After White Americans saw Rodney King, a Black man, being beaten by LAPD cops on video in 1991, they clutched their pearls and made sure everyone knew that they had no idea life was so hard for African Americans.
After George Floyd was killed by a police officer in 2020 while bystanders begged the officer to let him breathe, White Americans once again clutched pearls; “Oh my, I had no idea life was so hazardous for Black people.”
Then came the backlash against the grassroots organizing movement “Black Lives Matter” with the Whitebread slogan “All Lives Matter.” Seriously? Black lives have never mattered enough in America. Slavery, brutality, the KKK, Jim Crow, Black men getting humiliated or shot by the police every day, and recent Supreme Court setbacks for civil rights should provide a hint—even for the willfully oblivious.
Now, Republicans at the national and state levels want to ban books and silence any diverse voices in our shared history. The right’s false attacks on CRT and DEI have given them a weapon to roll back progress and restore the traditional American role of rule by White men.
Teachers are threatened if they speak of women’s, gay, or civil rights. This is an outrageous betrayal of our children, who have an acknowledged right to read and learn. This vitally important issue is not going away without widespread resistance.
Everyone who has ever been a member of a threatened group needs to unite to resist this ruinous attack on our school system. Those who threaten public schools threaten a prime foundation of American democracy and the nation’s future.
Far-right thought leaders say students must not experience discomfort. They are so wrong. Learning and acquiring skills is uncomfortable by its nature. Just ask anyone how they feel about public speaking, a skill that can be taught but must be practiced. It is doing students a great disservice to gloss over anything upsetting and continue to just feed them a whitewashed version of America’s glorious manifest destiny. That is not history. We cannot create a more perfect union without acknowledging the truth of our past.
America is so very lucky that African Americans want justice, not revenge. This may be one reason racism is so persistent; Whites are afraid that Blacks will treat them the way they were treated. This fear is unwarranted and short-sighted, however. Over and over again, Black people have given us shining examples of good will and continue to provide us with instances of astonishing cultural joy.
Yet the poison of racism lives on, usually thinly disguised. In the 1960s the Southern Strategy of the Republican party was to divide Blacks and poor Whites; to blur their common cause, to divide and conquer.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Whites caused violent implosions over public school integration. The precious image of Black six-year-old Ruby Brown being accompanied by U.S. Marshals through a hostile, screaming crowd should be recorded in every American’s brain. We all owe a debt of gratitude to this courageous child. Consider the first-grade classroom of today. The White, Black, Brown, and mixed-race children need to go to school together to learn that talent and kindness show up in every man-made segmentation of “we the people.”
In the 1980s, Reagan’s slogan was “Make America Great Again.” Sound familiar? The goal then was to reestablish rule by White men, just as it is now. Yes, this is an overgeneralization, but summaries necessarily are.
Here is the summarized truth: European immigrants stole this land from the First Peoples and stole the lives of Africans to make money, lots of money, for the richest White men. The plantation owners of the South and the factory owners of the North were the oligarchs of their day. They made the rules, just as today’s right-wing oligarchs are making the rules now. We must not sit by and watch corporate leaders and billionaires hijack the painful, slow progress we have made in claiming inalienable human rights for all humans.
Black Americans just keep contributing to this country. Let’s honor them, celebrate them, and listen to the music.