Why Every Black Person Should Study Black American History
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Understand the cloth you’re cut from.
I hated history, and even more so Black History.
When the only Black History that is taught is slavery and struggle, you get sick of that shit.
What does it do to a black boy’s mind when the first thing that he learns of his ancestors is that they were slaves.
Black History as taught in American public education:
Black were slaves. Honest Abe Lincoln finally freed the slaves out of the kindness of his heart. Black people, or n*ggers, as they were called in those days had no rights and got lynched. A lot.
Martin Luther King Jr. fought for civil rights because he had a dream. Rosa Parks sat on a bus.
The Civil Rights Era was progressive for ‘negroes’, until King was assassinated. Somehow he was hated enough by America to be the target of an assassination, but loved enough when dead to be memorialized.
The words that Carter G. Woodson wrote in the Miseducation of the Negro back in 1933, are still applicable the Black American almost 100 years later if we do not realize what we are up against in these American public schools.
In most schools across the country, students are gettting a Eurocentric point of view. Standard subjects that are tested, proven, and do not change such as math and science are going to be what they are. But when it comes to history, literature, philosophy, and subjects that are more subjective, you’re going to get the white version.
Black students can go through a whole K — 12 never being able to articulate Black people’s contribution’s to society, being offered every language except any African languages, and studying every great writer or philosopher that is not Black.
That’s how a Black and White student can sit in the same class and get a completely different understanding of their place in the world.
That lack of history and not knowing where we’re from can lead to a lack of self-worth. How could one be proud of a heritage that seems to be essentially worthless in our history…
