The all-white school board voted 5-2 to stop offering Black history and literature courses.
A Missouri school board that previously voted to rescind an anti-discrimination resolution has voted in favor of removing elective Black history and literature classes.
The seven-member Francis Howell School Board voted 5-2 Thursday night to stop offering Black History and Black Literature courses, which had been offered at the district’s three high schools since 2021, KSDK reported. All seven members of the board are white.
“Our students really wanted these electives,” Harry Harris, whose son is a student in the district, said during the board meeting. “Our families really wanted them and our teachers really wanted them. It’s important. It’s been great.”
In July, the conservative-led board revoked an anti-racism resolution that had been passed in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.
Growing up in Indiana, they didn’t teach black history, and I turned out just fine except for not knowing about Jim Crow or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or redlining or the Tulsa race massacre or Ruby Bridges, or lynching, or Malcolm X or the Black Panther movement or the MOVE bombing or…
I grew up in Wyoming. We didn’t get most of that well…
We did hear about lynching and Malcolm X. Not much in details about either, mind, but we were told that both had existed. They glossed over anything that Malcolm X stood for, or actually said, or did…
As for lynching… We learned the word.
To be fair, I grew up in the north east and went to a very good public school and never learned about ANY of that until I went to college/uni and started taking real history courses.
The people of Tulsa didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Until that HBO show Watchmen I never heard of it.
Ask my wife who was born and raised here and my ex wife both had no clue and they went to school in the Tulsa area.
It fucked up but Until HBO shine a light on it they had plan to never educate anyone about it.
Is black history not taught inside the main history classes? Slavery, civil rights, etc etc? What is the argument for these classes?
They say it disappeared in the 1920s. It didn’t. It just went underground.
It is not - “main” history classes gloss over “messy” details. You should see what we don’t learn about Christopher Columbus, for example.
You mean the guy who was too Evil even for the spanish monarchy?
I got $5 betting Francis Howell Families has a common conservative donor with Moms For Liberty.
I like how they revoked an anti-racism:
The resolution, which made a pledge to “speak firmly against any racism, discrimination, and senseless violence against people regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ability,” was removed from school buildings.
Francis Howell Families is a champion and benefactor for racism, discrimination, and especially senseless violence against everyone for any and every reason. If that weren’t true, why would they revoke the resolution?
Kinda like when Google removed the “Do no evil” part from their mission statement.
Removing three words can so easily change the world.
I thought it was just moved somewhere else?
Edit: turns out it’s “do the right thing” now
I can’t remember the last time Google did something right.
*A Spike Lee joint
A mission statement is a statement of purpose. Their mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That has not changed
“Don’t be evil” was their motto. It was replaced with “Do the right thing”, and “Don’t be evil” was moved to the last line of the Code of Conduct.
Removal of black history classes completes the erasure of generations of racial terrorism against black people, of course they want that.
A policy of denying racial inequity and preventing the truth from being told about it is the very definition of structural racism.
I’m reminded of a guy I knew (who wasn’t even white!) that had a sort of “racism is over” attitude. I was like, “Ok, let’s look at one very specific part of racism in the US. Do you know what redlining is?” He did not. I explained it, and generational wealth transfer. Then he was like, “Oh. Yeah, I guess that would still have an effect today.” Made a big crack in his world view with one twenty minute talk.
Of course conservative shitheads don’t want this stuff taught. They don’t want that kind of eye opening happening all over the place.
The south was not burned enough during the civil war.
Unfortunately what gets considered as “The South” is actually anywhere in the country more than ~30 minutes outside of any Metropolitan area. It’s not North VS South, it’s urban v rural, and Big Ag dropped a fuck load of money a long time ago to ensure land votes harder than people.
As someone who somewhat recently moved to California, it was shocking to see how conservative anywhere outside of urban areas is. Like California is seen as this haven of progressiveness, but that’s only because we have two of the biggest cities in the country.
There are more people who voted for Trump in California than in Texas. There are just a LOT of people in California. But there are also a lot of republicans.
It’s not North VS South, it’s urban v rural
IMHO it’s compassionate vs cruel. And like the paradox of tolerance, showing compassion for the cruel is the way to a cruel world.
Unfortunately Lincoln severely hampered the radical reconstruction movement, and then Johnson absolutely killed it.
Recommended reading: “Black Reconstruction in America” is a really great book that covers this kind of stuff. It’s by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois
The political and military leadership of the Confederacy should have been executed, the statehood of traitor states should have been stripped, and the whole region placed under martial law with military governors appointed. That’s how Reconstruction should have went. I don’t think there was ever the will to do that to “fellow Americans” though. Especially on behalf of people that, at the time, were still largely considered “less than,” even in the Union.
It’s a bummer. This is the district I went to high school in, and it was a fantastic district while I was there. It had its issues but I got a great education.
It’s truly depressing to see this kind of mentality take hold in my community. Sadly I live in a different school district now so I couldn’t have even voted against these board members, but I definitely had to vote down my fair share of people just like them in my local district.
Man you just really hate to see it. I hope this inspires a reaction that will ultimately oust these people before they can do irreparable damage.
Talking to a family friend who’s still in the area, I frankly can’t say it surprises me at all.
I’m with you, it’s really disappointing seeing it get this bad. It feels like Missouri has been trying it’s hardest to catch up to Texas and Florida, in fighting the culture war. Example: one of the Republican candidates for governor wants to get rid of the state’s department of education.
Missouri should vote to remove the school board.
But it’s Missouri.
So they have a handicap. That shouldn’t stop them.
Haven’t been to Missouri, huh?
I see no reason to.
Damn, I guess we’ll have to get all or our history knowledge from more statues then.
A Black Literature course actually sounds really interesting. I’m familiar with some of the more well known authors and works, but there have to be so many gems that are either too obscure or too radical to break into mainstream western literature.
Taking a literature elective in college was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It rekindled my passion for reading, which had almost been stamped out by high school.
I imagine the opportunity to both target the humanities and sweep America’s racial issues under the rug was too much for those white conservatives to miss.
So much white resentment.
I misread the headline as “Mussolini School Board” and, well, I wasn’t that far off.
Are reddit comments really leaking into Lemmy? Jfc
During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the ensuing Italian colonisation of Ethiopia, Mussolini implemented numerous laws mandating strict racial segregation between black Africans and Italians in Italian East Africa. These racist laws were much more rigorous and pervasive than those in other European colonies, in which racial segregation was generally more informal, and were instead comparable in scope and scale to those of South Africa during the Apartheid era, where laws dictated racial segregation down to the most mundane minutiae of society.
What’s your problem with their comment, and what does reddit have to do with it?
While nice to know white guilt effected 2 of them, perhaps white guilt isn’t the mechanism for addressing this?
But they are NOT Racist!
