Teaching Black history shouldn’t fall solely on the shoulders of Black people
Teaching and learning Black history is a collective responsibility. It is never acceptable to put the onus solely on Black educators.
A teaching colleague recently asked my opinion on whether she should take the lead on coordinating Black History Month activities at her school. To answer, I needed some context.
I knew she was only one of three Black teachers in a school with several dozen total instructors, most of them white. (That’s a problem by itself, but I digress.) I asked if she was likely to get support from colleagues. She answered yes, but only if programming didn’t veer from the previous years of teaching sunny, watered-down interpretations of the work of Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In other words, unless activities had a goal other than leveraging Black history to show our society trending as post-racial — a place where racism, prejudice, and discriminatory policies don’t exist — they likely would receive backlash from white faculty and white parents.
To any Black educator with the expectation of being solely responsible for making Black history happen in a school where they’re likely to receive little to no support from their colleagues — and face repercussions for actually teaching the Black Freedom Struggle candidly — my advice to you, as it was to my colleague and friend, is just say no.
If there isn’t a committee for planning and executing Black History Month activities, if approvable activities don’t go beyond lunch and a movie with misguided interpretations of Black activism, and if there is a lack of supervisory support if confronted with any retaliation, you don’t have to isolate yourself to take on that level of stress and anxiety.
The lack of support from colleagues is concerning. Even more concerning is the potential loss of employment for exposing young people to those elements of Black history that explore the uglier aspects of American history more broadly.
Teachers are losing their jobs around the nation for talking about race — with their dismissals often being attributed to instructing students about critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), or “wokeness.”
In 2002, New Jersey created the Amistad Commission to study, develop, and promote programming incorporating African American history into the public education system year-round.
In 2021, Gov. Phil Murphy strengthened the commission, legally requiring boards of education to include the accomplishments of African Americans in the curriculum of “all courses on the United States.”
But the problem is the law is unable to stop many white teachers from feeling ambivalent toward teaching Black history — or students learning it. We also have no way of knowing for certain whether Black history is truly being taught in every classroom, whether in February or year-round.
Teaching and learning Black history is not the burden of Black people alone.
There’s also the question of the vagueness of the law — it codifies teaching the “accomplishments” of Black people. It doesn’t mandate teaching about Black American resistance, the empires of Africa, or the difference between chattel enslavement and enslavement outside of a European colonial context.
As for concepts such as whiteness and racial capitalism, the state of Florida has shown us you can write in and take out what you want to be taught.
That likely means more lukewarm lessons, more potluck soul food lunches, more taking MLK’s quotes out of context, and more showing movies like Hidden Figures, or the more recent Six Triple Eight.
Teaching and learning Black history is not the burden of Black people alone. Teaching and learning Black history is a collective responsibility. It is never acceptable to put the onus solely on Black educators, particularly when there may only be a handful of Black educators in any given building.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for Black educators to abandon teaching or sharing Black history at any time in the year. Or to back down from this important work in the face of threats from the new presidential administration.
Trust me, we won’t. Even if we step away from leading schoolwide initiatives, Black history can be found in our classrooms and content.
But with the rollback of DEI protections for African Americans and others, sharing the revolutionary power of Black history — and its crucial place in the broader tapestry of American history — has become that much harder.
Rann Miller is an educator and freelance writer based in South Jersey. His Urban Education Mixtape blog supports urban educators and parents of children attending urban schools. Miller is also the author of “Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids,” which was reissued in 2024. @RealRannMiller