Black Students Caught in Middle of American Culture Wars

Payton Pinkard always hungered to know more about Black culture and Black people. Sitting in her elementary school classroom, the Black teen remembers “white history, just regular history, and then February would come around.” But the annual detour to a Black-centered curriculum was reduced to a repetitive loop of men and their breakthrough inventions — including Garrett Morgan and his three-way traffic light, George Washington Carver and his peanut products, and Eli Whitney and his cotton gin. Her Black history education was consistently basic and boring.

Then one February she learned that Whitney didn’t create the cotton gin. The machine that Whitney patented in 1794 was actually based on ideas from enslaved laborers. The story of Whitney and the cotton gin — a familiar staple of her Black history lessons — was a myth. This single fact changed Pinkard’s entire perspective on what she’d been taught about Black people’s contributions to this country.

“I was hurt and angry that I was being misled,” she said. “I didn’t like being lied to about my history and something that was stolen from some of my ancestors, some of my people.”

Now a sophomore at Houston’s Young Women’s College Prep Academy, Pinkard, 16, credits this episode with raising awareness of gaps in her knowledge of Black history. Yet filling in the remaining missing parts has gotten infinitely more complex with growing political overreach into classrooms. Conservative lawmakers across the country have passed a rash of bills aimed at stifling teaching and learning — branding accurate yet painful parts of U.S. history as divisive and unpatriotic.

Among the first wave of states that limited open discussions on race and racism was Texas. Opaquely written, the current law states that “a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” Since January 2021, 41 states have introduced bills or taken steps intended to restrict how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an analysis by Education Week; 15 states have passed legislation or enacted these restrictions.

What’s more, the same forces challenging teaching on race and sexuality have rallied to remove books from school libraries that affirm LGBTQ youth and lift school COVID protections. While students largely are reeling from the backlash, Black youth say they feel squarely in the crosshairs of the latest culture wars engulfing America’s schools — seeing themselves as collateral damage in a political firestorm.

“The history of Black people runs deep in America and has impacted our society, and yet we don’t learn about it,” Pinkard said. “People are scared to point out that America is racist and its systems were built on racism. And no one is asking us how we want to be taught or how we’re affected.”