My students and their racist textbook
Lots of thinking about Eurocentrism is happening around here
This week I’ll be writing about the book STAMPED (the REMIX version! It’s shorter!), some of my favorite Black history museums, and helping my students analyze a textbook.
A lesson to teach: Analyzing a textbook
Like most World History teachers in the US, my students are subjected to a rather Eurocentric textbook. There are 90+ pages about the French Revolution and a shaky paragraph on the Haitian Revolution. The European Dark Ages are not contrasted with the Golden Age of Islam. Mansa Musa, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, and Tupaia are not hailed as explorers (or mentioned at all).
I help my students think about this by giving each student a chapter section to skim. They complete this worksheet while reading about how men from Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and Britain explored the world, kickstarted the Scientific Revolution, and became Enlightened.
The worksheet focuses on the most important question: What group of people have power in your pages?
Students are then asked what area of the world these people with power are originally from (Asia, Middle East, Africa, Australia/Polynesian, Europe, North America, South America?
Then students each get an index card. Again, they write where people with power are from.
Then we make a big ‘ol graph, right there on the classroom wall (and, apparently, the ceiling)
At this point, the phrase “racist textbook” starts to be whispered around my classroom. Students aren’t quite sure if they can say such a thing, despite the visual evidence, right there on the wall.
I give students a few definitions for the word racism and a few definitions for the word Eurocentrism and we have a little class discussion on whether the textbook is racist, Eurocentric, or both. Different classes come to different conclusions - I don’t try to steer them towards one word or the other.
And then we promptly study how Mansa Musa, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Tupaia, Sacagawea, and Isabella Bird explored the world. Stay tuned because that lesson will be here next week.
A book to read: STAMPED: RACISM, ANTIRACISM, AND YOU: A REMIX of STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
One of the interesting things about not being in my twenties anymore (okay, okay, I’m also no longer in my thirties), is that you already lived through events that historical books discuss. When listening to Barack Obama’s biography, he would recount a highlight from the campaign trail and I would remember it within the context of my own life.
Getting old. It has its benefits.
When I read STAMPED, the Young Adult version of Ibram X Kendi’s National Book Award-winning manifesto, it was like authors Kendi and Jason Reynolds had somehow found the archives of my teenage mind from the ‘90s. Not only did they know all of my naïve-white-girl-from-the-suburbs thoughts, but they also broke down where those thoughts came from.
While in high school, I thought racism was pretty much over. I’d thought folks were responsible for their own life circumstances and the world was pretty much color-blind.
My experiences after high school quickly disabused me of these notions! But, I’ve spent much of my adulthood wondering why I’d harbored such racist beliefs in the first place.
Jason Reynolds and Ibram X Kendi told me exactly why.
When I was a freshman in high school, Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Reynolds and Kendi state:
The mandate was simple enough; Black people, especially poor Black people, needed to take “personal responsibility’ for their economic situation and for racial disparities and stop blaming racism for their problems and depending on the government to fix them. It convinced a new generation of Americans that irresponsible Black people, not racism, caused the racial inequities. It sold the lie that racism has had no effect. So Black people should stop crying about it.”
I’d never heard of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act as a teenager, but this is EXACTLY what I thought as a high schooler…even growing up in a very liberal home and state. Scary, how things can sink into the brains of mindless fifteen-year-olds like me.
Reynolds and Kendi write about the notion of “color blindness” and how folks in the media argued that “the way to fix racism was to stop focusing on it.” They break down September 11th, No Child Left Behind, and Bill Cosby blaming Black parents for not raising their kids to be assimilationists.
Reading this book makes me wonder what fallacies and miscalculations my current brain is making. In twenty years, how will I remember the mindset of my little 41-year-old self? I hope there are authors around in 2045 to explain exactly what I’d been thinking and why.
Black History Museums to explore: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, Arkansas
I visited this museum several years ago with my Mom. I’d re-read my copy of “Warriors Don’t Cry,” which Mom had given me back when I was still in high school. (Yes, I read it in high school. No, the lasting messages about racism apparently did not sink in).
The museum doesn’t just tell the story of the integration of Little Rock but begins with exhibits on slavery and key Supreme Court decisions regarding Jim Crow laws. Then comes the story of the Brown v Board decision, how Arkansas’s Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to block the students from entering the school, how President Eisenhower had to send the National Guard to Little Rock to ensure that nine students could attend school, and how Faubus closed public schools the next year.
Especially well done were the video news clips of the time spliced with interviews from the nine high school students who desegregated the high school.
The museum was great, but not as great as our fellow museum-goers. As Mom and I were getting ready to go, an older Black couple arrived on the scene with their two grandchildren. They made their way through the museum, urging their bored grandkids to “pay attention! This is the reason you can go to good schools!”
As someone who intimately knows the pain of trying to teach disinterested teenagers something really important, I gave the older guy a sympathetic smile. Sensing a receptive audience, the man abandoned his grandkids and came over to talk to Mom and me instead.
Luckily for us. Turns out he’d grown up in Little Rock. Mom and I still remember this museum because of this man. He pointed out one of the Little Rock Nine students that he’d grown up with. He told us what it was like to be a young black man in Little Rock in 1957, which can be broadly summarized as “scary.”
In conclusion, museums are great, but not as great as talking to people. Or listening to them.
Black History Museums to explore: Greenwood Rising: Tulsa, OK
The bored grandkids from Little Rock probably would have a more impactful experience at Greenwood Rising.
This brand-new Tulsa museum documents Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 in an immersive fashion. Instead of plaques on the wall and documents to read, visitors here can sit in a barber’s chair and listen to holographic Black barbers talk about Greenwood - the site of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK during the oil boom years in the 1910s and early 1920s.
Next, you walk through a dark room, winding around panels that light up with sound and video as you hear and see the sites of Greenwood burning around you.
After being enveloped in violence, the museum opens up into a bright room so visitors can see artifacts and read stories about rebuilding and resurgence. A final room for reflection rounds out the experience.
Black History Museums to explore: Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO
This is my favorite museum in the entire world. I’ve been here five times despite never living in or near Kansas City. Unlike the museums at Little Rock and Tulsa, this one is pure joy.
You step into the museum and get to sit on old bleacher seats and watch a quick documentary narrated by (of course) James Earl Jones. Covered in happy-baseball-goosebumps, you emerge into the main museum. It’s a big open room with all the history stuff lining the walls and a faux baseball field in the middle.
One time when I was there, my baseball team was there too! Here are some 2019 Seattle Mariners! I know one of these guys is Dee Strange-Gordon. I think the other is Mallex Smith? Is one of the other guys JP Crawford before he had his long dreadlocks?!? Obviously I was too busy trying to covertly film these guys that look at any museum stuff.
When the Mariners are not at the museum, I do a better job reading all the plaques and learning all the things. One of the most interesting aspects of baseball and racism is that Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier was actually the a bit of a bummer for Black baseball teams. All of the sudden, the best players headed to the MLB and the Negro Leagues started dying out. Then, baseball players and their fans had to go to MLB games and endure racism in order to watch the game they loved. It’s the kind of thing white folks like me don’t really think about when we learn about how great it was that baseball was integrated back in 1947.
Katherine Johnson writes about this concept too, though in regards to segregated schools, instead of segregated ballparks. In REACHING FOR THE MOON, her autobiography for kids, she writes:
What Colored school did have going for them was a dedicated cadre of Negro educators and students hungry to learn. Though school system paid Colored teachers less, they typically required Colored teachers to possess a greater level of training that the White teachers had. The higher requirement…meant that Negro teachers tended to be more highly educated than White teachers were.”
That’s the thing about learning. Sometimes when you read books or visit museums, or analyze textbooks, there are hidden twists and turns to the story of racism. May I never stop learning about them.