Question for DU members who have experience in the black culture.

[Baitball Blogger]

I have an in-law who is a cliche of a Karen. Albeit, a non-confrontational type. She wouldn't get caught on a phone video. Instead, the damage is done through family conversations where her fears and prejudices have been passed on to her children. I wish I could say that I caught on early. But I didn't.

Maybe it was Trump. Maybe it was FoxNews. Maybe because she's taught in a Christian school and that's her private circle, the result is that she now has no filters. The drip, drip, drip finally took its toll, and as she kept doubling down I finally came out too. Now I'm enjoying the quiet.

Okay, here's the set up for the question. Sometime in the nineties she told me that black students came into her classroom without any knowledge of their own history and the teachers were the ones that had to teach them about it. Most of her comments are a lot like that. For example, she trashes public school teachers, even when my own mother was a public school teacher. She trashes migrants who come over the Southern border, even though that's the route that my grandfather took to eventually become an American citizen. So, that's what she's like.

Anyway, going back to that condescending statement about black students, back then, I knew she was wrong but I couldn't put my finger on why. Of course, jump twenty five years to the now, and I know what I was missing back then. Mostly, what I was missing was the history of Black Americans that most primary schools won't teach. I didn't learn it either. It was only in the last five to ten years that stories like Emmett Till's were finally given fair attention. It was only recent where it became clear how the black vote has been suppressed through excessive police attention and felony charges that stole the right to vote for so many. I only recently became aware of voter suppression and gerrymandering methods, which were meant to suppress the black vote.

In sum, I know now that whatever black American history was being taught back in the nineties, was a whitewash.

But I wonder, just as black fathers have had to teach their black sons a different lesson concerning the police, was the true history of black America shared from generation to generation inside of the culture? In other words, could those black students walking into the classroom in the nineties, have more to teach their white teachers, than they would learn from the curriculum?

Frankly, if I were living a different history than the one taught in a structured American school, it would have me questioning everything about American education.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Thoughtful essay with a good question at the end. . . .nt

[Dan]

2. Interesting....

Raised by my grandmother, great-aunt and great-uncle in Oklahoma.
Lots of elderly people of our community.
Schools were segregated as was the law until 1966-67.
All our teachers were Black.
ORAL tradition - passed from generation to generation.
The elders may not have had a formal education - but they knew the dark side of American history.
Emmett Till, Philadelphia Miss, bus burnings - all those things - we knew, the community talked about and shared.
….
Maybe another way of looking at your question is - how responsive might the teachers have been if the kids shared what they had learned from their parents about American History. How receptive would they have been or would they have put the children down - cause what they knew was not in the history books at the time.
…
Great-grandmother was a slave - and the stories she told our parents….
I remember the glass pictures made during the civil war that our neighbor used - and that is how I was introduced to that event while still in grade school. The meanings of the pictures and what they represented.
…
But that’s just me.
….
When I traveled to the North as a teenagers, my northern relatives knew more and yet knew less.

[Baitball Blogger]

3. See, this is what needs to be highlighted.

White American culture has been one of domination, and they have worked very hard to destroy people's culture and, thus, perceptions. I am very interested in how minority cultures have managed to protect their identity. What you describe is exactly the kind of thing that should be the subject of a documentary.

[RobinA]

8. White American Culture

(whatever that is) is not a monolith. The Slavs who came over in 1900 might take exception to the notion that they dominated anyone.

[jaxexpat]

17. "When I traveled to the North as a teenager, my northern relatives knew more and yet knew less."

That sentence is quite profound. It speaks volumes in eloquent understatement.

I worked in rural Mississippi in the '70's and '80's and saw new schools built in the 1960's abandoned, by whites and blacks, throughout the depopulated delta region, the dilapidating and unmown result of a hurried and desperate migration. It was a mass exodus away from the fear of instant chain gang enslavement or worse, lethal white hostility to federal civil rights legislation. It was a hopeful flight toward something besides a dead-end life and lack of a steady job. It was settling for a result where a crowded tenement apartment was an improvement over a no-electricity or running water shack along some nameless gravel road. It evolved into something else when red-lined city planning forced people to remain in low hope neighborhoods perpetuated by "urban renewal" and other top-down abuses of power by government social "engineers". These aspects of living in America have seldom, if ever, been honestly and contiguously explored in the media and are thus unknown thinking to most.

It's no surprise to this old white man how so many black Americans (and Native Americans too) still live with continual uncertainty about and subsequent mistrust of their prospect for lives among white people.

[ChazInAz]

22. My own experience.

Having been born in Hungary, and emigrating to America in 1956, I do have some experience.
My family were the newest arrivals in a shrinking community of Slavic and Eastern European immigrants in Springfield, Illinois. The Black part of town started the next street over. Since most of the European residents were older than we, there weren't a lot of kids for me to hang out with other than our African American neighbors. Our schools, typically for the time, were strictly neighborhood affairs. Thus, most of my class mates were Black.
I think that was a good thing.
We had no Black teachers in the schools, but I learned about their local history from my friends and their parents. The main thing I learned was an horrendous part of Springfield's history that was not taught in the classrooms, nor spoken of by White residents. It explained why there was that odd arrangement of Blacks and Europeans living next to each other on the "wrong side of the tracks".
The Black community never forgot that their original neighborhood, The Tenderloin, had been destroyed in a huge race riot in 1911, and that they had fled to the southeast outskirts of town, The Cabbage Patch, out of the easy reach of the White folks. Only recently has the city acknowledged this atrocity.
My sympathy and affection for Black people is entirely due to their sharing that community memory with a lonely Hungarian teenager, who sat in his girlfriend Linda's living room, listening to her Grandmother tell her story.

[cachukis]

4. After fifteen years teaching reading to mostly high school seniors

who came to me with an average 1.2 GPA and never having read a book after the fourth grade, I feel somewhat knowledgeable about your subject.
The school property was bequeathed to the black community and the population, while I taught, was mostly black. This is in a southern city with a 25% black population.
I am white with a notorious Boston accent. And yet, most of my students graduated on time.
Trust and empathy, with a hard psychological analysis, tempered my learning. I learned far more from them than they got from me.
I did learn that economics far outweighed the social stigmas we associate with the poorer among us.
Heritage, mostly legacy was missing in most of my students. Curiosity had been drummed out by parenting unable to respond to the many "why's" from their offspring.
Learning deeply takes time and repetitive discussion on a subject.
Growing up with, "I ain't got no time for that," takes its toll.
The struggle to make ends meet is considerably more difficult in communities with limited vocabularies and petty criminal records.
The discussions about parents away for transgressions or instability does not lend to sharing outside.
Even among my higher level students, knowledge about historical figures was limited.
I think part of that was directly related to the immediacy of social media for satisfactory brain activity.
My students knew nothing of Duke Ellington or Ella Fitzgerald. Robert Johnson?
It is not limited to the black community.
Humphrey Bogart was known by those whose parents had the time to share the Casablanca experience.
The learned among us want to share what's been learned. Those with little to pass on, pass on what little they can.
History lessons, today, pass an enormous amount of tidbits that are not integrated into conversations with those who've actually lived it, like parents, except when time allows. That time is generally during the leisure hours when economic struggles are abated.
Hopefully, this lends a bit of insight from my experience. Just a scratch on the surface.

[Baitball Blogger]

6. Regional differences mattered, it appears.

As Dan pointed out in his post, "When I traveled to the North as a teenagers, my northern relatives knew more and yet knew less."

Growing up in Panama I did get to see another culture, non-American, and what is apparent is that when a culture is allowed to appreciate its own history, the purpose of education takes on the objective of providing a foundation for the doctors, architects, engineers, etc, for the next generation. In sum, nothing was standing in the way of success for dark-skinned citizens. Nothing distracting like racism or prejudice. It would be a grave mistake to underestimate just how much this fuddles the mind.

And, yes, it becomes confusing to figure out where you stand in such a society. For some, Ellington and Fitzgerald was a luxury too far from their world to appreciate? I can only imagine this, since it is a surprise to learn.

[cachukis]

12. Economics. There is a lack of legacy in poor families. Difficult to escape. A lot written on this.

[Baitball Blogger]

14. Thank you.

[cachukis]

13. By the way, this is Tampa.

[Dan]

19. Ahhh "Gold and Silver City".... Smile

[cachukis]

26. Rereading. Been to Panama. Did the Gringo trail in '78.

Lived in hammocks attached to my '68 Volvo wagon.
Heritage plays a significant role in success. Nagging works until it doesn't.
I've found that it really involves conversation. Hawaiian conversation is the "Hula." The language is built around 13 phonemes and a smaller vocabulary. They get around this with showing. They teach by showing how to do it. Still, conversation.
The poor get left behind because they are left out of the conversation. The different, suffer similar maladies.
Black culture is incredibly strong. It is matriarchal.
The matriarch makes the society. It is in a serious battle with white supremacy. It is in a death match with rich white men without rich black men by their sides. Read that a few times.
Young black people survive by the guidance of their mothers. If they are lucky to be the progeny of a black man who has maneuvered his way to economic success, their chances improve. Still not easy.
If their conversations, growing up, are with economically deprived parents, more often, parent, that parent is using all her skills to keep the family together. From that energy, a few get out.
Thankfully, there is support, but many voters resent that support.
I revisited Panama in February 2020 and bused from the city to David, ending up in a hostel in the mountains. My BIL and family are in Bocas. Flew back to Old Town for a few days and got back before covid set in.
Panama City reminded me of Cairo. First world juxtaposed with the third.
The struggle is economic.

[Baitball Blogger]

28. Thank you for your insights.

In this thread, I read a lot of information from DUers that could be used to help tell the real story of the struggle for minorities and how culture was used to keep it together, in the absence of economic benefits and incentives.

[frazzled]

5. My children were in elementary school in the late 80s early 90s

and I specifically remember my (white) daughter coming home in 2nd grade with a series of mimeographed Black history lessons, mostly stories of "famous" Black leaders (Harriet Tubman, Eli Whitney, etc.). Of course, her teacher was Black. I suppose that explains it.

Why do I remember this? Because my daughter was so excited about these little lessons, and eagerly shared them with us. I recall saying to her, "Boy, you really like these history stories, don't you. You're lucky to have Mrs. H. for a teacher." When she asked why, I responded that Mrs. H. knew a lot about this subject. And she asked why again. And I said, "Well, because she's Black." And my daughter was incredulous: "She is?" I thought that was so funny. It was typical that young kids don't notice race or any other personal information about their teachers: they're teachers, and that's it!

But getting back to it: in general, history was not really taught much at all in the elementary grades, or at least not until 5th or 6th grade, and maybe it still isn't. To have received any history lessons at all, of any kind, was a delight to my child.

[Baitball Blogger]

7. I can definitely see how a black teacher would make special time to educate her students of

a valuable history that is too often denied. That way her students didn't grow up learning about black American influences and contributions through filters that would only see this as a fluke.

This is what makes De Santis' anti-woke policy so damaging. Those kids are going to grow up with a great deal of ignorance. Set them back to 1950.

BTW, I suspect I know why your daughter was surprised to learn her teacher was black. She probably learned of black people through television and overheard conversations from the wrong kind of neighbors. That's why it is so important to have positive role models.

[frazzled]

16. Right, but

really wrong, I feel, about the reason for child’s surprise about her teacher being Black. She had positive examples of Black people from among friends and colleagues of ours, and attended kindergarten and first grade with Black classmates. And she didn’t watch any “grownup tv.” Nor we’re there any overt racists in our neighborhood.

She even remarked that she knew Mrs H’s husband was Black, because he’d come to the classroom to show their new grand baby to the kids, whom she also said was Black. I’m pretty sure the reaction was a function of Mrs H being her teacher, and to kids, that is the paramount feature. They don’t even think about race at that age.

[Baitball Blogger]

18. Sounds like a wonderful neighborhood to grow up in.

[Quakerfriend]

9. From my experience, I have found that most blacks

have not been taught about black history- from generation to generation within their own families.
- At least this has been my experience worked closely with many blacks in inner city Philadelphia.

For example- I was shocked to learn that a young lady I spent a great deal of time working with had never heard of HBCUs and the history of how they came about, had never read Up From Slavery, never heard of the great dismal swamp etc.

I never really learned anything about black history in school myself.

[Baitball Blogger]

10. I think this is the purpose of the anti-woke school movement.

To keep minorities ignorant.

[Dan]

20. Ummmm..... South vs North

[ismnotwasm]

11. When I was a kid in Seattle, desegregation busing started. 70's.

There was a lot of white flight, and in the case of my Mom, Catholic conversion—anything to keep white kids away from Black ones. (Yes, my parents were racist as hell) Still I went to the local middle school and Black kids were bussed in.

So, I remember the Black kids coming in, they stayed in groups, probably terrified. Their experience was NOT my experience. I was a reader, and in our library was every republicans nightmare. Books by and about other races than White. So many books, the mainstays of course, The biography of Harriet Tubman and “Black like Me” but “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee” was in that library and it changed my perception of history forever.

This continues to high school (not for long, I am a high school drop out) where Black history was required. I don’t remember many Black kids, at this point, but I was a troubled youth, although the library of middle school stays with me and influences me to this day.

But I wonder if the bussed in Black kids got a taste of that library, and if it matched their oral traditions and education.

(As an aside, I had a Black best friend for years, we talked about it and she claimed she didn’t experience much racism. She was very, very beautiful and that may have buffered some of it. BUT when we were both teenage mothers, it was harder for her I think. And when her daughter was 16, that daughter committed a triple felony crime—along with adult men—her daughter received a 20 year sentence. She served the entire sentence and also received the harshest punishment. She’s out now of course, but it was racism in action. The men were white)

[czarjak]

15. Racism. The same yesterday, today and forever.

[iluvtennis]

21. + agree with @Don above in post #2. It was oral tradition in my household. Although my siblings

and I were born and raised in California, my family hails from Mississippi.

My uncle and his wife migrated from Mississippi and my aunt and her husband migrated to California. After some years, my grandma and my mom a minor at the time migrated to California.

Grew up in California in the 50s and 50s. As a matter of fact when I was a toddler we had 4 families all living in a 6 bedroom house. We lived that way until each family could save up enough to move out on their own (note: it's akin to what a lot of immigrants do today).

Anyhow, we learned of black history via the old folks sitting around telling stories. We also supplemented it with articles you could read in Ebony and Jet magazine - a staple of most black households back them. I was also an avid bookworm and read just about everything I could on black culture in school and neighborhood libraries.

I grew up in a majority black community with a few Latinos, and I can honestly say I never knew what racism was until I went to college. That's the real truth. Yes, our teachers were primarily white, but I guess we didn't see that - we just saw them as people. Racism was never taught in our household (note: Later in life I attended a diversity seminar at a hi-tech company I was working for where one of the caucasian ladies told of her experience where racism was taught everyday at her dinner table where her father would talk about n-word this and n-word that. It took her getting out of that home t learn what he was teaching was BS).

I'll end with with a story that taught me that children have no concept of racism and that it's taught and the result of cultural conditioning. I have biracial twin girls. Was walking my 2 year old daughters in the park one day when two 8/9 year old girls came up to me to say hello to the girls. The girls then asked me if I was the mom of my girls. I went on to tell them that yes they were my girls and that I was "black" and their dad was "white". One of the girls told me and I quote, "But, you're not black, you're brown".

I was just dumbfounded that I had just learned something about life from a 8/9 year old child. She had no concept of races, she was just a child who saw me as a brown person. It taught me the lesson that life had culturally conditioned me on races. Although, I'm older and tainted by life, I always try to treat people as a fellow human being and not through culturally conditioned stereotypes (note; until they prove they should be treated otherwise).

[intheflow]

24. I am a white woman with a Black friend who said she never met a "white person" until college.

She grew up in Hartford, CT in the 1970s. The whites around her self-identified by their familial ethnicities: Italian-American, Irish-American, Polish-Americans, etc. She went to college in South Carolina and suddenly met WHITE PEOPLE. It was terrifying to her as a young Black woman.

[iluvtennis]

25. I can relate.

[Baitball Blogger]

29. You're so right about racism not being a universal phenomenon.

I learned about racism watching the Civil Rights fights in the US during the sixties. This is the horrible truth about watching something like this at the age of six to eight: I thought I was watching old historical files. I didn't realize that it was actually news of the day. And that was always my reference point. So, to me, racism was always a thing of the past and every experience that I encountered that suggested otherwise, surprised me. That's why it took so long to identify it in my husband's family.

I guess, the realization came in slowly. By the nineties, I was ready to recognize that it, indeed, existed, if even subtly. Interacting in predominately white circles I was taught to deny what my eyes were seeing, until I could no longer play that trained monkey role. And, finally, with the appearance of the Karens, I no longer had to pretend.

[iluvtennis]

32. The important thing is that people open their eyes from how they were conditioned with prejudices

and see the true state of things.

Glad that has happened for you.

[intheflow]

23. Did Black families have conversations about Black history?

Last edited Tue Nov 29, 2022, 05:03 PM - Edit history (1)

Yes, though I'm not sure it was the norm. Because of slavery, the Great Migration, and high rates of Black incarceration based on racial stereotyping, many families have been in a kind of domestic diaspora since their ancestors were kidnapped from Africa 200-300 years ago. If your family wasn't allowed to read (during slavery and Jim Crow), it was hard to retain family records. Even having a family Bible could get you lynched in some areas. In short, most Black families do not know their own familial history which is compounded with notoriously bad schools in "minority" majority cities also served to keep history hidden. It's been much, much better since the internet became accessible through phones, but as an urban librarian I can tell you that I talk with at least one person once a week who has no idea of their family lineage beyond their grandparents' generation.

Here's an example of that. Chris Rock has an ancestor who was in the Union Army. He had no idea until he was on this PBS ancestry show:

On edit: I understand you're talking about broad Black history, which has traditionally been handed down orally, as someone noted above. But even that was disjointed, prior to modern media, especially. Most were the people/events that made national news: Frederick Douglass, Emmett Till, W.E.B. DuBois, etc. We know that other stories, even HUGE Black history events, have been suppressed from official narratives, such as Tulsa and the other destruction of Black Wall Streets though out the country.

[Baitball Blogger]

30. No question that we are more aware today of the history that was stifled.

And I don't think De Santis will prevail because we have far too many methods to tell the story.

I am just adding, that the method of how these stories were kept alive in a country that tried so hard to muffle them, should be a story in its own right.

[Prairie_Seagull]

27. What incredible reading, painful in parts but incredible.

Broad black history, is American history.

[Baitball Blogger]

31. +1