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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31095 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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This is why the right loses. It finds itself in a hair splitting debate which it eventually loses. Trying to make 'more accurate' African history courses is not answer. The answer is such courses should not exist at all.

Why not? If people are interested, then I think these courses should be offered as electives.

Think you are forgetting the amount of education of a high school grad even one going to an elite school.

Africans just haven’t figured into the big world events that high school kids don’t know. They’ve had zero influence on major ideologies, political systems, communism versus capitalism etc. The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.

The former I think high school kids need training in bigger things or the latter is just woke training.

This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.

The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.

It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.

Ok so tell me what important things have African Americans done?

Also we are talking high school history not college level. High School still has a need to teach basic things like why Democracy is important and how it developed etc. We aren’t talking about a college elective.

Also it’s not motte appropriate to say someone has no history education. Which isn’t true but you need to flesh out what you mean by that.

Ok so tell me what important things have African Americans done?

Well for starters until the Civil War they formed the basis of one half of the country's economic system, and thereafter were a crucial element in industrialisation. And aside from African-Americans as a group, there are countless individuals who are easily worthy of inclusion in any high school history education.

Also we are talking high school history not college level

Well race is one of the most important themes in American history across many centuries; even in high school that seems like a reasonable basis for an elective course; it's not compulsory after all.

So you can’t even name one important thing African Americans did and accused me of not knowing history?

Being a day laborer (farmer/factory worker) is no different than being a cow in the field. We don’t study horses in history class.

Race literally doesn’t matter to me. It’s not an important thing.

The fact that they were regarded as no different than a cow in a field in a nation that claimed to be for liberty is arguably a huge deal that deserves plenty of attention no?

Nobody here is saying it shouldn’t be a part of an American history course. The point is there’s not a lot of world changing achievements coming from African American history.

And the cow in a field reference I would also use to describe Russian serfs or Irish peasants or basically anyone whose existence was much more than subsistence farming. In history you study kings not peasants.

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