Throughout America, significant parts of Black history have been washed down, distorted or omitted from standard history curriculums. While Illinois has mandated that Black history be taught in schools and expanded that mandate in 2021, it’s in the minority as far as teaching Black history goes. There aren’t even federal standards for how to teach Black history. 

Multiple states have banned Critical Race Theory, a legal theory taught at graduate level law schools, from K-12 curriculums and some states are going even further. A proposed bill in New Hampshire would “prohibit teachers from advocating socialism, Marxism, or ‘any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America,” according to Education Week. But this suppression is nothing new. 

“White Americans have controlled virtually every institution,” said Joseph Flynn, a professor at NIU’s College of Education and Associate Director of Academic Affairs at the Center for Black Studies. “This includes education.”

As a result, what we are often taught in schools can miss the mark or cover up important parts of Black History including the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, the Tuskegee Experiments and the significance of the year 1619. What we’re expected to learn has largely been based on the decisions of white Americans. 

“Even when you go into the 1960s with the rise of Black studies, women’s studies, Latino studies, queer studies,” Flynn said. “This whole spectrum was credited as a response to the fact that minorities weren’t being represented.” 

But despite these movements trying to make the history of minority groups more prominent, there is still much to do. Today, people still have a skewed version of history. In order to gain a larger understanding of history, we must make a substantial effort to seek out historical texts, often from a minority perspective. 

“You’ll need to grow a thicker skin,” Flynn said. “You are going to see and hear things that will make you uncomfortable. You’ll also need intellectual humility.”

Intellectual humility is especially important because, often, what we hear about a certain event and what actually occurred are two very different things. We have to accept the fact that what we were taught may not be correct. 

In Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” which lasted roughly 17 minutes, people often point to the last four to five minutes, Flynn said. However, looking at the full speech reveals something entirely different.

In King’s speech, he discusses multiple things affecting people of color back then that are still all too relevant to this day including reparations for slavery, police brutality, wealth inequality and gentrification. 

What Americans need to understand is that history is rarely simple. It’s a complex thing that must be continuously examined. The answers aren’t always comfortable, but discussions about racism in the United States need to happen. Brushing these issues and our history under the rug is what has led to the systems of inequality continuously being upheld.