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This man was not a cause, he's a symptom. White supremacy and white privilege are woven into the fabric of the USA. To begin removing this stain Schools need to teach a history that includes Juneteenth, the Jim Crow south, the true history of the Reconstruction which includes the slaughter of innocent blacks in New Orleans and other southern cities. Just as Germans tour the death camps, US students should tour a replica of slave ships to fully get the squalid conditions in which other human beings were forced to live. Students can also tour the slave holding pens which still exist in Savannah, Charleston (IIRC) and other cities. Then we can go into eugenics, The Tuskegee studies, and the testing of gas on black infantrymen in WWI.
Turning fire hoses and police on blacks in Alabama who sought only to exercise their right to vote is current events and not ancient history. The newsreels aren't fake news, they're real and a part of life for blacks in the US. Teach the deaths/assassinations of Emmett Till, Medger Evers, George Lee and Lamar Smith.
The US must be dragged kicking and screaming from its white privilege. As others have said, speak up when you see it, don't let them think you agree with them by being silent. I was told a racist joke some years ago and said to the teller of the joke I was bothered by the fact that he believed I might even find that joke funny, then looked at him until he turned and walked away.
It's strange to me to think these things aren't taught. I went to a private, vastly majority white middle school and high school in New Orleans (Holy Cross) and we were taught about all those things. And, it's not as if my school wasn't highly white and conservative. Maybe I was again just lucky that I had the right teachers, an administration that let teachers teach, and parents that didn't interfere, but I also think it was also a different climate in the country where there wasn't this odd war against teaching kids things that the parents might or might not agree with.
And, my daughter went to a private school in New Orleans and then Ben Franklin, which I guess counts as a liberal education in New Orleans, so she learned those things to. As a result, I guess I'm kind of shocked that those things aren't already taught in schools.
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