Last week I saw the movie, The 13th. If somehow you don’t know how to make sense of the wave of police brutality against African-Americans or reports on the mass incarceration of Black men, this documentary is the one to see. 

As a social studies teacher, I have become very aware of, as James Loewen put it, the “lies” history teachers tell.  And, by not always pointing out to my students that their history textbooks present a narrative of “our” history filled with skewed interpretations and omissions, I guess I’ve been lying too.

That said, it has become patently clear that the meta-narrative of American history found in our textbooks is a distortion of the historical record since it averts our gaze from the experiences of whole classes and groups of people and focuses instead on the actions of a few powerful people. The message that students usually hear is that…