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Black History Month founder showed how schools should teach about race [washingtonpost.com]

 

By DeNeen L. Brown, Photo: AP, The Washington Post, February 1, 2022

In his red-brick rowhouse in the heart of D.C., the man who would become known as the “father of Black history” wrote furiously. From a second-floor “home office” at 1538 Ninth Street NW, Carter G. Woodson led and orchestrated a movement to document Black history, dictating dozens of books, letters, speeches, articles and essays promoting Black people and their place in American history.

At 12:15 p.m. on most days, Woodson, who would launch what became Black History Month, met with his staff in the kitchen of the house. He’d give orders and strategize. There was little time to waste. He saw his mission — to correct how White people wrote about Black people, and to place Black Americans at the front and center of American history — as critical.

“If a race has no history,” Woodson wrote, “it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

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Irrational racist sentiment is too often handed down generation to generation, regardless of color or creed. If it’s deliberate, it’s something I strongly feel amounts to a form of child abuse: to rear one’s impressionably very young children in an environment of overt bigotry — especially against other races and/or sub-racial groups (i.e. ethnicities). Not only does it fail to prepare children for the practical reality of an increasingly racially/ethnically diverse and populous society and workplace, it also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content or (preferably) harmonious with their multicultural/-racial surroundings.

Children reared into their adolescence and, eventually, young adulthood this way can often be angry yet not fully realize at precisely what. Then they may feel left with little choice but to move to another part of the land, where their race or ethnicity predominates, preferably overwhelmingly so. If not for themselves, parents then should do their young children a big favor and NOT pass down onto their very impressionable offspring racially/ethnically bigoted feelings and perceptions, nor implicit stereotypes and ‘humor’, for that matter. Ironically, such rearing can make life much harder for one’s own children.

One means of proactively preventing this social/societal problem may be by allowing young children to become accustomed to other races in a harmoniously positive manner. The early years are typically the best time to instill and even solidify positive social-interaction life skills/traits, like interracial harmonization, into a very young brain. Human infancy is the prime (if not the only) time to instill and even solidify positive social-interaction characteristics into a very young mind.

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