Why Teach Jim Crow?
When I speak, particularly during Black History Month, and we go all the way back to the 400- or 500-year experience of slavery, I always ask the question: what lessons have we learned from our history? Because I end it with a pair of handcuffs that might have been used in one of those enslavement forts 500, 400, 300 years ago and with a pair of police handcuffs today. What’s changed? Now, there are too many of our youngsters that are symbolized by these handcuffs who are in prison. What have we as adults given them to change them? I write in my book Ancestor’s Wisdom, that this is the only place that says we want to educate our youth so that they don’t do. And, there’s your answer right there: they don’t do what we’ve done. We want to educate our youth so they don’t have to go through what we have. But the white supremacy system is alive and well in the world. Other societies train their adults to transcend and transform, so that they hand the youth a world that is more just and more
