It's America, learn some black history

Just yesterday a friend of mine who is Icelandic was asking me about American public education. (Our kids are in the same class.) I gave him the rundown of forced integration, the property tax revolt that started in California in the 1970s, white flight and the ongoing abandonment of the public sphere, and so on. We talked about taxes and the public sphere, whether or not the heterogeneity of the United States (as opposed to Iceland) creates a particular suspicion of the public sphere, and what the respective benefits of state funding vs. volunteerism vs. private funding of public goods (education, health care, etc.) are.

And then today I flip open the virtual NYT to find this article: Philadelphia Mandates Black History Course for High School Graduation. Wow! In the age of standardized testing, of arguments for school vouchers, of the always foolish arguments about what people do and do not want "their" tax dollars paying for, the Philadelpha school district has the insight and intelligence to mandate a course like this.

"You cannot understand American history without understanding the African-American experience; I don't care what anybody says," said Paul G. Vallas, the school system's chief executive, who is white. "It benefits African-American children who need a more comprehensive understanding of their own culture, and it also benefits non-African-Americans to understand the full totality of the American experience."

Absolutely right. And I really get a kick out of that little phrase, "non-African-Americans"--what a turnaround from the usual locution of "non-white," what a subtle little reversal of the margins and the center.

Of course, there are the expected objections: it's divisive (yeah, if you're a bigot), now every minority group will want a course like this (well, yes; but that doesn't negate the fact that the African-American experience is absolutely central, or the crime that most white kids--and not only white kids--can't name more than a handful of important African-American figures-- G'wan, especially if you're white, try it: MLK, Malcom X, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver (or, as I once heard him referred to, "the peanut guy"), Shirley Chisolm . . . how much can you really say about any of them beyond a simple soundbite like "the peanut guy"?) Ideally, of course, "American history" courses would already contain tons of African-American history, tons of Spanish and Mexican history, tons of history of American Indians (including the fact that they still exist), the Chinese, the Filipinos, etc. etc.--but that hasn't happened very well. Ya gotta start somewhere, and quibbling with the centrality of Black history in the U.S. is pretty dumb.

There's one line in the article that speaks to a particular worry of mine, the way that multiculturalism can be (and often is) dumbed-down to an essentialist idea that cultures are distinct (do, if you haven't already, read Michael Bérubé's fantastic blog entry on the distinction between culture and society) and the implied corrolary that segregation is progressive:

A friend of Mr. Budnick, Arbi Ferko, also 16, said, "It's not our history to learn."

Okay, admittedly this kid is only sixteen. But he's pretty typical of what I see in my undergraduates: if they're conservative, they deny that racism exists; if they're liberal, they essentialize and divide. Drives me nuts.

Hopefully this course will equip some of the college freshmen of the future with a better understanding of history--not just content, but how it works. That histories, plural, are part of history, singular; that individuals as historic actors draw on, and are shaped by, lots of different cultures; that "multiculturalism" means more than "you have yours, and I have mine"; that dialectic exchange is an important part of the process. Certainly the book they're using looks pretty darn good. I might just see if I can get my hands on a desk copy.