Black History Month Isn't Making Life Better for Black Americans

[martyfan]

Heroes like Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks feel like characters in a novel-a world away from the clicking locks and nervous glances that plague millions of ordinary people.I’d experienced it before, but it was especially palpable one morning when I had to run around two white women out for a walk at a high school track. I felt the need to shrink

Comments

[soleiltropiques]

This was a good article. It's really sad but it's also true.

Thanks for posting it.

[moonshaz]

Excellent article.

The way black history is being taught in the US nowadays is apt to give kids (white ones, anyway) the impression that racism is something that happened in the past, in the jim crow South, and that people like King and Parks fixed all that, so it's no longer an issue.

I am an old fossil, and I went to school before black history was even a "thing" and the word "racism" was never spoken. And back then, all we were taught was: Slavery was a very bad thing, but that's been over for a long time now, so yay. End of story.

We no longer teach kids that and leave things there, thank God. But we still teach them (whether directly, indirectly, or a combination of both) that racism is a problem of the past. The only difference is the point in time when it (supposedly) stopped being a problem. It's high time we (generic we, meaning the US as a whole) recognized this and started doing something about it.