What If You’re A White Teacher Teaching Black History? [Some Examples]
In my last post, I put down some thoughts on Black History Month, something I’ve written about at least once for the last four years. Every so often, I get a question that I ought to put in an FAQ section. For instance:
“What if you’re a white teacher teaching about Black history?”
I often reply, “Go right ahead, as long as you do it right.”
Of course, you want to know what I mean by “right.” Besides the aforementioned article, I’d like to point you in the direction of some of the comments made in that article, too. For instance, here’s my respected colleague Mike Kaechele:
As a social studies teacher I really don’t like all of the special months and days. I try to teach the various viewpoints of history holistically. I will not be singling out blacks in February, just like we didn’t talk about terrorism on 9/11. We did spend three weeks on 9/11 and terrorism when it fit where we were as a class. We have talked about African Americans in the context of all of the