Juneteenth

This week we saw the first creation of a federal holiday since the Martin Luther King holiday was created back in the 1980's--40 years!  And it seemed to happen quickly, although people have been requesting it for decades. In these days when Congress can seem to do nothing but obstruct, it's dizzying.

What makes this moment even more surreal is the declaration of this holiday in a time where we're debating how much we teach children about history.  I would argue that far more important than the facts that we teach is that we teach everyone how to think about these facts.  I would also argue for a teaching of larger cultural contexts.

Of course, that's a lot to do in a school year.  It's hard just to get through the timeline of the facts, and then I want us to do the hard work of providing cultural context?  Yes, in an ideal world I do.

I shake my head over the idea that we're teaching Critical Race Theory in K-12.  In what universe is this true?  I associate Critical Race Theory with the kind of deeper, intense work we would do in college, but I realize that many people are using this term, Critical Race Theory, in many different ways.

Many of us think of slavery as belonging to a distant era but we forget that those slave times in the U.S. really weren't that long ago.  In his excellent book How the Word is Passed:  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith reminds us "There are people still alive today who knew and held and loved people who were born into slavery" (p. 289).

And many of us think that slavery is over, but it's not. I remember in the late 90's hearing a commentator saying, "There's never been an easier time than now to own a slave."  We hear about trafficking and migrant farm labor, and we forget that those are often forms of slavery and bondage.

In my ideal world, we'd teach not only the cultural contexts of the past, but also of the present.  What are the forces enslaving so many of us?  We think of iron shackles, but there are other societal constructs that hold so many back:  debt, violence, educational systems.  If we compare these issues to slave times and the Jim Crow era, perhaps we'll create a generation of thinkers that are set free.

And once free, perhaps they will figure out ways not only to free others, but to make sure that others aren't enslaved, either metaphorically or literally.