Black History Month means empowerment. That provokes attacks on education in Kansas and U.S.

As Black History Month ends, consider what’s happening in legislatures nationally, including here in Kansas, to limit how it’s being taught. Black history can liberate and inspire and empower, and that’s why politicians from Tallahassee to Topeka continue to attack it.

The New York Times has reported that a new version of the AP African-American history class curriculum was being prepared “after heavy criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis.” The new version of the course would, among other things, include less focus on “critical race theory.”

Here in Kansas, lawmakers have introduced a bill allowing parents to opt their students out of activities or course materials parents deem objectionable.

Both measures stand in opposition to any school instruction veering from “feel-good” historical narratives of a race-less America.

For the record, however, race was an organizing principle of our society.

One of the hemisphere’s greatest historians, John Henrick Clark, once said “It is impossible to continue to oppress a consciously historical people.”

He wasn’t talking about rows of goose-stepping soldiers or parade processions of rockets and warheads. He said simply remaining consciously historical would make it impossible to keep you down.

Once people know themselves, Clark said, they will always know what to do about their situation. They will have sufficient orientation to navigate their world. They will have a historical true north on their cultural compass.

Culturally grounded people can prove difficult or impossible to control, and this is why history is being white-washed. This is why history in books is being replaced with nostalgia. This is why extremists continue to attack the 1619 Project. This is why book banning has seen a revival.

It’s no accident that when slavery is taught – if it is taught at all – we learn only about the slave trader and the slave owner. The slave breaker is intentionally left out of the discussion. Slave breakers attempted to torture the humanity out of their captives to make them fearful and compliant. Otherwise, the enslaved might realize they outnumbered their captors and free themselves.

Telling the truth about the “peculiar institution,” that its influence stretched from Maine to Mississippi, might upset our system, which is designed to produce inequality.

Similarly, what if we placed the term “school choice” under a historical lens?

We’re strangely proud of the Brown decision here in Kansas. Strange because our inclusion in Brown meant that we aimed racism at children here. But today’s “school choice” efforts here in Kansas and elsewhere – to steer public money into private schools – had their origins in Brown-era resistance to desegregation.

Southern governors vowed to never integrate and argued for “school choice.” This literally was a segregationist term. We can’t forget that. In fact, most school choice efforts since then have only meant more deeply entrenched segregation. Finland, which leads the world in education, did away with private schools to give all children an equal shot at success.

Without this historical context, today’s discussions about school choice might seem racially benign.

It’s not.

Nor were decisions more than a decade ago to discontinue Mexican American studies in Arizona.

Then Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne wrote a bill banning ethnic studies following a fiery speech in Tucson Public Schools from legendary activist Dolores Huerta, who criticized conservative policies aimed at Latinos. A story about the flap said when Horne brought his Latina deputy in for rebuttal, the students “turned their backs to her and put their fists in the air.”

Again, it is impossible to continue to oppress a consciously historical people.

This censoring of history is really about maintaining the fictitious societal narrative of a post-racial society as well as the status quo.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose award-winning book “Between the World and Me” has become a book-banning target for those on the right, said to understand the pull of this post-racial mythology, you also have to understand how some feel pushed.

Coates said, for example, that we can’t understand the vicious Southern “Redemption” campaign (lynching and segregation) without studying Black advances during Reconstruction. Similarly, we won’t understand the Reagan Revolution without understanding just how much many people on the right viewed the civil rights movement as an existential threat.

“The history of this country in terms of these backlashes, … they generally come and are generally most ferocious when the forces that most want to maintain the status quo are most afraid,” Coates said in a television interview earlier this year. “This (historical reality) disrupts conceptions of what America is and it frightens people, so you get the backlash.”

It’s fascinating how Harriet Tubman and others working on the Underground Railroad operated as subversives in helping to free enslaved people and how today, merely discussing that heroism also could get you labeled as a subversive.

Black History Month should liberate you.

That’s precisely what so many people don’t want.

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.