To be seen and not learned, “Everyone wants to be black but no one wants to be black”
Op-By: Melissa S. Thomas, Graduate Student of Social Work at Our Lady of the Lake University, Social Policy Class.
There is a phrase that has been floating around the Black community for a little while now that came from a long-tenured comedian. The phrase goes “Everybody wants to be Black, but no one wants to be Black.” That it is fine to take on African American culture, the dancing, the music, the bravado, but we can deal without all the negativity and history that is the foundation of what it is. The passing of House Bill 3979 is an example of Texas “not wanting to be Black.” It is destroying the education that our children need to aid in the understanding of what it means to be Black. They are taking our history and removing it from the books making us in existence, a historical literary holocaust. According to a 2020 article from the National School Board Association:
“In 2018, 90% of Black students had home internet access. However, this percentage was lower than their peers who were Asian (98%) and white (96%). Among Black 3- to 18-year-olds, 11% had home internet access only through a smartphone, compared with only 2% among Asian and 3% among white students. Among Black students without home internet access, 39% said that it was because the internet was too expensive, suggesting that their families could not afford it. This percentage for Black students was much higher than that for White students.” (Cai, 2020)
If this law continues to have life, how will many of our students learn about their history if they can’t afford to do it at home and the free public school system denies them access? The problem is that the public and our lawmakers keep trying to see things in black and white, to include the people, to see the education of our students on African American topics as a “woke” movement and not a celebration of perseverance and accomplishments.
Though it is a national holiday now, why don’t we celebrate Juneteenth like we celebrate the 4th of July? Why don’t we learn about Benjamin Banneker the same way we learn about Benjamin Franklin? We omit some of the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and how he felt about African Americans but treat Fred Hampton as a terrorist when he was advocating for African Americans to stand up for themselves. The school system has hidden or altered the history of African Americans for so long, now they want to outright get rid of it. When is enough, enough? African Americans have spent the better part of 500 years being tortured, maimed, crippled, and separated from our people. We created new people and embraced a country that didn’t want us here but didn’t want to see us go. Now they have invented new ways to continue the same old practices of torture, maiming, crippling, and separation and it is being done through the removal of our history where it would hurt the most, with the children. It is time for us to move as a people and as a society to ensure that the facts of who we are and what we have been through are told. In Texas that starts now with the removal of the law that is House Bill 3979.
