May America Awake

One of our major school goals this year was to dig deeper into American history with the kids and really talk about the role that minorities played. We wanted our kids to be given more than a passing reference to Squanto, Sacagawea, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Our hope was to give all of us more information to work from so that we could better love our neighbor.

With that said, it’s made for some interesting school time discussions, especially because we have one child with an incredibly strong sense of right and wrong (ironically, the child who is also most often in trouble), who just doesn’t understand how people can be so horrible.

Why couldn’t they just be nice to each other?

Why would they treat someone that way?

Why would they think that?

And each time the answer has been: greed, money, power: sin.

We’ve talked about the good things America has done and the bad things. We’ve talked about good people who have done bad things, and bad people who also did good things. We’ve discussed the role of fear in race relations. We’ve talked about how what happened in the past is affecting what’s happening now. We’ve tied history to geography and science and theology and current events—and some of it has gone over their heads and some of it we haven’t had answers for. And some of it has just been hard, like this week when we read about the Trail of Tears, drawing connections to the Holocaust, right before a discussion of the George Floyd trial and questions from the kids that we tried to answer as honestly as we could.

When I came back to the States for my eighth grade year, I had a fairly good grasp of American history, thanks in large part to parents who were readers, political news junkies, and history buffs. I knew about slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Right’s Movement. But I knew it as history. So, imagine my shock when, after playing a soccer game, the opposing team refused to shake the hands of my two black teammates.

I’d experienced racism in Indonesia, but my understanding of America was that there racism had been dealt with in ancient history (way back when my parents were kids) and was dead and buried so that all Americans lived together in some kind of unified, color-blind utopia. I was naive. But I learned.

And I want to continue to learn.

And I want my kids to learn with me. As we often remind Littles, his name means “Defender”. This comes up when his brother is getting called names by the kid down the street, when his little sister gets told she’s too little to play, and especially now, as we prayerfully maneuver conversations about race. We want our kids to know their history, to know what really happened and why, and because of that to become adults who hold space open for those who have traditionally been denied a voice.

Earlier this week, I got to listen to an interview with author Trillia Newbell. One of the questions she was asked was about how we can encourage diverse voices with our writing. She answered by encouraging us to read diverse authors and listen to diverse voices. I do this in my own reading life, reading different genres but also reading books written by authors from different cultures, races, backgrounds, worldviews. I may not always like or agree with everything that I read, but I always learn something more, and my line of sight is always widened, even if only a little bit.

I hope that after this year, as our children have learned about Osceola, James Forten (whose quote I used in my title), Black Sparrow, York, Benjamin Banneker, Elizabeth Freeman, and many more, that their perspective has grown as well. “May America awake,” and may it start in our own selves and with our own families.

{I included pictures of our history curriculum this year. We have only made it halfway through and will finish the last five books next year—and I’m sure have many more challenging conversations. We’ve also looked for other resources to flesh out and balance what Joy Hakim has provided with The History of US, but I have loved her presentation of a many-faceted view of history and the way she provides space in the narrative so that minority voices can be directly quoted and their stories shared.}