Racism & Racial Identity Archives

Our House Divided: What U.S. Schools Don’t Teach About U.S.-Style Apartheid

By Richard Rothstein

In the current issue of the School Administrator, I write that we do a much worse job of facing up to our racial history in the United States, leading us to make less progress than necessary in remedying racial inequality.

Burning Tulsa: The Legacy of Black Dispossession

By Linda Christensen

The author describes teaching about racist patterns of murder, land theft, displacement, and wealth inequality through the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

The term “race riot” does not adequately describe the events of May 31 - June 1, 1921 in Greenwood, a Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In fact, the term itself implies that both Blacks and whites might be equally to blame for the lawlessness and violence. The historical record documents a sustained and murderous assault on Black lives and property. This assault was met by a brave but unsuccessful armed defense of their community by some Black World War I veterans and others.

American History Lessons

The original idea for the Zinn Education Project’s “If We Knew Our History” column grew out of our reading “American History Lessons,” by Melissa Harris-Perry in The Nation magazine. Harris-Perry’s article, reproduced here, is a meditation about the role of Black History Month.

She argues that we suffer from a “national deficit of historical knowledge” and that this deficit has contemporary political consequences. If we knew our history, she suggests, people would be less likely to follow the bigots who patch together historical symbols and soundbites to justify their right wing nostrums. And if we knew our history, we’d be more likely to appreciate and defend the accomplishments of social movements.

Rethinking Cinco de Mayo

By Sudie Hofmann

I recently came across a flier in an old backpack of my daughter’s: Wanted: Committee Chairs for this Spring’s Cinco de Mayo All School Celebration. The flier was replete with cultural props including a sombrero, cactus tree, donkey, taco, maracas, and chili peppers. Seeing this again brought back the moment when, years earlier, my daughter had handed the flier to me, and I’d thought, “Oh, no.” The local K-6 elementary school’s Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) was sponsoring a stereotypical Mexican American event. There were no Chicana/o students, parents, or staff members who I was aware of in the school community and I was concerned about the event’s authenticity. I presumed the PTSA meant well, and was attempting to provide a multicultural experience for students and families, but it seemed they were likely to get it wrong.

‘Repeat After Me: The United States Is Not an Imperialist Country — Oh, and Don’t Get Emotional About War’

By Bill Bigelow

You may have seen that an administrative law judge in Arizona, Lewis Kowal, just upheld the decree by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction that Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program violates state law. Judge Kowal found that the Tucson program was teaching Latino history and culture “in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.” According to CNN, one lesson that the judge objected to taught that the historic treatment of Mexican Americans was “marked by the use of force, fraud and exploitation.”

Try this “history detective” experiment. Ask the next person you encounter to tell you what they know about the U.S. war with Mexico. More than likely, this will be a short conversation, because that war (1846-48) merits barely a footnote in U.S. history textbooks.

July 29, 1910: Slocum Massacre in Texas

Citizens in the small, predominately African American town of Slocum, Texas, were massacred.

July 13, 1863: New York City Draft Riots and Massacre

The New York City Draft Massacre (“Riots”) were the largest civil insurrection in U.S. history besides the Civil War itself. White mobs attacked the African American community — committing murder and burning homes and institutions (including an orphanage.)

The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States

By Richard Rothstein

Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the United States and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems — it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren. We’ve taken no serious steps to desegregate neighborhoods, however, because we are hobbled by a national myth that residential segregation is de facto — the result of private discrimination or personal choices that do not violate constitutional rights.

What the Koch Brothers Want Students to Learn About Slavery

By Adam Sanchez

Given that the billionaire Charles Koch has poured millions of dollars into eliminating the minimum wage and paid sick leave for workers, and that in 2015 he had the gall to compare his ultra-conservative mission to the anti-slavery movement, he’s probably the last person you’d want educating young people about slavery. Yet the history-teaching wing of the Koch brothers empire is seeking to promote an alternate narrative to slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

July 24, 1973: Twelve-Year-Old Santos Rodriguez Killed By Police

Twelve-year-old Santos Rodriguez and his 13-year-old brother David were pulled from their home in Dallas, Texas, handcuffed, and put inside a police car. Santos was killed when one of the officers played Russian roulette to try to force the boys to confess to a crime.