Black History Month: Racism Persists Unless We Study History

It’s impossible to understand who we are as a society, how far we have come and how far we have yet to go, unless we study and come to terms with Black History.

We cannot comprehend the Black experience in America, and what happened to Tyre Nichols in Memphis – George Floyd in Milwaukee, Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as well as mass shootings in Buffalo, and Charleston, South Carolina, and so many more incidents in which Black Americans have been targets of criminal assaults – without studying America’s unique economic reliance on slavery and Jim Crow to build this nation.

Nichols is just one more tragic incident in a seemingly unending arc of that history.

And now we see Ron DeSantis, the latest Great White Hope of right-wing Republicans blowing his dog whistle, relegating the study of Black History as “less than” other academic disciplines --  German History, British History, Asian History, and the rest – barring it as an Advance Placement course in Florida high schools.

We imperil our future as a society when we fail to acknowledge our past and recognize that Black Americans, who should enjoy all of the rights and privileges of being citizens, all too often have been relegated to “less-than” status.

The Trump-DeSantis wing of the GOP complain that by teaching our children the ugly truths about slavery, by focusing on America’s original sin, we are damaging our youth, teaching them to hate themselves, their ancestors, and their nation.

Really?

Throughout Germany last week the nation stopped to commemorate Holocaust Day. Every German child studies the Holocaust the way we study our Civil War, the way South Africans study Apartheid, grappling and coming to terms with a seminal period that should never be forgotten nor repeated.

Several generations of German youth have studied the Holocaust, in many cases coming to terms with the horrific acts of their very own parents and grandparents, and yet, Germany doesn’t seem any worse for acknowledging its past: in fact, it’s one of the world’s great economic powerhouses, cultural centers, and strongholds of democratic government and seemingly not the self-hating neurotic characters DeSantis and his crowd suggest we would become if our children study the history of slavery. 

Psychologists, psychiatrists, priests, rabbis, imams, and yes, the Dalai Lama will tell you that coming to terms with past misdeeds is absolutely essential to healing and forgiveness. It’s the reason Germany teaches the Holocaust. It’s why Rwanda and South Africa created “Truth Commissions”: to take a hard look at the horrors of the past so they could move on. It’s why Catholics attend confession and Jews observe Yom Kippur.

A right-wing segment of Americans seem to want to believe that we are a perfect society, without flaws, failures, or blemishes. How many generations have refused to acknowledge what white settlers did to native Americans? How long did it take to come to terms with the internment of Japanese Americans?

America continues to have this internal struggle, failing to understand why racist incidents keep occurring, violently and economically targeting a segment of American society, arising from a failure to acknowledge its history.

Teaching Black History is an important part of the way forward.

We must fight for that future.