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 has been 150 years since the Civil War, so let us put this part of our history in the rear-view mirror and look forward rather than back and learn from it.” Only 8 percent of surveyed high school seniors could identify slavery as a central cause of the Civil War. While American textbooks deliver a slavery-lite version of history, other countries have chosen to confront the ugliness of their past, not a sanitized version of it. For instance, schools in Germany are legally mandated to teach the Holocaust. In the apartheid museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, patrons are randomly sorted into the white or non-white entrance lines. We, too, can only learn from our history when we know it. Learning the sordid details of U.S. slavery means recognizing that the current racial wealth gap that has black families seeing one dollar of net wealth for every 10 gained by white families stems from the system of white supremacy that did everything to maintain slavery — even go to war. Brems and others should understand that our current criminal injustice system, one that sees African Americans incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites, is a remnant of America’s fight to suppress black civil rights since the end of slavery. We should recognize the connection between slavery and the use of local property taxes to fund school districts, a system that blesses wealthy suburbs with educational largesse, but results in students of color receiving $23 billion less in education funding. These are issues that will touch black students’ lives, and they should know this history so they can begin dismantling modern systems of oppression.