Public School Education is Failing Us

Dear Ms. Tea Hunter,

Thank you for educating people about what really happened in 1865 after slavery “ended.” I think too many people mistakenly believe that once Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation African Americans could just start living like white people with fair pay and equal opportunities. It’s somewhat understandable why they would think this because of the way American history is taught in high schools. Speaking from personal experience, classes like AP United States History only briefly discuss sharecropping when it comes to the Reconstruction era. They do not go into any detail about the conditions which newly freed people have to live in. Yet, for too many people, high school is the last time they will ever learn about slavery. And honestly, I think that’s how public education systems want to keep it. I say this because it seems like the majority culture is fine with acknowledging that slavery and sharecropping and inequality happened, but they do not deem it necessary to go into detail about how badly they intentionally and absolutely wrecked the lives of whole races within our country. This goes beyond just how they damaged African American society but the societies of other races such as Chinese Americans and Native Americans. This also goes beyond how the majority culture acted in the past; the repercussions of slavery and segregation still affect minority groups to this day. For my political science class, I had to research national education statistics of minority groups. I was appalled and disappointed with how only 22.9% of Black Americans and 15.9% of Hispanics had bachelor’s degree or more. I thought, “that's it?” This is especially astonishing when compared to the statistics for White Americans, which was 93.3%. The drastic difference between these numbers cannot come from the common misconception of “laziness” that too many people believe to be a common truth about minority groups. These statistics exist because of the remaining effects of slavery through racial discrimination and enduring misconceptions about how difficult it has been for African Americans to recover from slavery. This is why literature such as your own should be more widely distributed across America. Then, maybe more Americans will understand the struggles of being oppressed in the land of “opportunity.”

Sincerely,

Ruthie Lewis