The Heart of the Matter: The Current Great Awakening

It’s Valentine’s Day and the roses and boxes of chocolates are all overpriced and selling fast. No one is complaining about this inflation at the supermarket or the grocery store of political debate.  V-Day, as the new feminists are now calling it, and “wokeness” are being attacked as a ritual by Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as we celebrate Black History Month. Is this the second McCarthyism resurrected from the ashes of the 1950s? (If you aren’t old enough to remember McCarthyism or your history teachers just forgot that part, look it up on Wikipedia.) This is like a retread of tired old history. It’s neo-fascism by any other name and the censoring of  AP African American Studies curricula nationally exemplifies it. What’s this got to do with your local high school?

It’s been nearly 70 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Separate but Equal Doctrine put forth in the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson, was unconstitutional.  In the intervening years, integrated schools helped reduce racial achievement gaps and encourage critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. Further, attending a diverse school also helps reduce racial bias and counter stereotypes, and makes students more likely to seek out integrated settings later in life.

By equalizing higher education, there has been an increase in Black academics studying race and racism in America and there is now a vast body of work, including the dreaded Critical Race Theory, that even DeSantis and McCarthy misunderstand and attack as “wokism.” (See Paul Rosenberg’s article this issue, “African American Studies Are American Studies — Nothing Proves It More Than the Backlash.”)

 The recent “great awakening” occurred after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020. You’ll recall there were a series of both peaceful protests and riots against police brutality and racism that began as his murder was recorded by a bystander whose video  was shared on social media where it went viral. What happened next, unlike with the Watts Riots or the Rodney King uprising, is that a multi-ethnic, multi-generational set of protests exploded nationwide and internationally. This time was different.

What is at contention between the so-called woke academics and the DeSantises of America is the idea that Black history is American history and that the history of Black and white America are interlocked in some very integral ways that don’t get talked about at the dinner table or at the chamber of commerce cocktail mixer. Hell, when I was in high school, there weren’t any Black kids there, and second, when African American studies became a subject, I believed it was only for African Americans, not me. The intervening years have changed all of this and through my own life experiences and readings, I have come to believe that the critical parts of the American story that must be taught, include slavery, the American Civil War, the postwar Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It is about the juncture of freedom, liberty, and justice and what these ideas actually mean.

We are not the first generation in this nation to wrestle with this conflict and probably won’t be the last, but what I gleaned from the six-part series