大象传媒

When it comes to how deeply embedded racism is in American society, Black and White people have sharply different views.

For instance, 70 percent of White people believe that  than discrimination built into the nation’s laws and institutions. Only 48 percent of Black people believe that is true.

Many Black and White people also fail to see eye to eye regarding the use of blackface, which dominated the news cycle during the early part of 2019 because of a series of  that involve the  in Virginia, where I teach.

The donning of blackface happens throughout the country, particularly on . indicate that 42 percent of White American adults either think blackface is acceptable or are uncertain as to whether it is.

One of the most recent blackface scandals has involved Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, whose yearbook page from medical school features someone in blackface standing alongside another person dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Northam has denied being either person. The more Northam has tried to defend his past actions, the clearer it has become to me how little he appears to know about fundamental aspects of American history, such as slavery. For instance, Northam referred to Virginia’s earliest slaves as  His ignorance has led to  of how he to the highest leadership position in a state with such a .

Ignorance is pervasive

The reality is that Gov. Northam is not alone. Most Americans are largely .

As a scholar who , I believe much of this ignorance is because of negligence in our education system. For example, a recent knew that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. Schools have ample opportunities to include much more about White supremacy, racial discrimination, and racial violence into school curricula. Here are three things that I believe should be incorporated into all social studies curricula today:

1. The Civil War was fought over slavery and one of its offshoots—the convict-lease system—did not end until the 1940s

The Civil War was fought over the South’s  to continue to from it. It is impossible to separate the Confederacy from a , and curriculums across the nation must be clear about this fact.

After the end of the Civil War, Southern White people  sought to keep slavery through other means. After a brief post-Civil War period known as , White Southerners created that gave them legal authority to arrest Black people over the most minor offenses, such as not being able to prove they had a job.

While imprisoned under these laws, Black people were then leased to corporations and farms where they were  under extremely harsh conditions. This “” was, as many have argued, , and it persisted until the 1940s.

2. The Jim Crow era was violent

While students may be taught about segregation and laws preventing Black people from voting, they  about the extreme violence White people enacted upon Black people throughout the Jim Crow era, which took place from 1877 through the 1950s.  were frequent occurrences—and not just in the South—throughout the Jim Crow era.

Racial terror was used as a means for White people to . Notably, —not just White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan—engaged in this violence. Moreover, the torture and murder of Black people was not associated with .

During this same time, White society created  as a way to dehumanize them and justify the violence White people enacted upon them. These negative stereotypes included that blacks were ignorant, lazy, cowardly, criminal, and hypersexual.

 refers to White people darkening their skin and dressing in tattered clothing to perform the negative stereotypes as part of entertainment. This imagery and entertainment served to solidify negative stereotypes about Black people in society. Many of these negative stereotypes persist today.

3. Racial inequality was preserved through housing discrimination and segregation

During the early 1900s, a number of policies were put into place in our country’s most important institutions to further segregate and oppress Black people. For example, in the 1930s, the federal government, banks and the real estate industry and to create racially segregated neighborhoods.

This process, known as redlining, served to White people in middle-class suburbs and Black people in impoverished urban centers. Racial segregation in housing has consequences for everything from  to . Moreover, because public school funding relies so heavily on , housing segregation affects the quality of .

All of this means that even after the removal of discriminatory housing policies and school segregation laws in the 1950s and 1960s, the in housing persist in the form of highly segregated and unequal schools. All students should learn this history to ensure that they do not wrongly conclude that current racial disparities are based on individual shortcomings—or worse, Black inferiority—as opposed to systematic oppression.

Americans live in a starkly unequal society where and  outcomes are largely influenced by race. We cannot begin to meaningfully address this inequality as a society if we do not properly understand its origins. The  responsible for sanitizing our history lessons understood this. Their intent was clearly to keep the country ignorant of its racist past to stymie racial equality. To change the tide, we must incorporate a more accurate depiction of our country’s racist history in our K-12 curricula.

This article was originally published by . It has been edited for 大象传媒 Magazine.