ATLANTA — Historian and writer Ibram X. Kendi learned as an adult what he hopes his young daughter and all children of color to learn from birth: They are not the racial problem. No racial group has more because they are more. No racial group has less because they are less.
New laws, including Georgia's ban on teaching divisive concepts, undermine the ability to explain to children, as Kendi did, for example, to his own perplexed daughter, why there were few Black and brown faces at a medical school graduation. It was not a complex explanation — his daughter is only 6 — but it stressed that Black and brown graduates were underrepresented not because they had something wrong with them, but because of bad and unfair rules.
Kendi worries the Georgia ban will dissuade teachers from sharing the courage of Ruby Bridges or discussing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s concern that, "The history books, which have almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, have only served to intensify the Negroes' sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy."
