Teaching an accurate, honest, critical history is an act of resistance. What unites these measures is a determination to keep students from studying how slavery and exploitation based on race are fundamental to our lives today. Proposed legislation takes aim at a host of curricular initiatives, approaches to understanding society (e.g., critical race theory), and organizations. Republican legislators in at least 42 states are offering the country a lesson in How the Word Is Suppressed.
As Smith suggests, one cannot understand the history of the United States without focusing on the centrality of slavery - and this history is essential to helping our students make sense of the world around them. Below are lessons, discussion questions, and writing prompts, which take students more deeply into Smith’s brilliant book.
This is work for all of us - to create, to share, to teach. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.Īnd one way this foundational history enters our memories is through the classroom. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society it created it. It was not peripheral to our founding it was central to it. The history of slavery is the history of the United States. In the Epilogue to his New York Times bestselling book How the Word Is Passed, Clint Smith writes:
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