My wish in life is that we could live in a world where race doesn’t matter. However, we don’t. We live in a world where white workers make 37% more than a typical Black worker, white people are 60% more likely to have health insurance, only 2.8% of Black people and Latinos are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and Black people are shot by police at twice the rate of white people.
The only solution I know to this problem that has plagued our country since its founding is to educate myself. I was a history major in college and took classes on Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, African American history and Latin American history. I also get to continue to learn and educate myself through books, documentaries and movies.
None of those things made me feel bad about myself or my country. What it has done is make me want to make the world better. It has made me sensitive to the injustices that other people face. It has made me work to be better and understand my privilege.
The argument that learning about our nation’s history will somehow make white kids feel bad about themselves is just not true. I think it will make us better citizens, better neighbors and workers for justice. Consider that only 8% of college kids can identify slavery as one of the causes of the Civil War or that only 10% of our current curriculum celebrates the contributions of Black Americans.
What do our kids really learn about Black history? That once there was slavery, but Abraham Lincoln solved that problem. That once there were some racial problems, but Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks solved that problem.
Recently, I have been helping to lead a book club for people who want to learn more about racism and how to dismantle it. I am amazed at the number of people in that group who grew up in the Civil Rights era but don’t know the history. They say that they didn’t know how bad it was, or what was going on. They didn’t know about Fannie Lou Hammer, the freedom summer, the white citizens groups formed to stop people from voting, and sharecropping.
It is amazing to me how much I don’t know about the history of people who lived in this country. People who fought for this country by demanding that they be treated as equals. I didn’t realize how brutal the response was from supposed God-loving white people.
If we don’t know our history how can we work to make things better? How can we know what is right? I am going to assume that the people who are proposing HB 544 have the same goal as me, to live in a world where race doesn’t matter. However, I would ask them to consider that those of us who are against this bill also want the same thing. That we don’t want white people to feel guilty, we want them to know the truth and want to change it so that together we can make the world we all want.
I didn’t become a history teacher, instead, I became a pastor. In my faith, change does not happen without the truth. It does not happen without repentance and forgiveness. Repentance is not a bad thing. It is a good and cleansing thing. It helps us to move past our past and into a new future.
I hope that we continue to learn about our past and celebrate the good and repent of our mistakes. I hope that we can together work to end racism and live in a world where race doesn’t matter. I ask you to vote against HB 544 because learning about that past is what helps us to know the truth and move into a better future
(The Rev. Jonathan Hopkins lives in Concord.)