When I was growing up in Harlem in the ‘90s, Black history wasn’t a special elective or a watered-down February module — it was the air I breathed. My elementary school was named after Henry Highland Garnet, the abolitionist minister who addressed Congress in 1865. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was around the corner. When I was in a bad car accident, my physical therapy sessions took place on Striver’s Row — one of Harlem’s most famous enclaves of Black excellence. I took dance and drama classes on the same site where the original Cotton Club once pulsed with live jazz. None of this felt remarkable at the time. I was a kid, and it was just my neighborhood. When I taught in Prince George’s County, Maryland—one of the wealthiest Black counties in the country—students got layered Black history woven into nearly every subject. As an adult who now spends more time outside of predominantly Black communities, I’ve come to realize just how much of a privilege that was and still is. In 2025, schools failing Black history isn’t a hypothetical — it’s happening in real time.
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The Slow Erasure in Real Time
Across the country, the teaching of Black history is under attack. Many parents and advocates say they don’t trust schools to do it justice — and for good reason. Curriculum standards there have included language suggesting enslaved people “developed skills” for their benefit, a framing that educators and historians have widely condemned as misleading and harmful.
Florida has been ground zero for bans on the AP African American Studies course, with South Carolina following suit in restricting content tied to race, gender, and systemic inequality. The effect is measurable: one study found 25% of teachers have altered their materials to avoid being in conflict with vague state laws.
These incidents are part of a national trend. From book bans to “patriotic education” mandates, we’re seeing a coordinated push to sanitize American history by stripping out uncomfortable truths about race. When the public record gets scrubbed, the casualties are our children’s understanding of themselves and their place in the world.
Why It Matters Who Tells the Story
![The Whitewashing Of Black History Is Happening In Real Time — And We Can’t Wait For Schools To Fix It [Op-Ed]](https://madamenoire.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2025/08/17548565880966.jpeg?w=338&strip=all&quality=80 "The Whitewashing Of Black History Is Happening In Real Time — And We Can’t Wait For Schools To Fix It [Op-Ed]")
Taylor Cassidy, TikTok creator of the viral series Fast Black History and author of the forthcoming Black History Is Your History / Source: Adam Hendershott
When I was a student, Black history wasn’t something you had to go hunting for. It was in the names of our streets, the murals on our walls, and the community griots who could tell you about it firsthand. My foundation was laid by educators, neighbors, and community institutions who understood that history is what we choose to remember.
Not everyone has that safety net. In many places, kids’ only exposure to Black history is whatever the state has approved. If that version is stripped of agency, joy, and complexity, it can distort how they see themselves. As Taylor Cassidy — TikTok creator of the viral series Fast Black History and author of the forthcoming Black History Is Your History — shared with MadameNoire in a recent chat, “In the textbooks I learned from growing up, our humanity was reduced to service, suffering, and silence.” Cassidy, 22, started making her one-minute history lessons in high school after realizing how little her peers knew. She recalls learning that George Washington Carver didn’t invent peanut butter — a fact she’d been taught by a qualified teacher in first grade. That moment was a red flag: if something so basic was wrong, what else had been distorted or erased?
Now with more than 2.2 million TikTok followers and a debut book dropping October 14 from Simon & Schuster/Atheneum, she’s turned her knack for witty, fast-paced storytelling into a cultural force. Her work is proof that when schools fall short, young people are finding new ways to teach themselves and each other.
The Joy Missing From the Lesson Plans
One of Cassidy’s biggest critiques of the school curriculum is that Black history is usually framed through the lens of slavery and trauma, with little focus on the victories, inventions, and leadership that have shaped the U.S. since 1776. She remembers being shocked that Claudette Colvin — a teenager who refused to give up her bus seat months before Rosa Parks — was left out of the narrative.
For Cassidy, that omission was a missed opportunity. “Change doesn’t have an age requirement,” she says. “Claudette’s story could inspire students to see themselves as capable of making history now.”
She’s not wrong. When history is taught only as a record of Black pain, it robs students of seeing themselves as protagonists. It also reinforces the myth that Black people’s contributions to this country began in chains and ended with the Civil Rights Movement, which is a dangerously incomplete picture.
Why Representation in Curriculum Matters
Sharif El-Mekki, founder of the Center for Black Educator Development, says the whitewashing of Black history is inseparable from the lack of Black educators in the system. “When you have a teaching force that’s nearly 80% white, it impacts what’s prioritized, how it’s taught, and whether students see themselves reflected,” El-Mekki told Axios.
Research backs him up: studies show that students of all races benefit academically and socially from having Black teachers, but the impact is especially profound for Black students. A Johns Hopkins University study found that low-income Black students who had at least one Black teacher in grades 3 through 5 were 29% less likely to drop out of high school and 18% more likely to express interest in college. A Brookings Institution analysis found similar results, showing that Black students with one Black teacher by third grade were 7% more likely to graduate and 13% more likely to enroll in college—figures that jumped to 32% with two Black teachers. In curriculum terms, it means having someone in the classroom who won’t hesitate to connect Phillis Wheatley’s poetry to today’s spoken word scene, or to draw a line from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary Afrofuturism.
Great Job Thiy Parks & the Team @ MadameNoire Source link for sharing this story.
