Those who pretend race does not matter in a nation where the racial wealth gap between Black and White people has remained unchanged for half a century, where Black women are three times as likely as White women to die of maternal mortality, Black people are three times as likely to be killed by police, and the homeownership gap between Black and White people is wider “today than it was over 50 years ago,” are condemning Black Americans to second-class citizenship. This is why many conservatives are fighting to remove Black history from the classroom. They don’t want the average American to connect the dots, to understand that White people created a racial hierarchy in this country through the chattel slavery system, maintained it through the Jim Crow era through discriminatory laws, and opposed the expansion of civil rights to Black Americans because then they’d be able to put our current sociopolitical environment into context. They’d see the truth, that color-blind ideology is heartless in a nation riddled with racial inequities.
Dr. Allison Wiltz
