"This is some bullshit!" I thought as my 7th grade social studies class stood silent and uninterested at the grave of the Arkansas Confederate boy martyr, David O. Dodd, in the Spring of 1999. My mawkish white teacher waxed nostalgic about his "sacrifice" as if she were a card-carrying member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. "Does she see who we are?" I thought, staring at the various aloof, sepia-toned faces of the majority-Black class. As we stood around the white obelisk marking his grave, I thought in my own 13-year-old way that this was white supremacy loud and proud. The field trip forced us to consider the moral quandary of a boy caught up in Civil War politics over the humanity of our ancestors. I was standing below a large white phallic symbol of indoctrination. I was looking up at a big white dick, erasing my people. We weren't even footnotes. This was some bullshit.
The obelisk cast its shadow over me going into high school. In 2003, the soft bigotry of low expectations for a nappy-headed Black boy from the south side of the city's unofficial racial dividing line—I-630 in Little Rock, Arkansas—was palpable. Colloquially referred to as "The Wall," my zip code told teachers everything they wanted to know about me. I knew I was being warehoused with other poor Black kids. The random classroom pat-downs and the frisking at the entrance were enough to rattle my undiagnosed neurodivergent aversion to the high-frequency beeps. The sounds made for sweaty palms that came with the untoward guilt of a slave worried about what his master would think if he escaped, rather than his own well-being. They were manifesting our futures from the present, using scripts from the past.
My unexplored neurology was hidden because I masked. Pedantic, erudite, and sporting "wannabe-white-so-bad" brands like Vans in the early aughts, I was, to many of my teachers, a breath of fresh air. Disarming even. But wisdom from the old heads in the community and family steadily reminded me that white folks are always listening and assessing. Or, as Fanon reminded me, "The black man who quotes Montesquieu must be watched."
I grew up against a backdrop of white evangelical power. Florida's new CRT ban means even more Black students will, too.
When it comes to the protection of whiteness, separation of church and state has been enforced primarily as a matter of convenience.
To this point, an English teacher once confronted me for propagating what he called "revisionist" history. I had written a reflection on James Loewen's classic Lies My Teacher Told Me for the high school newspaper, which attracted the attention of old-guard teachers. You know, the kind of educators wedded to hidden curriculum staples like standing for the flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The pre-Kaepernick-era haters. I found myself in that hallway, staring at his leathery, sun-abused skin, thinking, "You shouldn't be teaching Black kids." His smirk and condescending tone reminded me of all the ways white folks patronize us through language. The hand-holding hallway exchange—him assuming I didn't know what certain words meant—fit well into the pattern of passive-aggressiveness that Mr. Charlie and Ms. Ann (slavery-era archetypes of white authority) employed with precision and gusto toward someone they could only see as having cultural deficits. Anything defying white grand narrative histories was suspicious to a lot of this generation in the South. A student encouraging critical thinking about their people's role in history was seen as subversive. The obelisk remained pointed and erect as ever.
My intellectual abilities and interests were always called into question. Junior year, I submitted an essay for the monthly school-wide Barnes & Noble gift card giveaway exploring Emma Bovary's insatiable Harlequin-esque desires in the novel Madame Bovary, which remains one of my favorite novels to this day. "Loving the Sea For the Sake of Its Storms," I named it. "It was a really good essay; we just didn't think a student wrote it," explained "Mrs. Terry" (pseudonym), one of those teachers in need of a software upgrade. She had taught David Auburn, playwright of Proof. Apparently, working-poor Black boys don't read 19th-century French realism novels. Who knew?
I didn't pass the informal intellectual catechism they administered. They thought I was "well-read"—because calling me "bright" would have been an affront to their antiBlack and anti-working-poor sensibilities. To them, I was smart, but not quite cultured enough to be part of the fraternity; I wasn't an Alpha man. The meritocratic tirades from my mom about working twice as hard for recognition began to sound more like propaganda than what evidence could demonstrate. My intellectual abilities weren't tied to what I could actually produce, but to where I ended up in life's lottery. I was never going to be good enough.
These teachers wanted the kind of students the school produced when Hall High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was chock-full of National Merit Scholars. The school opened in 1957 as a haven for the white students from the newly integrated Central High School. The influx of working-poor Black students in later decades made classrooms look more like Dangerous Minds (1995) than Dead Poets Society (1989) or Mona Lisa Smile (2003).
I recall hearing a white-presenting French teacher from Brazil say that she didn't see anything "African" about African Americans. She admitted that she admired the Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and '60s, but felt like my generation was squandering it with our "hood" culture. Why did she tell me all of this? Because I masked. The way Dunbar reminded us. They were okay with a Black kid they could tokenize and control. I couldn't decide if my interest was born out of a need for white validation or to better understand how teachers could teach with any form of respect or care for a community they genuinely don't know and seemed to have no interest in learning about or from.
"I don't think African American history should be taught in high school," she said. I felt like I had astrally projected out of my body, watching in disbelief from above. I was shocked out of recognition by someone who I realized didn't see me because she didn't see the people I was from. She thought my history was "too niche" for a high school subject (though she didn't seem to have this problem with European history). In her mind, Black Americans were enough as figureheads for movements that she could politically stomach and, of course, as entertainers. Chattel slavery was just a "peculiar" institution playing in the background of America's grand narrative of societal progress. Her attitude was a bellwether for the perceived slings and arrows of a more inclusive and truthful literature in the school curriculum that would come nearly two decades later. When teachers are willing to erase your history from the K–12 curriculum, and college is inaccessible to most working-poor kids, where would they learn about such history from a credentialed instructor? They likely wouldn't.
I was never going to leave my education completely in the hands of the Little Rock School District or any institution, for that matter. I was an autodidact. I was like Malcolm in prison, starting with "aardvark" in my free time. I had childhood Saturday mornings on the living room floor combing through the incomplete encyclopedia set my parents could barely afford. Volumes A, B, and C sufficed; everything from Iceland's Althing to bioluminescence to Comoros became accessible. My favorite books were from the Ebony Pictorial History of Black America set that was gifted to my mom from my grandma. The set painted a narrative of Black Americans largely through photographs, which helped me understand the history of my community in a more embodied way. Seeing an image of Malcolm X lying lifeless on the Audubon Ballroom floor produced a visceral reaction. It got me out of my head and made injustice felt and tangible.
Now, more than two decades after the field trip, the obelisk still hadn't gone flaccid, its stamina shown night after night on the evening news as conservative (mostly white) parents bombarded school board meetings with accusations of "reverse racism." The once-in-a-generation COVID-19 pandemic was hemorrhaging lives across the country, and the podium meltdowns looked like a cathartic ritual of parents gatekeeping for white comfort.
I could see a new movement was emerging. The rhetoric was appealing to the sensibilities of middle-class whites (white aspirants, too) who didn't want their children inheriting a guilt complex from chattel slavery ("cattle" slavery). The boogeyman was dubbed "CRT" (the dreaded critical race theory) and had been completely denuded of its post-civil rights legal analysis. It was CRT in name only. A name associated with a radical approach to understanding continuing disparities after the gains of civil rights legislation of the '60s was now nothing more than basic cultural competency. And that was too much for the opps. I watched Christopher Rufo, Manhattan Institute Fellow and documentarian, turn a legal concept derived from minds like Derrick Bell's and bastardize it into the buzzword abbreviation "CRT." Now stripped of its meaning, the term became a byword for what is essentially cultural competency. This is how erasure starts.
When I was younger, the monuments of white supremacy seemed to maintain a quiet but firm boundary. A boundary that said, "I'm here. I'm anchored." Now much of that same praise and worship feels different, as I watch erasure looming. For example, Negro enslavement was such an anathema in the Texas history curriculum that needed the enslaved to be presented as workers to appease the sensibilities of offended folks with money, connections, and time.
The Southern Students Manifesto For Academic Freedom
We, a coalition of students, staff, faculty, and alumni at The University of Texas at Austin, amplify the discontent of communities across the United States. We are tired of the senseless elimination of educational opportunities under the guise of neutrality, the increasing implementation of gag rules that demolish systems of shared governance, and most alarmingly—the increasingly aggressive attacks on those who refuse to ignore such injustice.
Arkansas' current ban on "indoctrination of students" through the LEARNS Act fails to define when instruction ends and indoctrination begins. Some teachers today have to approach topics like slavery and race with precision and care so as not to offend students (white parents). I feel quite vindicated in knowing that I always sensed the irony that the education system I was thrown into gave more attention to distorting, deleting, or misrecognizing American descendants of chattel slavery… just like they did me. Whitewashing enslavement is not merely a distortion of historical accuracy, but a creation process that clears the state's ledger, morally and financially, of the debt of chattel slavery. The state refuses to pay for the $100 AP African American Studies exam for a course studying a distinct American ethnic group, while subsidizing AP European History.
I scoff at Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and conservative assembly members playing on descendants' pain. As a Black kid growing up under her father's governorship, I was too informed about history not to know I was being indoctrinated with a complex sob story of Lost Cause lore—and now our bondage is being sanitized or overlooked for the sake of racial harmony. The media portrayal of the panic was a PTSD trigger. I thought of all the ways I had been erased as a descendant. Entrusted educators were given access to my mind and body and essentially did their damnedest to subdue me. I was ADOS writ large in the curriculum. Arkansas history is not repeating; it's rhyming in a stretched-out Southern cadence and drawl, "harmless" enough to disarm in daylight. Dreadful at sunset.
Looking back at my time in the Little Rock School District, I now view it as a stress test in decolonizing the mind. I want to tell my younger self that these attacks on your people, whether through active legislation (e.g., LEARNS Act) or neglect, will come. I want to look into his pensive and prematurely world-weary eyes and tell him, "I see you. And years from now you will make your own contribution to your community in the curriculum. Beyond anything they expect." I embrace my younger self in front of the obelisk and see it for what it truly is… compensation for their own inadequacies.