Arkansas joins Florida in hiding Black historical facts

Get the Point!

Earlier this year, Arkansas Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in challenging the College Board's oft criticized AP Black History standards.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Sanders, like DeSantis, chose to appeal to the "Know Nothings" among her MAGA base by suggesting that teaching the truth about the Black experience in American history is "divisive" and only serves to "indoctrinate" students in a way that teaches them to “hate America.”

As a proud holder of two degrees in history (Morehouse/Florida A&M), and as one who studied Critical Race Theory when it emerged in seminars at the University of Florida College of Law in the 1990's, I continue to find this latest Republican culture dividing talking point to be sick and simplistic. Sick in that facts are facts, and simplistic in that one doesn't need to be a Mensa Society member to understand how we, the people, interpret objective historical facts depends greatly upon our individual and collective life experiences! Life experiences, at least for all non-whites, that are now being whited out by right wing politicos in red states across the nation.

Seriously, I can remember all the way back to my first grade year (1978-79) at Apple Grove Elementary School in Oxon Hill, Maryland and how my teacher, Ms. Susan Hasenclever, captured my entire imagination as she held her Tab soda in one hand, while holding paintings of Christopher Columbus—the man she claimed "discovered" America—in her other hand. Her lesson would be replicated in most of the social studies and history textbooks that I read all the way through high school, with the juxtaposition of the greater "historical facts" and "historical indoctrination" being as follows:

Objective Historical Facts: European settlers sailed to the Western Hemisphere in droves in the 16th and 17th centuries and by the end of the 19th Century, dominated commerce and politics throughout the Americas and the Caribbean/Atlantic isles.  

Subjective Historical Indoctrination: White settlers from Europe, simply wanting to freely practice their religion as they saw fit in what they deemed the “New World,” were ordained by God (Manifest Destiny) to take lands from Indigenous Peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere and to import stolen Africans to clear the swamps, plant the crops, and build the buildings of the mighty American Colossus.

Thinking back again to Mrs. Hasenclever's 1st grade social studies class, I distinctly remember that she taught a short segment on slavery prior to a field trip that I later took to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Once more, the juxtaposition, from first grade on forward, was:

Objective Historical Facts: European businessmen built commercial ships for the purpose of capturing and bartering African men, women, and children to transport them across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved throughout the Western Hemisphere. Millions of Africans did not make it to the Americas alive due to unsanitary conditions, malnourishment, and violence from their European captors. For ship captains who lost human "cargo," insurance companies, like Lloyd's of London, provided compensation.

Subjective Historical Indoctrination: European colonizers brought Christianity to "heathen" African people who were transported to the "New World" to learn "valuable job skills," taught the “Protestant (or Catholic) Work Ethic,” all the while being "taken care of” and "provided for" by wealthy plantation owners. The enslaved Africans were a happy lot…

😡

To break through the web of lies, as I often proudly write, I was blessed to have two parents, Charles and Vivian Hobbs, who were avid readers of history and, most crucially during my educational journey, Jim Crow survivors! I distinctly remember that it was in 4th grade when my father showed me an old Jet Magazine photo of Emmett Till's lynched remains, and after almost losing my dinner upon seeing his grotesque visage, from that point forward, both of my parents got real—and really graphic—in their "supplements" to what was NOT being discussed in the social studies and history textbooks that were assigned to me each year!

In September of 1955, Mrs. Mamie Till posed with the lifeless remains of her 14-year old son, Emmett Till, to show the world the horrors of Jim Crow era lynch mobs in America. My father, Charles, was 15-years old that year…

Digressing to first grade indoctrination, I actually have to give credit to my older sisters, Terri, Tarrah, and Traci, who were in 8th, 7th, and 6th grades, respectively, for telling me at the dinner table one night that Christopher Columbus didn't "discover" anything because Native Americans were already living here—while also explaining what they knew about slavery from watching Alex Haley’s "Roots," which first aired on ABC in 1977!  

So, thanks to my entire family, I was that kid who knew that much of what was being taught in school from a social sciences perspective was some one-sided non-sense! Such is why as an adult, I ALWAYS provide objective facts in my essays and blogs before arguing my opinion, because facts are concrete no matter what perspectives I—or my readers—draw from those facts. 

But the problem today is that with blissful ignorance being promoted in the public square, it has become easy for those in power to provide Orwellian "alternative facts" or, whole lies that, in time, could replace the real truth!

That's why it makes me ill to think that over in Arkansas this month that Little Rock Central High School, the battleground for a pivotal Civil Rights era standoff in 1957 that forced then President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) to send Federal troops to protect nine Black students as they integrated the previously all white school, will now be forced to have its history teachers submit lesson plans to the modern “Dixie-can” education department to determine whether certain "facts" will "hurt the feelings" of young white students—or "indoctrinate" all students into "hating America."

Real history lessons, when taught properly, do not vilify the white descendants of the Little Rock Nine's tormentors, rather, they compel all students to consider why something as arbitrary as skin color compelled state level policies to run contrary to Federal law while discriminating against a whole race of people that simply wanted the best education possible during the Jim Crow era? 

In the South, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past…” William Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun”

But with truth being stranger than fiction, suffice it to say that the Critical Race Theory critics like Governors Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ron DeSantis don't really object to indoctrination, because you won't hear these leaders calling into question whether the 12 American presidents who owned enslaved Blacks were "great" men—or evil men; you won't hear these leaders demanding that President Abraham Lincoln's views on the inherent inferiority of Black people be taught in comparison to popular (and wrong) sentiment of "Honest Abe's" love for the same; you won't find these leaders suggesting that history courses question whether race was a factor in the decision to drop Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. 

No, the reason you won't hear these “leaders” raise their voices about all forms of indoctrination is because to them, the "American" perspective, one that has always been told from a Eurocentric or white vantage point, is all that matters. Hell, even the crux of the United States’ National Motto, "E Pluribus Unum—Out of many, One" (1782), was THE original form of indoctrination in which the dominant culture (European) was designated to subsume all others.

Lest we forget…