Title: By teaching slavery adequately, we can overcome our history
Headings: Slavery still shapes all of our lives, yet students aren’t taught its history
Slavery still shapes all of our lives, yet students aren’t taught its history
Glossing over America’s original sin means we can never overcome it
Andre Perry

Content: It’s past time all students learn why black and white Americans can expect very different life outcomes, so that they can unlearn the myths of America and the black stereotypes that bolstered those falsehoods. The disconnect between students’ lived experiences and what they are taught in school is reinforced by the failure of our schools to properly teach about the institution of slavery. In a 2018 study, the anti-racist nonprofit the Southern Poverty Law Center surveyed high school seniors and social studies teachers and found that only 8 percent of the students surveyed could identify slavery as a central cause of the Civil War. Less than a quarter could identify how the U.S. Constitution gave advantages to slaveholders. And while most teachers (90 percent) claimed they were comfortable teaching about slavery, 58 percent stated their textbooks were inadequate, and 40 percent believed their respective states offered insufficient support to teach our history. Not teaching slavery adequately has resulted in a massive hole in school curricula — and that didn’t happen by accident. Legislators, history activists and those who want to project a positive view of the U.S. proactively work to keep the subject from the books, principally by manipulating state education standards and authorizing sanitized texts. Some people feel that slavery, when it existed here, was merely a fact of life that should now be seen as water under the bridge, as Coshocton, Ohio, resident Robert Brems wrote in March for the Coshocton Tribune. Why teach history, he argued, to students who are likely uninterested in the whole enterprise? “ We should be proud of the fact that we fought a Civil War that devastated half of the country and took hundreds of thousands of lives to halt slavery here,” he continued, saying that we should now focus on the good that has been done rather than the evil. “