These Black mothers don't want their kids taught 'whitewashed history'

[Jilly_in_VA]

About a year ago, in Round Rock, Texas, about 20 miles outside Austin, complaints about book on the history of racist ideas in the United States led to threats to remove it from the school’s reading list.

But as the local school district debated whether “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” should remain part of the curriculum, thousands of parents, teachers and community members signed a petition calling on the district's board of trustees to keep the book on school shelves.

The Round Rock Black Parents Association was a crucial part of the mobilization against the attempt to ban the book, which is by the Black authors Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, and is a young adult adaptation of Kendi's "Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," which won the national book award for nonfiction in 2016.

One way the parents association did this was organizing groups such as ACT Anti-racists Coming Together to speak out in support of diverse literature at a local school board meeting.

“Taking away that book would have completely whitewashed history, and that’s not what we are for,” Ashley Walker, 33, one of more than 400 members of the Round Rock Black Parents Association, said.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/meet-moms-color-texas-fighting-book-bans-kids-schools-rcna13701

[spanone]

1. ⏩K&R⏪

[MagickMuffin]

2. I believe this to be a REAL good solution to this problem

Black American need to start showing up to these school board meetings and let their voices be heard as well. They to hold the power with their voices. Don't let the white supremacist dictate what is taught in school when it comes to slavery and racism.

[brush]

5. Agreed 100%.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

14. Not just black, whites need to be there too.

We need unity in this just as it was in the 60s.

[MagickMuffin]

15. Very true, we should mobilize

Like in the 60's

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

17. If we all rise up again like Dr. King and...

all of those fierce soldiers for justice did in the 60s, we can make these nazi monsters look even worse than they already do!

The effect, (and success,) would be much greater this time due to historic precedent. Both of the march for progress made in the sixties but also the extremity of the Trumpers compared to their 1930's German and 60s Jim Crow Southern counterparts.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[brush]

4. A nation is in bad shape when substantial groups within it are...

so ashamed of their history they try to hide it.

But when you think about it, it's not really that new a phenomenon as Black and other POC history and accomplishments have been downplayed/not mentioned for centuries. Until now there hasn't been an open, unashamed campaign to ban and outlaw actual history being taught, previously the raciat history has just been quietly swept under the rug and not mention—only denied and continually downplayed when raised by activists.

Thank God for the activists from the civil rights era and on.

[pandr32]

6. Good. Pushback is needed

We all need to oppose the white Christian nationalists and the idiots who carry their water.

[crickets]

7. Pushback is crucial. K&R for visibility.

[ananda]

8. I wouldn't want any child taught whitewing history.

...

[Skittles]

18. yes

this isn't a, er, black and white issue

[Hekate]

9. A victory. They got signatures from "thousands of parents, teachers, & community members"...

…which tells me this was a really good outreach to the wider community.

[Jilly_in_VA]

10. If I lived there

I'd be right along with them, pale white-bread WASP though I am. Ten of my 11 grandchildren are young people of color--some kind of color, anyway. (The eleventh is even paler than I am, but that's beside the point.) I was brought up to believe that understanding history meant that you had to learn about all of it...the good, the bad, and the ugly. We didn't get a lot of the ugly in the 1950s, although we saw some of it on our own television screens when Joseph R. McCarthy hove on the scene. And being a curious kid, I read a lot; my parents didn't censor my reading, and if they'd known some of what I was reading in the stacks when I went to the library downtown, well....*shrug* I didn't censor my kids' reading either, and we talked about the good, bad, and ugly of the past and of current events as they grew up. Most kids are curious and not stupid. Give them the tools and they will figure it all out. That's what the neo-fascists are afraid of. Smart kids.

[Baitball Blogger]

11. K&R

[Nululu]

12. Good for them.

[onetexan]

13. I don't want ANY black children, and children of color, to be taught 'whitewashed history'

Round Rock is 20 minutes from me. It's maddening what these damn RW fascists are doing to our public school system. First they wanted funding to be syphoned for charter schools, and now they're banning books because of "whataboutism".

[DFW]

16. After World War II, the two parts of the country where I now live went about this differently

In Western Germany, where the history books of the Nazis were discarded, the French, British and Americans made sure that all German children learned about what had happened in their country from 1923-1945. None of it was left out, so that no former Nazis could say they had nothing to do with it all. Some people were indeed dissenters, but if they were found out (see: The White Rose), they were dealt with harshly, although not all were beheaded like the Scholls.

In Eastern Germany, the Party (SED) determined what history the children were taught. While they emphasized the evil and the dangers of fascism, they practiced it to a large extent, themselves, and simply claimed there were no Nazis left in all of East Germany, so alakazaam, their country had made itself Nazi-free with a wave of their socialist wand (well, Stalin's socialist wand, anyway). They said all the Nazis left were in West Germany, and there was therefore no need to spend a lot of time on repressing something that was gone forever. They kept this myth up until the wall fell 40 years later. Latent right-wing extremism, while present everywhere in small pockets all over Europe, bloomed in Eastern Germany, where people who had repressed their fascist sentiments finally felt free to express them openly for the first time in 40 years. Under the guise of "free speech," they thought it was "OK" to suddenly act like it was 1938 again. Since the anti-Nazi laws put in place by the allies, and mostly (unfortunately only mostly) enforced by the West Germans, kept the holocaust-denying radical right at bay there, even those who admired them never numbered many.