History Is a Human Right, by Jesse Hagopian

Great piece by Jesse Hagopian. This quote connects well to the earlier piece on fascism that I just posted:

"We now live in an era defined by the rise of anti-truth and anti-history laws. The outlawing of an honest education represents a sharp turn toward authoritarianism in the United States — what historian Barbara Ransby has called proto-fascism — where now almost half of students are subjected to some form of banning of the truth about systemic racism and oppression.

The goal of these laws is to deny young people access to the lessons of history that could aid in building struggles against inequity."

Let's not reproduce the nonsensical statement that we live in a
"post-truth" world when it's really fascism that's at play.

History absolutely is a human right—and it's essential to the fight against book bans and for trans rights, Ethnic Studies, women and genders studies, and so on. and youth and community empowerment. Go to this link by the Zinn Education Project if you want to connect to the June 10th national Teach The Truth mobilization happening on Saturday.

Great job, Jesse!

-Angela Valenzuela

#TeachTheTruth

History Is a Human Right

From Stone Mountain to the Stonewall Inn, the #TeachTruth National Day of Action fights back against anti-history legislation. 

Jesse Hagopian  May 24, 2023 Word in Black

Pasadena MD at Banned Books Photo Booth, June 2022, Photograph courtesy of Lynda Davis, Zinn Education Project

With almost half of all students in the United States attending a school whose educators have been given educational gag orders to prohibit them from teaching honestly about the history of systemic racism, a grassroots network of educators, parents, and students across the country are organizing a #TeachTruth National Day of Action on June 10, 2023, to fight back.

Research from the CRT Forward Tracking Project out of the UCLA Law School reveals that measures attacking truthful teaching about race have been passed at either the federal, state, or local level in every state except Vermont — laws that impact “over 22 million public school children, almost half of the country’s 50.8 million public school students.”

The impact of these anti-history laws is difficult to overstate. In Iowa, high school teacher Greg Wickenkamp asked his superintendent, “Knowing that I should stick to the facts, and knowing that to say ‘slavery was wrong,’ that’s not a fact, that’s a stance, is it acceptable for me to teach students that slavery was wrong?” Instead of giving the only morally acceptable answer—”Yes! Slavery was wrong” — Noll replied: “We had people that were slaves within our state. We’re not supposed to say to [students], ‘How does that make you feel?’ We can’t — or, ‘Does that make you feel bad?’ We’re not to do that part of it.”

Wickenkamp described another attack on an Iowa educator that highlights that the worst attacks have been perpetrated against women of color: “I had a colleague who was a Latina teacher. She was pushed out because of hostile treatment. The strain and hostility she faced was much worse than anything I faced. I don’t know if she’ll return to teaching or not, but she was the first generation in her family to go to college — her case is markedly more challenging because of systemic factors.”

Experiences such as those in Iowa have been all too common around the country as attacks on truthful teaching about race, gender, and sexuality are being used as a campaign strategy for the Republican Party. Chris Guerrieri, a 22-year veteran teacher from Duval County, Florida, explained to local media, “An admin of the district recently told the media specialist that if you’re teaching slavery, make sure you’re teaching the positive sides of it as well.”

An admin of the district recently told the media specialist that if you’re teaching slavery, make sure you’re teaching the positive sides of it as well.

Chris Guerrieri, 22-year veteran teacher in Florida

Another educator — in Florida, where a bill was recently passed to make it a third-degree felony (carrying up to five years in jail and a $5,000 fine) to be caught with verboten books on race, gender, or sexuality — responded to a survey by the Zinn Education Project (ZEP), saying, “I’m terrified to say anything about enslavement because it might make students ‘uncomfortable.’ I also can’t recommend ANY books because a parent might not like it and then I could be charged with a felony.”

Another spoke to the way these laws are discouraging many educators from engaging in antiracist lessons: “It is creating a chilling effect on education. We continue to teach the truth, but with much less certainty what the consequences will be for doing so.” As of June 2022, The Washington Post had identified at least 160 educators who lost their job or resigned because they taught about race or LGBTQ+ issues — and there are undoubtedly scores more charged with violating anti-truth laws who have been pushed out of the classroom that have gone unreported.

Faced with this assault on the truth, educators around the country are turning the world into their classroom on June 10 and defying the billionaires funding the attack on antiracist education with public pedagogy at an array of creative events. In Lansing, Michigan, organizers are gathering at the corner where Earl Little — father of Malcolm X — was almost certainly lynched by being thrown in front of a streetcar. They’re walking to the hospital where he died to deliver banned children’s books to the kids in their care. Along the way, they plan to chalk the sidewalks with historical information about the Black Freedom Struggle.


In Boston, the Ethnic Studies Organizing Committee is meeting at the former headquarters of the city’s Black Panther Party chapter to help educate people about history that often gets left out of corporate textbooks.

In New York City, there are multiple gatherings, including one at the Stonewall Inn, where legendary Black transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson helped lead a rebellion against a police raid that became the inspiration for the annual Pride demonstrations around the country.

“At Stonewall, we will discuss what took place within those historic walls in 1969, and what action we can take to support LGBTQIA+ rights today,” organizers wrote. “We will share stories about LGBTQIA+ history that often go overlooked.”

In Stone Mountain, Georgia, the Stone Mountain Action Coalition, and other groups are organizing a rally at Stone Mountain Park, site of the largest Confederate monument in the world. The engraving on the side of Stone Mountain depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.

Organizers will read aloud the picture book, “That Flag” (by Tameka Fryer Brown, illustrated by Nikkolas Smith), a story about two young girls — one Black, one white — whose friendship is tested when the white girl’s family displays the Confederate flag and they learn the truth about its racist history.

It is creating a chilling effect on education. We continue to teach the truth, but with much less certainty what the consequences will be for doing so.

In Harmony, Mississippi, organizers are planning an event to highlight the rich contributions to the Black Freedom Struggle that people from their town have made. During the summer of 1964, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a Freedom School site in the Harmony community.

The Teach Truth Day of Action events respond to right-wing attacks that have deep roots. During the late 1940s and 50s, the second Red Scare (characterized by the attacks led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others on anyone they wanted to discredit by labeling them communists) was accompanied by the Lavender Scare — the repression of LGBTQ+ people and their mass firing from government service. The combination of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare led to the firing of thousands of teachers around the country.

Just as the Red Scare and Lavender Scare were used to purge teachers and prohibit discussion of social and racial justice in school, the attacks on what history deniers have labeled “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” are used today to fire educators and exclude discussions about structural racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia.

We now live in an era defined by the rise of anti-truth and anti-history laws. The outlawing of an honest education represents a sharp turn toward authoritarianism in the United States — what historian Barbara Ransby has called proto-fascism — where now almost half of students are subjected to some form of banning of the truth about systemic racism and oppression.

The goal of these laws is to deny young people access to the lessons of history that could aid in building struggles against inequity.

The goal of these laws is to deny young people access to the lessons of history that could aid in building struggles against inequity.

History is a human right. The struggle for social justice is many things. However, especially in this era, it must include the recognition of the right to learn honest history — particularly about social movements that have challenged injustice. Without truthful accounts of history and the truthful transmission of that history to the next generations, young people are robbed of the first condition of a democratic society — access to the knowledge needed to shape the future.

You, too, can join the #TeachTruth National Day of Action on June 10. Find an event near you. Or, organize your own. An increasing number of communities refuse to repeat the scapegoating and paranoia of the McCarthy era; we won’t let them use race, gender, and sexuality to divide and conquer us.

Tyler Walker, a high school language arts teacher from Austin, Texas, drove this point home when he signed the Zinn Education Project’s “Pledge to Teach the Truth” and wrote “Students need to know the wonderful stories of the brave folks that fought against systems of oppression and sparked hope and solidarity for the creation of a freer, kinder world.”

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Jesse Hagopian is a high school teacher in Seattle, an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, an organizer with Black Lives Matter at School, and serves on the leadership team of the Zinn Education Project. Jesse is the author of the forthcoming book from Haymarket Books, Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education, and the co-editor of the books, Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and Teachers Unions and Social Justice. You can connect with Jesse on Twitter, @jessedhagopian, or IG, @jessehagopian.

Ken Burns: The Sand Creek Massacre: "Confronting America's shameful, violent history makes us stronger as a nation"

With implications for current battles over Critical Race Theory and the teaching of U.S. history in our schools, do listen to this Nov. 23, 2021 interview on Morning Joe of filmmaker, Ken Burns, who comments both on the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and on the meaning of patriotism. This interview takes place in the context of a November 22, 2021 Opinion piece in the Washington Post titled, "Confronting America's shameful, violent history makes us stronger as a nation, that I post after the interview below.

I remember first learning about the Sand Creek Massacre in Dee Brown's classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It was required reading in my Race and Ethnic Relations sociology class that I used to teach. I remember feeling particularly impacted by this horrific story despite an entire volume fraught with despicable enmity and terror against Native Americans.   

Counter to existing lore, Sand Creek was not at all a battle, but a massacre. In fact, a Burns notes, the National Historic Site designation by the National Park Service—for which U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell fought hard—registers Sand Creek as the only one with the word, "massacre," in its title.

Former U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell fought many years for Sand Creek Massacre to get federally acknowledged on April 28, 2007.

Here is what happened on that horrific day of Tuesday, November 29, 1864.

Around 650 U.S. volunteer soldiers and their leader, Methodist minister and Colonel, John M. Chivington, attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians who were camped along the Sand Creek dry river bed in what is today known as southeastern Colorado. The troops killed 230 people, most of whom where defenseless women, children, and the elderly. This heinous action resulted in a sharp rebuke by Congress' Joint Committee on the Conduct of War as follows:

"As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their inapprehension and defenceless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man. It is thought by some that desire for political preferment prompted him to this cowardly act; that he supposed that by pandering to the inflamed passions of an excited population he could recommend himself to their regard and consideration."

Despite this rebuke, justice was never served, with Chivington and his men getting away with this atrocity. As for Chivington, his term of office expired and he left for the Midwest. He later returned to live in Denver until his passing in 1894. 

Ken Burns' point is that "Nobody's diminished by having a complicated past. People are enriched. A great country is in fact greater for acknowledging the things that it has gotten wrong, as well as celebrating the things that it has gotten right." He goes on to say that "curating the facts of our past" is how to not be a good country.

Do listen to his interview with Morning Joe, and read, as well, his timely opinion editorial in the Washington Post that I also post below. As Burns wisely expresses and captures through this corrective reading and exposure of subjugated historical knowledge, how we remember history is also part of the historical record itself.

Let's all of us people of good conscience commit, or re-commit, to greater openness to the truth so that we might not only correct the record but also do our part, individually and collectively, to perfect the nation.

-Angela Valenzuela

 

In 2007, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site became the only National Park Service unit to use 'massacre' in its name. Director Ken Burns 

Opinion: Ken Burns: Being American means reckoning with our violent history

Ken Burns is a filmmaker whose digital history project UNUM connects scenes from his documentaries to current events.

I’ve been making films about American history for more than 40 years. In all of those years, there’s something central that I’ve learned about being an American: Veneration and shame often go hand-in-hand.

Today, however, I fear patriotism is presented as a false choice. It seems that for many, to be patriotic is to remember and celebrate only our nation’s triumphs. To choose otherwise, to choose to remember our failings, is thus somehow anti-American.

But it is not so simple.

When the National Park Service opened its 391st unit — the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site — the site became the first and only to include the word “massacre” in the title, a reminder of the Nov. 29, 1864, attack on Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people that was misrepresented as a “battle” for nearly a century. In the video above, I reflect on the legacy and contemporary resonance of this massacre.

Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.

As some question how to teach American history to our children — and even question the history itself — I urge us to confront the hard truth, and to trust our children with it. Because a truly great nation is one that can acknowledge its failures.

“Critical Race Theory” Is White History by Kali Holloway

The line in this piece by Kali Holloway in The Nation gets to the heart of the matter: 

"The teaching of history, when grounded in truth, isn’t anti-anything. Instead, it’s a careful consideration of historical facts." 

And this careful consideration of historical facts is what our governor and Republican-led legislature don't want our children and youth to know. And in not wanting our youth to know, the underlying message is that they actually want racism and white supremacy to be "our heritage."

It is in this same vein that Holloway expresses that a slowing in the telling of the truth of history is the primary aim of the anti-CRT movement. At least there's some clarity here. 

Try as they may to slow down the telling of these truths of history, the genie is out of the bottle. Try as they may, they put it back in the bottle. They can't unring the bell of this racial reckoning. And we're all the better for it.

-Angela Valenzuela

“Critical Race Theory” Is White History

Conservatives are rebranding an inclusive, honest 

accounting of American history as inherently anti-white.

By Kali Holloway

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

For more than a year now, conservatives have been waging war against the misdefined conception of critical race theory that they themselves created. The right-wing campaign against so-called CRT largely amounts to a round-robin chorus of hysterical voices asking, Won’t someone think of the poor white children?! “CRT tries to make kids feel bad because of the color of their skin,” Representative Ron Nate, cosponsor of Idaho’s anti-CRT law, stated just after the bill passed in May. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who successfully led the state school board to ban CRT from public school classrooms last summer, tweeted in June that “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill muzzling history educators over lessons that might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” 

In pursuit of that goal, Republican senators in Texas recently drafted and approved yet another anti-CRT bill—after ditching language inserted by outnumbered and outvoted Democrats that would have required teaching “the history of white supremacy,” including slavery and the Ku Klux Klan, “and the ways in which it is morally wrong.” “We don’t want to teach those little white children that they should feel guilty because of what previous white people did generations ago,” Senator Bryan Hughes explained to a local news outlet about why he filed the bill.

Eight states have passed laws and 20 more have proposed legislation to outlaw a version of critical race theory that’s wholly of conservatives’ own imagining. In reality, the 40-year-old graduate school framework provides a prism on racism as “a structured reality that’s embedded in institutions,” as law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw described it in an interview with this magazine. But those behind the current anti-anti-racist movement in education have publicly admitted to repurposing CRT to “turn it toxic,” as conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo put it, branding it as anti-white propaganda. The legislative offspring of that misinformation movement is a slew of laws seeking to limit how history is taught. In Tennessee, just after the state legislature approved an anti-CRT measure, a teacher who assigned an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the intersection of racism and Trumpism was fired; in Texas, a Republican lawmaker is currently circulating a list of 850 books on race and other topics he says violate the new anti-CRT law.

What’s become abundantly apparent in watching the CRT social panic unfold is how its adherents steadfastly believe and propagate the idea that a full accounting of history—one that includes long-ignored perspectives and experiences and, consequently, locates the contradictions between American delusions of exceptionalism and the country’s grievous reality of brutal exploitation—is somehow historically inauthentic or a kind of frivolous add-on to the textbook narratives of white benevolence and heroism. In addition to pretending they’re saving white children, conservatives have also issued breathless accusations of national betrayal, variously casting CRT as “anti-American,” “a crusade against American history,” “racist pedagogy and anti-American revisionism,” and—wait for it—“Marxist.” The idea undergirding all this is that an inclusive American history is a specifically Black history. Listen to the throngs of angry white parents at school board meetings and it becomes clear that they believe history is a zero-sum game—that a history that documents Black American existence undermines and erases white American history. Like Blackness itself, these folks see Black history as somehow both insufficiently American and inherently anti-white.

But the history of Black folks in America—through slavery, Black codes, lynchings, redlining, voter disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, racial pogroms, illegal medical experimentation, extrajudicial and state-led theft of Black land, anti-Black policing, racist mass incarceration—is white American history, too. Not only were white people present as that history was being made, they architected the astoundingly sturdy systems of oppression that have organized Black/white social, legal, economic, and power differentials since America’s settler-colonial founding.

This notion that good history should be teased out from bad is a sign of just how poorly history has always been taught in this country. This isn’t even the first time white conservatives and their allies have waged violent protest against truth-telling in history, from the campaign to ensure the dominance of the ahistorical Lost Cause narrative, which saw literal textbook history revised to promote a false narrative of white magnanimity, to the massive resistance strategy of aggressive white opposition to school desegregation. If conservatives didn’t spend so much time zealously defending their version of the past, they would know that.

The teaching of history, when grounded in truth, isn’t anti-anything. Instead, it’s a careful consideration of historical facts. There’s no way to get around the reality that Black chattel slavery built America’s elite colleges, that the state largely sanctioned anti-Black pogroms committed by white mobs, that many of our most prized national landmarks sit atop bulldozed Black communities, that our white supremacist racial order provided well-documented inspiration to a rising German political star named Adolf Hitler. Another reason this backtracking effort is futile is that this history defines our present. Ruby Bridges, the tiny 6-year-old Black girl who had to be escorted by US deputy marshals into a New Orleans school to keep her safe from frothing white anti-integration mobs, is only 67 years old today. It’s hard not to suspect that a significant number of white folks gnashing their teeth over the teaching of our horrific racial history played an integral part in making it.

Condoleezza Rice, a childhood friend of one of the four little Black girls murdered in the 1963 white terrorist bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church—who should therefore know better—recently denied there is a current effort to suppress history and aired concerns that “how we teach history” threatens to “make white kids feel bad for being white.” It sounded like she was trying to assuage white fears. But that’s nonsense. In truth, white people are finally learning their own history. And in a nation where the majority of public school children today are non-white, opponents can slow progress on telling the truth. But history will prove they were unable to stop it.

Kali HollowayKali Holloway is a columnist for The Nation and the director of the Make It Right Project, a new national campaign to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Time, AlterNet, Truthdig, The Huffington Post, The National Memo, Jezebel, Raw Story, and numerous other outlets.

‘A hack job,’ ‘outright lies’: Trump commission’s ‘1776 Report’ outrages historians

This 1776 Report equates to outright lies and propaganda, not unlike what we saw here in Texas with our famous textbook battle in 2016 and 2017 before the Texas State Board Education with the proposed adoption of a racist, error-riddled textbook offensively titled, "Mexican American Heritage," written by two non-historians named Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle that would have done enormous damage to our children had it been adopted. You can read all about this in Dr. Emilio Zamora's scathing critique here on this blog.

This book surfaced while many of us were advocating for a high school Mexican American Studies course and texts, with Zamora outlining the following:

The story began last summer when we heard that Momentum Books had proposed to the Texas State Board of Education a textbook for adoption to teach Mexican American Studies in the state’s public schools.  We suspected a problem when we discovered that the owner of the publishing house was Ms. Cynthia Dunbar, a former conservative member of the State Board, an Assistant Law Professor at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, a recent Trump delegate to the Republican Party Convention, and a co-chair of Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.  The selection of the book’s authors, Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle, also raised concerns.

Relatedly, read "Texas' New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation: And they could end up in your kid's classroom too." 

A major difference is that whereas the Riddle and Angle text at least pretended to be factual--even as the meticulous work of the review team of historians spearheaded by Dr. Zamora identified and reported 407 errors to the SBOE--the 1776 Report, according to public historian Alexis Coe, "[L]acks citations or any indication books were consulted, which explains why it’s riddled in errors, distortions, and outright lies.” 

So pathetic.

I am so happy that President Biden and Vice-President Harris are now in charge, meaning that our nation's highest office will not implicate itself in lies and gaslighting the American public with a false historical, racist narrative that masquerades as truth.

In the meantime, we must always call out such racist texts like these wherever and whenever they surface.

Forewarned is forearmed. 

-Angela Valenzuela

‘A hack job,’ ‘outright lies’: Trump commission’s ‘1776 Report’ outrages historians

President Trump speaks to the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives Museum on Sept. 17 in Washington. (Alex Brandon/AP)

By 

Gillian Brockell

Jan. 20, 2021 at 7:42 a.m. CST

Two days after historians responded with dismay and anger to the White House’s “1776 Commission” report, the Biden transition team announced President-elect Joe Biden would rescind the commission with an executive order on his first day in office.

The report was intended to a version of U.S. history that would “restor[e] patriotic education” in schools. Historians largely condemned it, saying it was filled with errors and partisan politics.

“It’s a hack job. It’s not a work of history,” American Historical Association executive director James Grossman told The Washington Post. “It’s a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.”

The commission was created in September with a confusing news conference featuring Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. The 45-page report is largely an attack on decades of historical scholarship, particularly when it comes to the nation’s 400-year-old legacy of slavery, and most of those listed as authors lack any credentials as historians. While claiming to present a nonpartisan history, it compares progressivism to fascism and claims the civil rights movement devolved into “preferential” identity politics “not unlike those advanced by [slavery defender John C.] Calhoun and his followers.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” said public historian Alexis Coe. “This ‘report’ lacks citations or any indication books were consulted, which explains why it’s riddled in errors, distortions, and outright lies.”

Kali Nicole Gross, a history professor at Rutgers and Emory universities and the co-author of “A Black Women’s History of the United States,” said it was “dusty, dated” and “the usual dodge on the long-lasting, harmful impacts of settler-colonialism, enslavement, Jim Crow, the oppression of women, the plight of queer people … as the true threat to democracy.”

Boston University historian Ibram X. Kendi tweeted: “This report makes it seems as if slaveholding founding fathers were abolitionists; that Americans were the early beacon of the global abolitionist movement; that the demise of slavery in the United States was inevitable.”

“It’s very hard to find anything in here that stands as a historical claim, or as the work of a historian. Almost everything in it is wrong, just as a matter of fact,” said Eric Rauchway, a history professor at the University of California at Davis. “I may sound a little incoherent when trying to speak of this, because the report itself is not coherent. It’s like historical wackamole.”

He pointed to sections misinterpreting Puritan John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” speech, and to a section claiming the civil rights movement “came to abandon the nondiscrimination and equal opportunity of colorblind civil rights in favor of ‘group rights.’ ”

“Group rights is not anathema to American principles,” he said, recalling the formation of the Senate. “Why do Wyomingers have 80 times the representation that Californians have if not for group rights?”

Coe, who published a biography of George Washington last year, pointed to a section of the report that claims the first president had “freed all the slaves in his family estate” by the end of his life. In fact, he freed only one enslaved person upon his death; the 254 other enslaved people at Mount Vernon had a much more complicated fate.

George Washington owned slaves and ordered Indians killed. Will a mural of that history be hidden?

Hilary Green, a history professor at the University of Alabama, tweeted a list of books on American history people could read “instead of a certain report.”

Several historians said it was particularly offensive that the report was released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and included several photos King and quotes they said were taken out of context.

“The suggestion that affirmative action programs are somehow antithetical to the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. is simply ludicrous,” said Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse. “King was alive when the Johnson administration launched its affirmative action programs and publicly declared his support, specifically noting that it was a logical extension of the struggle for black equality. The document ignores King’s record of support for affirmative action, lamely pointing to the one line conservatives know from his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and ignoring the rest of his radical record. The fact that this historical distortion of King’s life and work was released on MLK Day makes it even worse.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s scorn for ‘white moderates’ in his Birmingham jail letter

“It is fitting that this president, who was impeached again, this time for inciting an insurrection in the nation’s capital, would mark his last Martin Luther King Jr. Day in office by attacking the very movement Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of,” Coe said.

“To say that the racial divisions that have existed for the last half century are due to insistence by African Americans on ‘group rights’ rather than to the depth and breadth of racism, to say that on a page where you have a photograph of Dr. King is offensive to Dr. King’s legacy,” Grossman said.

The commission began in part as a response to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, a group of essays by historians and journalists about the way slavery has shaped the nation.

At the National Archives Museum on Sept. 17, President Trump criticized a New York Times project focused on the first arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia. (The Washington Post)

Five professors say the 1619 Project should be amended. ‘We disagree,’ says the New York Times.

Even historians who have been critical of the 1619 Project, including Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, dismissed the 1776 report.

“It reduces history to hero worship,” Wilentz wrote in an email. “It's the flip side of those polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a slavocracy, and that slavery and white supremacy are the essential themes of American history. It's basically a political document, not history.”

Historian Kevin M. Levin, author of several books about the Civil War, said: “The 1776 report views students as sponges who are expected to absorb a narrative of the American past without question. It views history as set in stone rather than something that needs to be analyzed and interpreted by students.”

The White House also released Monday a long list of historical figures to be featured at Trump’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes.” Georgetown history professor Adam Rothman compared the report to the list, saying it was “nothing but the National Garden of Heroes in prose form, a stiff and lifeless history of America on a pedestal.”

Grossman, the AHA executive director, said: “This is written as if no historical scholarship has been produced in nearly 70 years, so it’s bereft of any professional historical sensibility at all. There are no historians on this commission. Would you take your car to a garage where there’s no mechanic?”

Teo Armus contributed to this report.

Learn about "Zapatap" Chicana Dance Crew Blends Tap and Mexican Footwork | KQED Arts

Friends,



Check out this "New percussive Chicana aesthetic," as expressed by Vanessa Sanchez from San Francisco City's mission district that draws on Indigenous, African American, and Veracruz Mexico, combining tap dance and son jarocho zapateado (traditional footwork from Veracruz, Mexico,)  as described here:

San Francisco’s La Mezcla dance company, founded and led by Vanessa Sanchez, uses dance and song to tell stories of Chicana history, culture and resistance. Blending tap dance and son jarocho zapateado (traditional footwork from Veracruz, Mexico,) Sanchez describes this unique dance style as “zapatap.” Watch these dancers perform dynamic choreography in front of iconic Mission District murals and landmarks, then bring us back to the 1940s West Coast Zoot Suit era (popularized by Bay Area playwright Luis Valdez) when young Mexican-American men and women, "pachucos" and “pachucas,” proudly repped their identity, while defying cultural and style taboos. Rocking big hair and flashy zoot suits, the women of La Mezcla reclaim this early California history.

I like how Vanessa Sanchez situates this in African American and California history, as well.  The Fandango where everybody plays instruments and everybody dances, is the coolest, funest part!


Enjoy!



-Angela Valenzuela

For Texas Teachers: A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

As per my last post, America Is Racist. So What Do We Do Now? Activist Lawyer Bryan Stevenson Has Some Answers, you now know if you didn't already that the State Board of Education (SBOE) voted last November to change the way that our students will be learning about slavery, with slavery for the first time ever getting taught as playing a central role in the Civil War.  

It's hard to believe that this wasn't already a given, but we're Texas and often is regarded—and regards itself—a Southern state—in addition to a Southwestern one—primarily because we, too, had slavery and in particular, for parts of East Texas, share in a number of cultural characteristics with the South.

In any case, since beginning in Fall 2019 slavery will get taught correctly, teachers need materials and so this is a powerful curriculum out of the Southern Poverty Law Center below that you can draw from.  Consider taking your students, as well, on a field trip to Montgomery, Alabama to visit the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a lynching memorial that opened up this year on April 26, 2018.

But since none of this affects textbooks, I encourage you to engage your State Board of Education member and demand leadership on the board on this important history.  Note: if you don't know who represents you, you can find that out here.

Demand African American Studies.  Since April 11, 2018 (read my reflection on this here), we officially now have African American Studies on the books but it needs standards attached to it so that its actionable for teachers in the classroom—and also that books can be considered for adoption, too.  Demand Native American American Studies and Asian American Studies, too, as these are also now on the books, as well.

As the Reverend Martin Luther King once expressed, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  And it bends, my friends, because we bend it, individually and collectively, in ways big and small.

I really hope that Texas teachers consider using this resource and others in their social studies and ethnic studies classrooms and beyond.  Young people need to know this for college and it promises to make them better human beings.

-Angela Valenzuela

#StayWoke #GetWoke

https://www.tolerance.org/frameworks/teaching-hard-history/american-slavery

A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of the United States—or how its legacies still influence us today. In an effort to remedy this, we developed a comprehensive guide for teaching and learning this critical topic at the middle and high school levels. (Scroll down to see the outline of the framework or to download the full document.)

Here are a few key elements of the framework and the accompanying resources:

Key Concepts and Summary Objectives  Important big ideas and critical content students must know to understand the historical significance of slavery. (Select the Summary Objectives below to see teaching suggestions and additional resources.)

Primary Source Texts  The Teaching Hard History Library features over 100 student-friendly sources, all with text-dependent questions.

Teaching Tools  Browse six sample Inquiry Design Models, based on The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards.

Podcast  Hosted by Professor Hasan Jeffries, this series brings us the lessons we should have learned in school through the voices of leading scholars and educators.

Student Quiz  Use this 12-question quiz as a formative assessment.

Webinar  Join Professor Hasan Jeffries and former Teaching and Learning Specialist Lauryn Mascareñaz for this on-demand PD.

Printable Cards  Download and display these cards to let people know you have the courage to teach #HardHistory.

DOWNLOAD THE FRAMEWORK

Key Concepts

1. Slavery, which was practiced by Europeans prior to their arrival in the Americas, was important to all of the colonial powers and existed in all of the European North American colonies.
2. Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the economy across British North America and, later, the United States.
3. Protections for slavery were embedded in the founding documents; enslavers dominated the federal government, Supreme Court and Senate from 1787 through 1860.
4. “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.
5. Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.
6. The experience of slavery varied depending on time, location, crop, labor performed, size of slaveholding and gender.
7. Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.
8. Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
9. Enslaved and free people of African descent had a profound impact on American culture, producing leaders and literary, artistic and folk traditions that continue to influence the nation.
10. By knowing how to read and interpret the sources that tell the story of American slavery, we gain insight into some of what enslaving and enslaved Americans aspired to, created, thought and desired. 

DOWNLOAD THE KEY CONCEPTS

Pre-Colonial and Colonial Era (to 1763)

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 1

Students will recognize that slavery existed around the world prior to the European settlement of North America.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 2

Students will be able to describe the slave trade from Africa to the Americas.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 3

Students will be able to discuss the labor and culture of enslaved people during the colonial era.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 4

Students will be able to demonstrate the impact of slavery on the economies of French, British and Spanish North America.

The American Revolution and the Constitution (1763-1787)

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 5

Students will identify ways that slavery was a key component of the escalating conflicts between England and the North American colonies in the period from 1763 and 1776.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 6

Students will describe the ways African Americans participated in the Revolutionary War in support of both sides.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 7

Students will demonstrate the ways that the Constitution provided direct and indirect protection to slavery and imbued enslavers and the slave states with increased political power.

Slavery in the Early Republic (1787-1808)

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 8

Students will examine the way the Revolutionary War affected the institution of slavery in the new nation. Students will examine the ways that slavery shaped domestic and foreign policy in the early Republic.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 9

Students will examine the rapid expansion of cotton slavery across the southern United States.

The Expansion of Slavery (1808-1848)

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 10

Students will understand the contours of the domestic slave trade as part of the nation’s economic and geographic expansion.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 11

Students will be able to describe the principal ways the labor of enslaved people was organized and controlled in the antebellum United States.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 12

Students will understand the growth of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and the slaveholding states' view of the movement as a physical, economic and political threat.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 13

Students will understand that enslaved people resisted slavery in ways that ranged from violence to smaller, everyday means of asserting their humanity and opposing the wishes and interests of their enslavers.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 14

Students will be able to discuss the culture of enslaved Americans and its impact on American culture in general.

The Sectional Crisis and Civil War (1848-1877)

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 15

Students will examine the expansion of slavery as a key factor in the domestic and foreign policy decisions of the United States in the 19th century.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 16

Students will discuss the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent decision that several slave states made to secede from the Union to ensure the preservation and expansion of slavery.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 17

Students will examine the evolving Union policies concerning slavery and African-American military service and understand that the free black and enslaved communities affected the Civil War.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 18

Students will examine the ways that people who were enslaved claimed their freedom after the Civil War.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 19

Students will examine the ways that the federal government’s policies affected the lives of formerly enslaved people.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 20

Students will examine the ways that white Southerners attempted to define freedom for freedpeople.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 21

Students will examine the impact of the Compromise of 1877 and the removal of federal troops from the former Confederacy.

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE 22

Students will examine the ways in which the legacies of slavery and of white supremacy continue to affect life in the United States.