Happy Black History Month! All month long I’ve been centering African-American contributions to the history of the United States and beyond!
In my last Black History Month episode today, I’m talking about ways parents and other adults who play significant roles in children’s lives can share the history and human experience of the African and African American diaspora with kids all year round. Stick around until the end to hear about the everyday ways you can teach kids to dismantle anti-Blackness, and how you can challenge yourself to create an anti-racist family culture.
Help kids stay grounded in and take inspiration from the ways the enslaved persisted, resisted, and endured.
Not only is the acknowledgment of Black history and culture relegated to a single month, but so often the discussion of the history of Black people in America is limited to enslavement, trauma, and oppression. While we can never forget the brutality of the system of enslavement and its influence on present-day life, it’s important to give kids more context. The African American experience does involve historical trauma, but it also involves survival, resistance, resilience and a globally emulated culture that thrived and continues to thrive within the destructive lie of racial hierarchies of both past and present.
Here are 6 ways to share Black history with children 365 days a year!
1. Offer accurate information about the business of enslavement
Kids do need to be given real information about how enslavement worked. They should be told about the horrors of kidnapping, forcible transport, and the racism that had to be developed because the culture and system of enslavement depended on the dehumanization of Black people. It needed to be a condition from which there was no escape—generations of people were born into it. It required making it illegal for Black people to learn to read, lest they become educated about what was happening to them or get ideas on how to stop it. It depended on the separation of families, sexual violence, and violent punishment to maintain control. It’s important not to gloss over these atrocities and the historical and generational trauma that reverberates in African American communities to this day.
2. Highlight African American survival despite oppression
In the midst of control by force, exploitation, and profound brutality, African Americans still went on to create one of the most vibrant cultures in the world. African Americans have made outstanding achievements in literature, design, science, music, philosophy, fashion, agriculture, education, medicine, dance, and beyond. When the business of enslavement was abolished, freed Black people worked to reunite with family members from whom they were separated, they registered to vote, and they sought to legitimize their relationships through marriage.
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