Opinion: Addressing racism is a white responsibility
Photo courtesy of Kachine Kulick
In the school and society class, I teach at The University of Colorado Boulder, I center Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian American counternarratives that animate the history of institutionalized oppression in schools which foregrounds the erasure in dominant narratives of schooling. I always hear similar questions from my students, such as, “Why have I never heard about this erasure until just now? Why is this being hidden from us? Wait, didn’t racism end after the civil rights movement?”
The superficial understanding of the history of racism in America exists beyond my classroom racism exists across the United States. According to an NPR poll inquiring about American attitudes towards race, white Americans are divided on if we need to continue systemic level change for Black Americans or if our country has already made the changes that are needed. This historical erasure is inte