On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, students and faculty at Bates College in Lewiston discussed and reflected on Dr. King’s legacy with a series of workshops, performances and a morning keynote address from author and Harvard Kennedy School professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad.
Muhammad tackled the theme of the day, reparations, by focusing on the need nationally for a revised civics lesson in racial education. He said history books have virtually ignored the economic contributions of black people. King may be memorialized on the National Mall, Muhammad said, but the movement he was part of is still not taught in the vast majority of the nation’s schools.
“In 2011 the Southern Poverty Law Center found that in a sample of 12,000 high school seniors, only 2 percent could identify, could answer correctly, a two-part question: What was Brown versus Board of Education and why does it matter?” he said.
In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 16 states require no teaching of civil rights history and 19 others did so little they were graded as failures. Only three were gauged to be “model” states.
Muhammad argues that the problem of racial illiteracy widens inequality and threatens democracy. As an example he points to what he calls “a recent discrediting” of black history.
“We’ve all watched Texas whitewash its textbooks, taking out civil rights history and Chicano history. We watched last year as world geography book published by Macmillan belittled the significance of the Atlantic slave trade. Scholastic published a book with happy slaves celebrating George Washington’s birthday as they prepared a cake for him,” he said.
And this week, Muhammad pointed to the state of Arizona, which is back in the news with House Bill 2120, which would prohibit public schools, colleges and universities from discussing or teaching anything that promotes “social justice toward a race, gender, religion, political affiliation, social class or other class of people.”
The bill is sponsored by Republican Rep. Bob Thorpe, who told a conservative news website that taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize courses that he believes promote discrimination. Muhammad said it’s another illustration of how Dr. King’s legacy has spawned yet another counterrevolution.
