All our kids need to learn about Black history

Civil rights march on Washington, DC police line on August 28, 1963.

We shelter our children by censoring Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, lest they ever encounter offensive language in literature.

But Ferguson still burns.

We tip toe around ideas of race and class, forever tweaking the way we talk about these things as though some sort of semantic twist will be the key to making our problems disappear. It’s as though we believe that if we use language like “person of colour” and “economically disadvantaged” it will somehow make it less true that being a poor, Black man in America means every single odd is stacked against you.

But Ferguson still burns.

If you are a Black man in America, you only have a 54% chance of graduating high school. You have more than a 30% chance of going to jail. And you have the lowest life expectancy in the country.

If you are an unarmed Black man in America, a police officer can shoot you seven times and not even have go to trial.

So, tell me. What the hell is your next move going to be? We are all obviously horrified by violent rioting and looting. I hate that this is happening. Nothing good comes of this. But I also get it. These are acts borne out of desperation. The anger and resentment of a community beaten down by racial discrimination for generations has come to head and this is what it looks like.

I wasn’t going to write about Ferguson, Missouri. I’m a white, female mom blogger from Canada, after all. What could I possibly add? And how is this relevant to my life?

As one friend put it, it feels so very far away. Physically, it’s over 1200 km. Intellectually, I know we don’t have the same history of slavery and deeply entrenched race divides in Canada. And emotionally, I feel like Toronto is probably one of the most ethnically diverse and accepting cities in the world. I don’t have to tell my kids that racism is wrong because they don’t even know it exists.

Except, of course, that it does it exist. And I would be doing my children and society as a whole a great disservice to pretend that it doesn’t. We only have to look to Ferguson or to the United States as a whole. Hell, we only have to look to our own impoverished inner suburbs to find a pretty convincing divide along both economic and racial lines.

But there’s more. Black American culture is exported all around the world through music and videos, tv shows, stand up comics, movies and books. It’s embraced by disenfranchised and downtrodden people everywhere. You will find expressions of American hip hop culture in every immigrant community across Canada and in the most remote and destitute Native reserves. (You’ll also find it in the wealthiest and whitest communities but that’s a different post.) And I love so much about that. The world of music especially is a much richer place thanks to Black American culture. But there are also elements of hip hop culture that we don’t want to emulate. There’s misogyny and glorification of drugs, violence and gangsters. We need to contextualize those ideas, try to understand where they come from and then talk about why they are wrong.

We need to teach our kids about the deep race divide in the United States that is the legacy of an economy founded on slave labour and the subsequent generations of civic inequality for Black people. We need to teach them about the dark and dangerous beliefs that feed racism and prejudice. We need to bring those ugly ideas out into light and talk about them, examining them from every angle until they wither away into the darkness they are born from. We should teach our children history, yes, but also the history of culture and ideas.

We all need to better understand the history of Black America in order to make sense of what has happened in Ferguson. We need to look closely at the tangle of economic, cultural and race-based factors that contribute to the ongoing discrimination against Black Americans so one day there really will be justice for young men like Michael Brown.

We need to teach our kids about this stuff in order to teach them that racism and hatred are wrong. But also because they won’t be able to understand the world if we don’t.