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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DD came home yesterday with a reading packet, which included an essay from the 1619 Project.

Are many schools still teaching this stuff?  [/quote]

What did you think of the essay? Who wrote it? What else was in the packet? What is the specific topic being studied?

[/quote]

Typical MAGA reactionary response without bothering to read the assignment.[/quote]

I don't have a disagreement with teaching any history responsibly. The problem that I have is that the teachers always seem to have an "us vs them" approach to teaching it when people such as Hispanics and Asians were not involved. We've had black and white teachers teach pre-colonial history, plantation history, and civil war history and the take was always that kids like mine were somehow made to feel guilty as part of the enslavers by both slightly angry AA or white apologists. Somehow there always seems to be extra room in the guilt trip party for contemporaneously non-existing groups to be implicitly blamed. And this has happened several times in different years.[/quote]

If you are learning about slavery and feeling guilty, you need to unpack that. [/quote]

[b]I’m fine with teaching kids about slavery but would prefer that it is done with the appropriate global and anthropological context. 
[/b]
Slavery has been practiced by the vast majority of cultures that have ever existed.

Today there are more enslaved people around the world than ever before in human history. It is widely practiced in many forms in multiple places around the world, specifically the Middle East but other places as well.

Slavery became prohibited because the white Christian men who were in power banned it.

[/quote]

When we are teaching about our own history in the US, it cannot be accurately portrayed or analyzed without acknowledging and understanding exactly how it worked here and what its repercussions were (and are.)[/quote]

Which is why it should be kept a black vs white thing, and not include others in the frame. Slavery was bad. White people were evil. Blacks were dehumanized then disenfranchised. Other groups of people didn't exist in this space so don't include them in the guilt-blame game. Very simple. [/quote]

I'm a public historian who works at sites of enslavement, and a parent of elementary schoolers. I'm half white, [b]half Middle Eastern[/b] (so yes, one side of my family is immigrant as well). I don't tell visitors to the sites, or my children, that they should feel guilty or responsible for slavery, or that white people are evil. I tell them that the laws and economy of slavery shaped our country in really important ways that are still visible today. I tell them that segregation existed here and racism still exists. I also tell them about the black and white leaders of the abolition movement and civil rights. I tell them that people in the past all had choices on whether to accept racism or fight it, and that they will also have these choices. Guilt is not the right message to take from history or the 1619 project. [/quote]

If that’s all you are telling them, then you are doing them a real disservice. Do you also tell them about the millions of people worldwide who are enslaved today? Or just provide the false and misleading impression that the US was uniquely evil? [/quote]

Including the role of Arab traders?![/quote]

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