WHITE IGNORANCE MATTERS

LINKING WHITEWASHED TEXTBOOKS
AND WHITE VIOLENCE
This is what is being taught in a Texas School in 2015. And since most school textbooks in U.S. come out of Texas, it might be in one of your children's textbooks too.

Slaves are identified in a section on "immigration" as "workers" that appeared in the U.S. to work on plantations.

But I submit to you that it is of limited importance that this is being taught to black children.


If you as a parent of black child have any sense at all, your black child knows better. But this book pours gasoline on white-on-black violence. This book and thousands of books just like it help to create the situation we have now.


There are actually white people who actually believe that Irish indentured servants and black slaves were treated equally.  Some of these same white people brag about their Irish ancestor's ability to overcome...as if their ability to be absorbed into whiteness had nothing to do with the current success of the Irish.

Identifying the white indentured servant and black slave as social equals who received equal oppression is colorblindness at its most foul.

More importantly, it is ignorance like this that produces a white base from which white extremists like Dylann Roof can mentally feed.  





The ignorance in books like the textbook shown above produces a percentage of population that watches a "Fox and Friends" segment about how Black Lives Matters is all about black folk out-victiming everybody else which makes the Black Lives Matters Textbook something that undermines the black community INSTEAD OF something that is educational and desperately needed by the white community.


Bottom line is this: White Ignorance Matters because White-On-Black Crime Is Rampant Yet Not Being Identified As Crime.


Ben Affleck lying about his slave owning heirs is part of that perpetuation of ignorance.  Henry Louis Gates Jr failing to be a gatekeeper may not be the bigger part of perpetuating white willful ignorance, but Gates' betrayal was the most galling to me. We, as black people, cannot afford to help white people maintain their ignorance of their own history.

The truth being kept twenty steps removed from white children explains a lot about how white adults can claim such astounding amounts of racial ignorance in the face of the deaths of so many black people at the hands of police.  To some of the white and willfully ignorant, black deaths at the hands of police are simply coming out of nowhere....instead of being a 400 year continuation of the same-ole-same-ole.  




BUT ONLINE PROTEST WORKS

McGraw-Hill, the publisher of the textbook said the following: 

"This week, we became aware of a concern regarding a caption reference to slavery on a map in one of our world geography programs. This program addresses slavery in the world in several lessons and meets the learning objectives of the course. However, we conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.

We believe we can do better. To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor. These changes will be reflected in the digital version of the program immediately and will be included in the program’s next print run.

McGraw-Hill Education is committed to developing the highest quality educational materials and upholding the academic integrity of our products. We value the insight the public brings to discussions of our content"

https://www.facebook.com/McGrawHillEducation/posts/1056963857671901


Clearly, this statement should be considered back-pedaling UNTIL WE FOLLOW THROUGH on making sure that McGraw-Hill actually follows through on making changes to their textbooks.

Question is, how do we do it? How do we follow up and follow through on applying pressure to McGraw-Hill? To tell the truth, I'm wondering if we can move Textbook creating out of Texas altogether.  Texas and Florida have a certain reputation with people of color and it's an ugly one.