Indiana Proves Once Again It Is America's A** Hole

A public school in Indiana is giving parents the option of opting out of Black History Month for their children.

In recent months, conservatives have falsely accused some schools of teaching Critical Race Theory and said that white children should not be made to feel guilty about the color of their skin.

Sprunica Elementary School in Nineveh, Indiana has taken the unusual step of giving parents the option to cancel Black History Month lessons altogether.

...White then offered the parents the option to remove their children from the Black History Month lesson.

"If you would like to opt out your child for receiving these lessons, then sign the form below and have your child return it to the school to give to the teacher," the letter says.

Source

I wonder if black children can opt out of white history that is taught the rest of the school year?

Indiana is the state that is now forcing its teachers to indoctrinate their students with the concept that socialism, communism, and Marxism are "invalid" social and economic theories and are "contrary to American values" and "inherently evil."

A major element of the conservitard faux outrage about CRT is a failure to distinguish between being "taught" something and being taught about something. If we teach our students about Naziism, for example, that's not the same as, say, teaching them good manners. So teaching them about CRT--something that almost never happens short of the university level BTW--doesn't mean that we're trying to persuade/force them to adhere to it. Nor are we doing so by teaching them about socialism, communism, or Marxism.

And I should point out that in many schools, including a goodly number of so-called secular ones, children are aggressively taught religion (of one flavor or another) and are never told that it's just one way of looking at the world and a person has the right to believe it or not.

Mark, is Indiana really that medieval, or is this just happening in the Podunk parts of the state?

It is really backward and medieval. 

Can't we just teach history plain and simple without labeling it?  Why does it have to be white or black history?  The cirriculum should be approved by the school board.  If the community doesn't like what they are approving, vote them out.  That is what is going on here in WI.  If you don't like your school district, move or get it changed at the board level but that takes time obviously you may not have. 

Until then, can't we just simply call it "history"?  

I'm actually trying to be in the middle on this one and taking a common sense approach to it.  

That's just it.  Republicans don't want to teach history. They want to teach propaganda rather than the uncomfortable truths of how African Americans have been historically treated in the country.

1. Parents shouldn't dictate what their students are taught about--or taught. School teachers and administrators are professionals. They know more than Clem and Wilma Cornpone about teaching. It's odd, because almost no one tries to intervene in, say, their child's medical care and tell the doctor what medications he should be prescribing.

2. "Black history" is a subgenre of "history," just like "American history" or "the history of transportation." The reason why black history exists as a subgenre is that the contributions of black people to American society have historically been overlooked. I personally have learned about dozens of highly significant events and individuals that had they involved white people, would have had their own chapters in American history books.

3. If white parents don't want their children to learn about black history, I think that at a minimum, they should be required to come up with good-faith, common-sense objections. I'm not buying any arguments that it's somehow unimportant or tangential. To cite a demographic that's roughly comparable in significance, I doubt that anyone would object to, say, a course on Scandinavian-American history. So this smells like racism, and I doubt anyone can justify it without twisting themselves into moral and legal knots.

4. And yeah, I think we as a nation need to confront and acknowledge our sometimes awful history, especially since its repercussions are still being felt today: Electoral College. Income inequality. Gerrymandering. Voting rights. Good ol' fashioned American racial discrimination and bias. The demonizing of immigrants. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Ignoring or whitewashing it won't make it go away.

I'm pretty sure you, like me. learned White History. Did you ever learn that the biggest race riot in our history, the Tulsa Race Massacre, occurred when white citizens with the encouragement of their city fathers in 1920, attacked, burned, and murdered to destroy the prosperous "Black Wall Street?" 

Another famous race riot you never heard about in school was the Zoot Suit Riot, when white soldiers, marines, and off-duty cops attacked Mexican Americans for days on end.

And how were you taught to refer to the losers in the Civil War? Confederates and Rebels, right? When by every definition they were anti-American Traitors.

That's White History. You know, the one you learned in school.

I can't argue much of that.  And no, I didn't learn many of those.  I'm in no way on expert an any of this but I feel the cirrculum in almost all schools is dreadfully outdated with the times.  Shouldn't there be more of an emphasis put on simple reading and writing along with general personal finance and computer science.  Some of the stuff at my daughter's HS that they have as electives should be requirements and stuff they have as requirements is outdated crap. (not all, just some)  She'll say, dad when am I ever going to need this and I honestly want to say "never."  Kevin probably has more perspective in this area.  I just see a ton of newbies coming into college not ready for it and even more scary, college graduates coming into the real life and not ready for it.  No idea how a credit card or mortgage work.  No idea how to file taxes or how that works.  401K, etc.  No idea how to use Excel or Word, etc.  

Funny (not so funny) I first learned about the Tulsa massacre when I watched the "watchmen" series on HBO a few years ago.    That's a totally awesome series, by the way.       

they re-enacted the Tulsa thing and it motivated me to go learn about it,   I was 49 years old when 8 first learned about it

Here's another one: the Port Chicago disaster of 1944. A Navy crew of mostly African Americans was assigned to loading ammo ships on this port to the east of San Francisco. There was an explosion, and 320 people were killed--2/3 of whom were African American. The extremely dangerous task of actually handling and loading the ammo was assigned exclusively to them. However, they received no training, which was found to be a major cause of the explosion.

The surviving African Americans in the unit were quickly reassigned to nearby Mare Island and once again tasked with loading ammo ships. However, still having received no training, they mutinied and refused to handle the ammo. Most of them were dishonorably discharged without pay. However, 50 of them were sentenced to 8-15 years at hard labor, though two years later, all were given clemency.

I grew up maybe 20 miles away from the site of this disaster and never heard about it until quite recently. There was no memorial until the 50th anniversary of the explosion: 1994.