I thought about the Florida teachers I’ve spoken with in recent days who are being asked for the first time to document and report their Black History Month activities to administrators. I thought about the bravery of Kenneth McElroy, a black middle-school civics teacher in the Tampa area, who told me he has no plans to stop sharing the truth of the nation’s history with his students, even though the state Whatever the law may have said.
“I come from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,” Mr. Ellroy said. “I’m not going to change the way I teach.” Another Tampa-area teacher, Martha Elena Galindo, described an environment hostile to black and transgender students. “‘Miss, we’re not bad people,'” she recalled telling a transgender student one day. “It brought tears to my eyes,” she said.
The College Board could send a powerful message by standing with these Americans. Instead, Housing Gees threw them under the bus with a bell hook. A basic reading of the History Board officials says they would champion making it clear that no one would be satisfied with such accommodation.
The question now is whether the majority of Americans, in the middle and in institutions such as the College Board, are able to clearly see the backlash, not as some sort of culture war, but as the life’s blood of an occasional anti-democrat. Violent political movement in the United States is gaining currency.
Black history is a direct threat to this movement. It humanizes slaves and their descendants. It paid a terrible price for white supremacy, not only for black Americans, but for the nation. It actually opens the door to the calculations that make inter-racial alliances possible, give life to democracy and pluralism, and alienate tyrants from their power.
The problem is that looking directly at this history is a prospect that terrifies many white Americans. Looking at the exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture—including instruments played by enslaved people and handcuffs made for a small child—it’s not hard to understand why. But the way forward is to face this history, not to twist it to our will, or whitewash it, or brush it away.
It is no coincidence that black writers under attack, such as Mr. Coates and Ms. Hook, have been militant in their refusal to allow America to forget. “The time to remember is now,” Ms. Hook wrote. “The time is now to speak a counter hegemonic race talk fueled by the passion of remembrance and resistance. All our words are needed.