Teaching Black history in schools remains elective rather than required

Evidence

Du Bois had described the same experience I would endure some five decades later in high school. But perhaps new generations will tell a different story. Last year, after many years without any courses dedicated to Black history, my old high school began once again offering “The African American Experience.” Our history is still optional: it remains an elective. But in that class, students now study the work of a girl from Waterloo who took that course all those years ago and would remain forever changed by the date 1619. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 69

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the origin-story-as-infrastructure theme: the fact that African American history remains an elective, not core curriculum, is the institutional embodiment of treating Black history as peripheral rather than foundational.
• DEEPTHINKING: flagged by the selector, no supporting note recorded
• XREF: connects to: Heroic national history curricula erase the categories needed to claim racial redress — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 137