Black History as American History
By: Stephanie Pierson
With February among us now, we’ve all heard odes to and seen social media posts about Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or we’ve heard about famous Black inventors. While these are great topics to learn about, solely focusing on teaching Black History through the elementary approach of the “history of great (wo)men” lens, we miss out on teaching Black History to its fullest extent. We should be teaching Black History as United States History, and here’s why. To start, Black people’s presence on the continent of North America precedes the establishment of the United States, with enslaved people from Africa arriving to the colony of Virginia in 1619, over a century before the founding of the United States of America. Black people are physically and metaphorically the backbone of the United States, as many enslaved African Americans’ labor maintained the pulse of the Southern economy and built many of our cities and even universities like UNC.
“Black people are physically and metaphorically the backbone of the United States”
A lot of the Black History curriculum taught in schools revolves around slavery and then skips to the Civil Rights Movement, two instances of state-sanctioned oppression that ended with said government finally acknowledging that people of all races deserve certain rights. With this approach, students do not learn why a movement with the magnitude of the Civil Rights Movement is even necessary. Neglecting the role that the U.S.
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2022 Black History Month Issue Edition
government plays in the systemic oppression of Black people encourages the blaming of Black people for problems and struggles that they face, like lower COVID vaccination rates and higher rates of poverty. Additionally, Black History should not be limited to stories of Black suffering and oppression. Our current Black History curriculum in schools misses the opportunity to paint a portrait of a vibrant culture. We’re missing out on reading about the surge in Black representation in Southern politics during Reconstruction. We’re missing out on learning about thriving Black-owned businesses and communities like Black Wall Street in the early 20th century, despite the limited economic opportunity for African Americans. We’re missing out on teaching about Black religious expression and its transformation throughout the centuries. We’re missing out on exploring the Black artistic expression that flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. With the teaching of critical race theory in schools being debated more frequently, despite the theory’s origins tracing back to the 1970s, we continuously see efforts to whitewash and sanitize American history. We are seeing people who want to talk about America’s triumphs without talking about its painful history with slavery and imperialism and its legacy of oppression. These critics argue that teaching about Black History is divisive, but in actuality, Black History is integral to fully understanding United States History, the history of triumphs and trials. The United States has tried to separate Black people and other marginalized groups of people by relegating them to second-class status for so long, and in doing-so, we have normalized and perpetuated the narrative that histories of marginalized peoples are not stories worth telling or listening to and that these stories are not parts of American History. While it’s obvious that Black History cannot be crammed into 28 days, we cannot limit it to a subset or footnote of United States History because Black History is inextricably woven into the fabric of United States History.
