"The View" hosts Ana Navarro and Sara Haines disagreed over whether educating students about Black history and slavery in schools should make white children feel bad or not.
During the show's Martin Luther King Jr. Day broadcast on Monday, host Whoopi Goldberg started the conversation by asking why Americans were so nervous to learn about Black history. She said that only 12 states in America have a Black history mandate in grade schools while 18 states have passed laws “severely limiting” the curriculum.
Host Sunny Hostin said, "They not only erase the ‘bad stuff’ that may make people ‘feel bad’ like slavery, which is responsible for the very foundation of this country." She continued that lawmakers have been erasing the contributions of “people that don’t look like them."
To Hostin, this erasure is a way to "otherize" other cultures. But Navarro said that there's more to it than Hostin's take.
"Black History and other things, banning books, has been weaponized for political purposes — to drive people to the polls based on outrage because ‘my poor little white kid is feeling bad because he’s learning about slavery.’ That’s ridiculous," she said. “Learning about history should not make anybody feel bad."
Haines interrupted, “Well, it should make you feel bad. But it’s important that it makes you feel bad.”
But Navarro disagreed: “I don’t think it should make you feel bad. I don’t think a white child that had nothing to do with slavery should feel bad about slavery. I think we need to learn history so we don’t repeat the same mistakes about history.”
SOME STATES LIMITING HOW SCHOOLS CAN TEACH ABOUT RACE: With only about 12 states with a Black history mandate while 18 states have passed laws severely limiting this curriculum, #TheView co-hosts discuss. https://t.co/cVclFZQU98 pic.twitter.com/4r3OKRDOnv
— The View (@TheView) January 15, 2024
