The truth will set you free.

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” Frederick Douglass. Artwork by Kenya Ford.

This is a post about putting together Kenya’s twelfth-grade curriculum. And it is a post about Black Panther. As always, there are smarter and more experienced people who write about these things, but sometimes we need to hear about complex issues from our friends, and I am your friend.

I just watched Black Panther with my kids again. It was Isaac’s first time seeing it so I watched with him beside me, holding on in the scary parts, seeing new things this time. The movie is so good—a study in nuance and layers, in family and forgiveness and bad choices, with understanding and compassion. It is a study in empathy. Oof.

One moment gave me chills.

It’s when T’challa has had his throne taken from him by Erik, and he nearly dies but gets the purple flower in time. He goes to the ancestral plane and sees his father for a second time. This time he’s heartbroken, though. He knows that his father killed his brother and left his nephew behind, and his love for his father is mixed with disappointment and sorrow over his actions.

“Why did you leave the boy?” he asks. (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember exactly.)

“He was the truth I chose to omit,” his father says.

“Now he is a monster of our own making.”

His was the truth I chose to omit.

We cannot omit the truth of history.

If we don’t understand history, we can’t understand the present.

We can’t understand the trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael, who shot Ahmaud Arbery, or why it is so painful. If we don’t know that in Georgia, where Arbery lived, there were 492 lynchings of Black people between the years of 1882 and 1968, more than any state but Mississippi, we cannot understand the nuance of two white men taking it on themselves to apprehend a Black man jogging in a suburban neighborhood.

To understand, we have to know what lynching was- the accusation and killing of a person without due process, often starting with a dubious criminal charge. This charge could be anything, even vagrancy or robbery providing the catalyst for killing without a verdict.

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery was not right or defensible. The men who committed the crime were echoing a kind of injustice that echoes back through centuries, a kind of violence and fear that were woven into life for Black people in those days.

If we don’t understand history, we can’t understand the collection of laws, days, books, studies, and choices that have made it dangerous for a Black man to run through a neighborhood, or explore an empty construction site. Or why it is that the men were not arrested for two months, and when they were, it was the result of enormous public outcry.

We can’t omit the truth, even if the backlash against the outcry of last summer has transformed the ideals of justice into a culture war.

This is no culture war, I believe we are being beckoned into the Beloved Community, as Dr. King called it, a holy place where the hope is that everyone can live without the extra burden of being less than, less worthy to fight for, less worthy of justice, “a nation and world society at peace with itself,” as John Lewis wrote. We will become whole when we face the past. The truth will set us free. When we tie ourselves to ideas of the past that do not include the sins of our ancestors, we put ourselves in bondage. But turning to look straight at these things and holding deep sorrow and mourning changes us, summons us, calls us into the Beloved Community, anchoring our convictions.

So. I am putting Kenya’s school curriculum together for the next year, and though the curriculum we use has had many, many good books included, though it is literature-based and global in perspective, I am more careful these days about what they recommend.

I will not be ordering Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance. I’ll swap that one out for some other books, maybe a few others. And though I did read the book Amos Fortune (in a past year) to our older children, I will not read it to my younger children. It outraged us with its descriptions of a “good slave,” and though I used it as a prompt for an essay about whether Amos Fortune had a good life according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (consensus was: he didn’t) and though I kept saying, “We have to understand that this comes from a white woman in the fifties, that’s why the perspective is so off,” now I feel differently.

I still think the writers of these books were doing what they knew how to do.

But this is why conversations about history matter so much. This is why, in all the outrage about teaching racial history in schools, we need to be more determined than ever to teach our children the truth. Because back when these books were written, books written by Black people who had actually experienced slavery were not published.

The accounts we got came from the imaginations of people who softened the experiences of the enslaved to ensure that white people were still held in the best light. But now we have the very real privilege of reading from sources who were Black enslaved people, or Black abolitionists, and these sources deliver truth that will burn us but will set us free.

So, in addition to the beautiful books from around the world that our curriculum contains, I will buy Jasmine Holmes’ “Carved in Ebony, Lessons from the Black Women who Shape us,” for Kenya’s school year. And I will keep looking through Heritage Mom’s collection of books for the younger kids. And I will look for books, any books, that are unflinching in their views on slavery and its repercussions and last gasp clutch on a system that wants some people to benefit while others pay.

Truth in the shape of stories is a gift we offer our children, who deserve it. All of our children need to have their ancestors represented, and these will be complex representations, but we can face the past with love, holding the identity of being no more or less than what we are: creatures, created beings who are not miniature gods, who are contingent on all the love and goodness that keeps flowing out of God’s desire for our good.

We do our children a disservice if we think they will only feel bad and that we need to shelter them from our ancestral histories. These are the moments when they learn that they have power and that they can do good things with their power, whatever that ends up being, in the Beloved Community.

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The amazing portrait of Frederick Douglass above is by my gifted artist daughter, Kenya Ford.