, in which I allow some of my frustrations about our current debate about race flow.

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White parents realize they have raised racial snowflakes and are terrified they will melt in the presence of uncomfortable-racial truths. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to come to any other conclusion as I watch a moral panic about something called Critical Race Theory that isn’t actually Critical Race Theory spread like wildfire in political and educational circles often led by white parents, even if not exclusively. [https://www.msnbc.com/the-week/watch/the-truth-about-critical-race-theory-co-founder-breaks-down-gop-gaslighting-115157061613] I don’t believe them when they say they are simply concerned about our educational system or the mental health of our children – because they’ve never shown a similar concern for black students.

              I did not see them storm into school board meetings and demand that legislators change an educational system that has taught black kids to revere the white men who raped, robbed, beat, sometimes murdered and enslaved the ancestors of those black kids. They’ve never said it might be traumatizing to teach black kids to honor the oppressors of those who wore skin the color of those black kids. They never much cared if most black kids were stuck in the worst schools if it meant those white parents might have to sacrifice just a little bit of the comfort from which their own children have long benefited. They soothe their conscience by telling themselves that “school choice” programs that might help a handful of black kids – while leaving the majority stuck in underfunded schools – is the answer though it clearly isn’t. They never cared that black kids have to contend with debates inside the classroom and out about whether IQ and standardized test scores suggest black people are dumber than white people. Tax dollars from black families should go to construct and preserve monuments and memorials built to white men who enslaved black people as well as white people who fought a war and founded an entirely new country built on the idea that black people are inferior and should forever be in the bondage of white people. To suggest otherwise is to erase history, to be too “woke.”

              They’ve never given a damn about what it means to black kids to have to carry around currency with the faces of slaveowners in a country in which the Voting Rights Act has been gutted and a political party is doing its level best to ensure it never gets restored. And yet now, suddenly, they are concerned with the mental welfare of kids who have to endure the indignity of learning about white privilege and maybe read the 1619 Project as part of a class assignment. It all would be laughable if it wasn’t all so maddening. God forbid they have to learn that Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t only say he wanted a world in which kids were judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin but also this: "We must honestly see and admit that racism is still deeply rooted all over America."

              White parents are making it abundantly clear their children can’t handle frank talk about systemic racism. Let us not allow their children to know King said the biggest obstacle to racial progress wasn’t the Klansman but the white moderate. Most of the white parents pushing for more than three dozen laws in numerous Republican states, like my native South Carolina and North Carolina where I teach, consider themselves moderate, reasonable. Their children mustn’t hear such unkind-unfair things about their parents. Collective guilt is wrong. Talking about racial groups in ways that might cause anguish to members of those groups mustn’t be tolerated. That is if that group is white. Because shaming black kids by suggesting they are to blame for being on the wrong side of educational and other racial disparities is perfectly fine. Because black kids are tough enough to take it. Or because their mental health concerns don’t much matter.

              Do they not understand how damaging it is to teach black kids to revere and honor those who benefitted the most from race-based chattel slavery? And make no mistake, the American educational system was not designed to simply help black kids – all kids – understand how this democracy came to be. Historians and history teachers didn’t write neutral books and deliver neutral lessons when talk turned to men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. These men were great. These men were good. Jefferson was an intellectual giant without whom we wouldn’t know that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights. We were fed fables about cherry trees that illustrated Washington’s high character. That they owned black people was kind of an afterthought because their hand in creating the U.S. constitution, Declaration of Independence and what has become known as the oldest democracy on the planet was always more important than Jefferson’s rape of a young slave girl or Washington’s penchant to have teeth removed from his slaves to replace his own when they rotted or wore down. Their inability or unwillingness to follow the lead of their contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, to free their slaves and establish a school for black people hardly ever grappled with.

              Historians have been quick to tell us the importance of Washington’s decision to decline a third term in the White House, thereby ensuring this country wouldn’t devolve into being just another monarchy. They’ve marveled at the unprecedented act of a man voluntarily relinquishing such enormous power. But they have been slower to tell us, or even seem to know themselves, that that is a half-truth. Washington gave up the power to rule over fellow wealthy white men – while keeping his boot on the necks of the black people he enslaved and ensuring that power would remain in the hands of wealthy white men.

              Neither have historians and history teachers done a good job asking if men like Jefferson and Washington were so bold, so innovative – so good – why they failed to understand how horrific it would be to bring an evil like slavery into a country they claimed was a new kind of democracy. How could they not know such a beginning would forever taint everything they ever did, said or accomplished? How could they not see that it would lead to the kind of violence that occurred between 1861 and 1865? The history lessons I remember are those strongly suggesting the founders had no other choice than to continue slavery, that without such a compromise the new nation would have never taken hold. But is that true? What was so special about 1776? What if the founding had to be delayed by 10 years or 50 years or even 100 years if that was the only way to avoid the racial hypocrisy that haunts us 245 years later? Slavery persisted for more than four score and seven years after the founding any way. Maybe we could not have rid ourselves of that great evil before then – except if men like Washington and Jefferson led the way instead of holding firm to their own slaves. But delaying the founding until we rid ourselves of that peculiar institution would have meant we were a true democracy from day one. That we weren’t isn’t something that can be washed away with the “patriotic” history lessons we’ve long been taught and conservative lawmakers want to double down on.

              That we weren’t a true democracy at the beginning hurt every black kid born on this soil even after the Civil War. The indoctrination we under went in public schools to make us revere the white supremacists who beat and raped and robbed and murdered and enslaved our ancestors made it worse. I was so thoroughly indoctrinated by our educational system that it feels odd, almost wrong to describe men who were literal slaveowners, established a racial hierarchy and used their intellectual prowess to argue in favor of the inferiority of black people as white supremacists. How insane is that?

              We were indoctrinated, and make no mistake, if the push by anti-woke anti-CRT white parents to shield their snowflake kids from hard racial truths about how this country came to be and why the color of their skin afforded their families opportunities and benefits not available to others is successful, it will further root that indoctrination into the American DNA. It will continue harming the mental health of black kids. I know, because I was one of those black kids, am raising two of them and have taught and mentored countless others.

              I was so indoctrinated I spent much of my life loving white men who enslaved black people while hating my black father for not perfectly navigating the racist world those white men had created. My black father struggled with alcoholism and beat my mother and grew up in a Deep South shaped by the racist evil from which Washington and other founders benefitted and did little to alleviate, despite what historians tell us about the phasing out of a slave trade that was no longer a necessary to prolong race-based chattel slavery. I was indoctrinated to excuse the racist sins of white men while holding in contempt black men who imperfectly navigated the racist nation they were stolen and shipped into.

              I’ve wondered what it would have done to Jewish kids to have been taught to revere the Nazis who committed genocide against Jews. But I don’t have to wonder. Because I’m a black man in America. I was taught to love my country even if it meant having to hate myself. White parents did not storm school board meetings or petitioned the government to save me.