A Great Leap Backwards

Brown vs. Board of Education. The civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King.

Were they all about the elimination of the white supremacy movement in order to replace it with black racism against whites?

Or were they fighting to eliminate the same segregation that is now being touted as the best to address the needs of different students?

In Oberlin, Ohio, local school board president Tony Marshall argues that only black high school teachers should teach "black history." Non-black educators may be able to teach black students to write well, conduct research, and digest accurate facts and information. But arming black students with the same fundamentals that every other student needs to succeed is apparently not what Mr. Marshall wants for his kids: "A black teacher brings an experience and understanding of being black that no else can bring."

If Mr. Marshall had to choose between hiring white historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and black rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, in other words, he would rather have the pot-smoking, profanity-spewing, gang-banging convicted felon in the classroom because of Snoop's skin-deep "experience and understanding."

Phyllis Yarber Hogan, a member of something called the Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress, agrees: "When you talk about slavery," she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer last week, "students need to understand it is not our fault. Our ancestors did nothing wrong to be enslaved. How do you work through that when the person teaching it is the same type of person who did the enslaving?"

Now is that the kind of spirit of understanding that the civil rights movement was trying to foster? Is this representative of the equality that so many people strove so hard for?

I'm sorry but I don't buy into this "black history" or "any-racial-group-here history" stuff. In school they should teach, maybe, three kinds of history: state history, US history, and world history. Those are what bind all of us as Americans.

It is wrong to Balkanize our kids through the elevation of some, while minimizing or disparaging the contributions of others.

And to declare a teacher unqualified to teach our history - not your history or my history, but the one that binds us all - because of their skin color, well that's just racist.

Will we need one teacher to teach white history, a second to teach black history, a third to teach Asian-American history, a fourth to teach male history, a fifth to teach women's history, a sixth to teach alternative religious history, a seventh to teach hippie history, etc? And what happens if we get something that is both black history and women's history? Will we need to get a black female to teach that?

It's ludicrous. A kid could end up hearing from five or six different teachers, just to get the same overview of WWII that I got from my one American History teacher. And he probably wouldn't know anywhere near as much about the war, except that a bunch of people got treated poorly and even killed to fight a nutty white guy who was alleged (but not proven to everyone's satisfaction) to have been killing an un-PC protected religious cult which is considered by some to a danger to world society.

Racial specialization of history is nuts. We don't need more history teachers, we need more good history teachers. Ones that know how to inspire thought and introspection. Ones that know how to make history interesting. A good history teacher can foster learning even with topics on which he is not of the identical racial makeup as a participant in the historical event.

You want to teach about Rosewood? Fine. But you don't need a black teacher to teach it. Want to teach about the Japanese-American interment camps of WWII? Great. But you don't need to have a Japanese-American teacher to explain the reasons or the horrors.

Whites are unqualified to teach blacks. Sounds like a great leap forward into the past to me.