Teaching Black History In Church

LEAVE IT TO FLORIDA. Or maybe Texas, the two bright red retro states, or rather, reprobate states. In Florida, it is illegal to teach accurate African-American history in public schools. I am not precisely conversant with the actul piece of legislation. Surely to gooendess it does not actually totally prohibit any mention or talk of African-Americans, or their history or culture in Florida publics schools; that might create some very awkward situations - but, evidently, to teach the real, brutal, horrible history of African-Americans is simply not allowed in Florida, because to do so would risk giving white students an inferiority comples, stress, anxiety, and guilt about the actions their ancestors took to harm Africans. Crazy as it sounds, that is exactly the usual justification of the law you will get from conservatives in Florida, or anywhere. I Florida schools, students are being tuaght that slavery was not all bad, that it afforded its participants many opportunites, and was there at least somewhat justfifiable, because ti brought people out of darnkess and poverty in Africa and gave them a chance for constructive work in America, an opportunity to learn new skills for future benefit, and bet of all, it gave the enslaved an opportunity to learn the one true religion, the Christian religion, and to be saved by Jesus Christ, just like white people. Children in Florida, and probably in Texas, (and how long iuntil all over the country?) are being taught this nonsense? We are soon going to have a generation of young adults who have no idea about American history, about the truth of the suffering of minorities, or probably any other kind of history. In Florida, as throughout these United States, churches tend to be racially segregated. In Florida's "black" churches, consideration is being given to the possibility of teaching the children, in church, the accurate version of African-American history which they need to know, but which they never will if left to the public schools. They need to learn, for instance, that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, good about slavery. A lady parishoner pointed out that in church, people, particularly children, are already taught many, many things. They are taught how to live their lives, how to treat other people. They are taught what's in the Bible, and a whole host of other things. Church is, at least in part, a place to learn, a place of education. So, why not make it more complete, by filling in the education which is now being withheld from people by the public schools, which have, tragically, been taken over and changed by America's far right wing religious fanatic conservatives? So far, only places like Florida and Texas have been so seriuosly infected, and may they be the last. When one conisders the book banning, the anti-LGBTQ attitudes of conservatives regarding education, and all the other regressive measures now being legislated and implemented by conservatives in communities all over America, one realizes that it is urgently necessary to resist and reverse this deplorable trend. We do not want to take America back to a time when gay people hid in closets, or went to prison, and black people were deprived of real education, and freedom of religion was almost nonexistant. And that is the kind of America the extreme far right, Trump movement included, wants to force upon us. We must not let them.