Explaining Today
Long after the smoke has cleared from last week’s protests, long after the headlines have been replaced with new ones, teachers will have to explain what these events mean, just as they must explain every step of our past. That is lonely work, vulnerable work, critical work.
The protests of police brutality are among the largest and most widespread in American history. They are also the most thoroughly filmed, reported, and analyzed, echoing with the history of slavery, segregation, and lynching. The protests present teachers with a great opportunity and a heavy burden, for we build on weak foundations.
The task of explaining today is made harder by the way we teach about before today, by the constraints of state standards and curricula. We introduce students to American history with evasion at its heart. We teach triumph but not the evil that gives the triumph its meaning. Among the first great Americans to which students are introduced are Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Students learn early that Mrs. Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and that Dr. King had a dream. But why should Mrs. Parks have sat at the back of the bus in the first place? And why did Dr. King invoke a dream of a day so distant, for his children rather than for himself? We present heroes but few villains. We explain the victory but not the struggle. We show that, once again, progress lies at the heart of American history.
As the grades progress, we tell them more. Sometimes the enemy is simply “Jim Crow,” a system of racist laws that came out of dark places and unnamed evil people in the southern past. The most powerful evocations of Jim Crow appear in pictures, pictures of black children entering school or young black people at lunch counters, surrounded by furious, contemptuous white people radiating violence. The villains seem obvious: white men in crew cuts and white women in old-fashioned hairdos and dresses, politicians with oily hair and accents.
Students see no pictures of the landlords, bankers, and CEOs who preyed on black Americans with unhealthy housing, high rents, and low wages. They see no photos inside mayors’ offices and police stations, chambers of commerce and board rooms, rental agencies and hiring departments. Nothing we teach them about the past would lead them to expect great wrongs, or great protests, in Minneapolis or Buffalo. And the chronology is just as confusing as the geography. We portray injustice in a few disconnected periods: Reconstruction skips to Jim Crow which skips to the 1950s and ends after the 1960s.