James Baldwin once asked, "It's taken my father's time, my mother's time … my niece's and my nephew's time. How much time do you want for your progress?"
Katherine Kersten now insists we take our children's time as well ("Woke revolution looms for schools," Opinion Exchange, Feb. 7).
Blatant fearmongering veiled as patriotism and concern for students cannot stand. As a member of the Social Studies Standards Committee — and as a member of a "demographic special interest group," to quote Kersten — I feel compelled to respond.
Across this country, those in the global majority routinely have been cast as tertiary characters in the predominantly Euro-American narrative of history textbooks. This is also mirrored in our current state standards, through clear sanitizations of colonialism and the historical racist roots of our country, as evidenced by the fact that the word racism only appears twice, and in both instances referring to the time period of 1870-1920.
While slavery appears more often, it is often referred to either as just "one reason" for the Civil War or as an "economic system."
Research shows that the overwhelming predominance of Euro-American perspectives leads many Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) students to disengage from academics.
However, according to Katherine, we are "scandalously misinformed."
Kersten goes further and makes the accusation that the work the committee is engaged in is "directly contradicting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s colorblind ideal." Katherine's interpretation of history is incorrect, and is a grave mischaracterization of King, who dreamed of a United States in which all people were created equal and were not judged by the color of their skin. King never advocated for our Black and brown communities to abdicate and erase our diversity or similarly not recognize and acknowledge whiteness.