But what happens when people are taught the incorrect accounts of their history? For students of color across the country, the account of history they learn in school doesn’t easily reconcile with what they’re taught at home.
Black students whose parents or grandparents grew up in the Jim Crow South may have a hard time embracing the now-pervasive doctrine that the Confederate Flag does not represent racism. For Native American students, the textbook portrayal of their ancestors as a hindrance to progress and the antagonists to the White settlers and Cowboys is not likely the way their ancestors saw history either. And for Hispanic students, their ancestors’ contributions really don’t show up at all.
Marisa Perez represents Texas’ third district on the State Board of Education and said she didn’t learn about anyone who looked like her in school until she enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin and took her first Mexican American Studies course.
“Growing up, the only stories that I had to build off of were those of my father … and my grandmother,” she said.
Kyle Mays, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and who is part Saginaw Anishinaabe and part Black, said he is not surprised that textbooks he used growing up did not reflect much of his heritage as a Black and Native man in America. Mays, whose research interests include modern U.S. History, Urban Indigenous studies, comparative ethnic studies, and Indigenous Hip Hop, said even the texts he has seen do not necessarily reflect the diversity of the Black/Native experiences.
“I’m not of the Five Tribes, I didn’t grow up in the Southeast, and I wasn’t enslaved,” he said.
