I find myself at the end of Black History Month looking around to see what has been put out there for our young people to see of blacks in the U.S. To my disappointment not much different was done. All the same things as last year and the year before etc.
We see all the familiar faces of Black History such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X. This is just to skim the top. No one seemed to be interested in the fact that we are living in a moment in time where history is being made. Across the world many people of black decent are coming into positions of power. In the U.S. alone we have Barrack Obama fighting to become the Presidential nominee. We have Condoleezza Rice a woman of color occupying a high level government office and of course Colin Powell, who can forget this great man.
The winds of change are in the air to say the least. To my surprise some change happened in the high school my son attends. February 2007 I found that in Union Endicott High School of Endicott, NY that Black History Month has been erased from the curriculum and no one batted an eye. No one thought to fight for Black History to be kept on the school curriculum. No teachers protested this change and on one made a peep as it was silently removed. At this school Black History went into the night without so much as a whisper. Up until this point no one noticed that it was put to death.
My son, being of mixed African American decent, was unaware of the impact of this particular event. I had to explain to him what it meant to have Black History removed from school. I then stood to explain to my son the richness of his family history. Here is how I laid it out for him; from myself (age 40), to my mother (age 59), to her father (age 79), to his now deceased father who at the time of his death in 1998 was 104 years old. At this point I explained that his great great grand father was a sharecropper in Hawkins Ville Georgia on the same land his parents and grand parents were slaves on. This is a line in history that his school has now negated. Virtually saying to my son, “your history is unimportant and not worthy of the paper on which it would be written.”
He found this to be an unbelievable thing; he said it felt like he was being robbed. That the school had studies on the Holocaust and all kinds of other studies of people. So when did the history of blacks in the US become any less important. This is a question he will be asking his counselor at school to see what the answer will be. I told him not to be surprised if his counselor sweeps it under the carpet in the hopes that it just goes away and that my son forgets about it.
How can the American school system sweep away so many tragic moments in its history along with all the wonderful things that black invented and not even bat an eye? What repercussions will follow in the wake of this action being taken by a public school? Who was it that okayed such a thing being done in the school system? And why were no red flags raised among the teachers and faculty of the school over this?
As a result of asking my son at the beginning of the month what his project for Black History Month was going to be is how this conversation came about. I was excited to help him with whatever the project was going to be, but instead I find that the school has completely removed Black History from the roster.
Attending a Jeff Johnson talk at Ithaca College of NY, I had more questions to ask. I just happened to mention to Mr. Johnson what I thought was something that could happen in schools, the erasing of Black History. Only to come home and talk to my son the next day and hear from him that such a thing had taken place, right under the noses of everyone. It was slipped in nice and quiet so as not to cause a ripple.
Have parents become so complacent as to not notice when huge swaths of American History are being taken away? I have to say on some level yes, because it happened in Endicott, NY. I have to say yes because I was one of those parents. I have to say yes because I have not heard nor have I read of anyone responding to this on any level. The scary thing is that with this coming to light we are now sending our children of color out as sheep among wolves. Their futures hang in the balance and with the rippling effect of what has happened in Endicott NY. For something like this to take hold even on a small level, what can be expected for their futures?
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