Thread: Did you learn about slavery and genocide in school?
Help me settle this.
I sparked a little conversation on Twitter about the media’s yearly Thanksgiving ritual of claiming that nobody in America is taught about the slaughter of the Native Americans in school.
Why do these yearly rituals always talk about the history "you've probably never read in your school books," like we were all raised in the 1950s? I was born in the *seventies* and was taught about slavery and the slaughter of the natives in elementary school.
MSNBC @MSNBC
there's weird new trend of people pretending that it was normal for public schools to teach that slavery was evil 20+ years ago
Leighton Woodhouse @lwoodhouse
HS class of ‘06 (public), started learning about the horrors of slavery in elementary and retouched the subject all the way thru APUSH. Who are these leftists who insist they never heard a peep about the evils of the institution in school? Maybe they didn’t pay attention.🤷♀️
mark @kept_simple
@primalpoly @kept_simple Yea i was *homeschooled* by ppl who didn't believe in evolution and thought women should be housewives and 20 years ago they had definitely taught me about slavery and that it was extremely evil. I read a bunch of books about it as a kid that were clear about the horror.
@kept_simple I’m from rural NC and I’m the same age as you and my elementary school had a Confederate mascot and we were still taught that slavery was evil.
Nobody in America was told slavery was bad until the New York Times launched the 1619 project
mark @kept_simple
Obviously that’s mostly a sampling of people who agree with me. But my general impression is that this idea that, when most adults alive today were growing up, schools whitewashed slavery, is just completely fabricated.
But I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen.
If you’re American, what year did you graduate high school, where, and were you taught in either elementary, middle or high school about:
a) the genocide of Native Americans
b) slavery
Tell us in the comments.
I graduated high school in Queens, NY, in 1986.
I don't recall much about the Indians (was a long time ago), but we had specific weeks of History class set aside for both slavery and the Civil Rights movement (we went through all of "Eyes on the Prize").
When people say "This hasn't been taught" what they really mean is "I am completely ignorant about anything that occurred before the invention of the smartphone," or "I can't believe others are allowed to think about these topics in ways I don't approve of," or "If we can just keep rubbing our opponents' noses in historical injustice, we can at last defeat or at least silence them."
Graduated in 1987 from a rural high school in Kansas—graduating class had 56 kids. We were taught, in depth and in great detail, from elementary school on, about slavery and genocide. This was not considered antithetical to another thing we were taught, which is this nation is a great experiment in democracy, equality, and liberty. We were also taught that it is our duty as citizens and humans to continue to broaden and strengthen liberty and justice for all. Yup. Out there in rural, racist white America. Kansas is a state born of the abolition movement. My little school bussed in kids from 3 Native American tribal lands. And we had homesteading families dating back to the 1800s that were Mexican and African American. The rich detail of our history is being lost or deliberately obscured by this current narrative. Thanks for offering an opportunity to tell the truth.