Chara Dixon and Keishana Barnes want Tennessee schools to teach their children about slavery, the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement. They both believe that educators should roll out lessons about U.S. history in an age-appropriate manner.
But the two women have very different ideas about the right age for those lessons, stemming in large part from their personal experiences, including how they’re raising their children.
Dixon, who was born in Thailand and now lives in the predominantly white town of Franklin, believes her son was too young last year to delve into a new reading curriculum that acknowledged America’s complicated racial history. She says her then-8-year-old, whom she describes as a “kind and sensitive” child of mixed race, became increasingly despondent over second-grade reading lessons that included historical stories about angry white mobs taunting and sometimes attacking Black heroes of the civil rights movement.
(READ MORE: Politics are still shaping Chattanooga-area public schools)
Barnes, a 20-year educator who is Black and lives in Memphis – where nearly 65% of the population is African American – welcomes school lessons beginning in kindergarten to teach about the nation’s past and present racial struggles. Even before her three children began school, she and her husband told them that color and class have created unjust systems that linger today. While they don’t share more about the horrors of slavery than they think their children can understand, they try to answer their questions about what it meant when an enslaved person was not allowed to be in charge of their own body.