Voices in Education

Teaching Truth Isn’t About White Kids’ Feelings

By Jeffery Robinson

I am a 65-year-old Black man in America. I have been a criminal defense attorney for more than 40 years. So, I have seen my fair share of racism. But it wasn’t until 2011, when my wife and I became parents, that I had to face the reality of how much I still didn’t know about this country’s history and its impact on racial progress today.

That year, my sister-in-law passed away, and we became the caregivers of her then-13-year-old son, our nephew Matthew. All of a sudden, we were responsible for raising a young Black child, and the surface skimming that I felt like I had been doing on the history of race and what racism means in America felt like it wasn’t enough.

So, I started reading more. And I found myself getting angry and feeling ignorant. I attended Marquette University and graduated from Harvard Law School. I’ve had one of the best educations available in America, but I started learning things about the history of race in this country that I never knew before. I thought, How could I not have known this? How could I not have been taught this? And I started thinking, If I don’t know this, I wonder how many other people don’t know.

It turns out that it’s a lot. According to a 2017 Southern Poverty Law Center survey of high school seniors, fewer than 1 in 4 students can correctly identify how provisions in the Constitution of the United States gave advantages to slaveholders. Two-thirds of Americans don’t know that it took a constitutional amendment to formally end slavery for most Black people, except for those convicted of a crime. Only 8 percent of high school seniors can identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Many white Americans still haven’t heard of the Tulsa Massacre, and the majority don’t know about similar tragedies in Wilmington, Elaine, Colfax, Memphis and Pulaski.

And yet, as we have conversations about how to better educate young people on our history, somehow “making white kids feel bad” has become a rallying cry to censor their learning. In 29 states, legislation has been proposed to limit what educators can teach related to this country’s racist history. In Tennessee, legislators are working to make it legal to impose fines ranging from $1 million to $5 million on teachers who knowingly teach concepts such as systemic racism — all under the guise of protecting white kids.

ParentMap is inaugurating this new “Voices in Education” monthly op-ed column for 2022 to spark discussion about important developments and trends in education. The opinions and perspectives expressed by our guest columnists are their own.