Living Dreams

State of Elementary Reflection

In my senior year of high school, my final cycling through the public school system, I cannot help but reflect on what they have taught me and what I have had to learn on my own.

My once-forgotten early years. One thing that strikes me as odd is the fact that while we were taught about slavery and the Civil Rights movement, the curriculum made it seem as if there does not exist any lingering effects of our brutal history. We were conditioned to believe that slavery ended but the atrocities still continued until the Civil Rights Act was passed. Then all was well and today nothing is wrong.

The same pattern is witnessed when we learned about Native Americans. We learned about their lifestyle and their techniques for survival. We took fieldtrips to the places they had once settled. I knew somewhere deep down that they are still here and they still live in this country but all I heard was that they were very different from us and respected animals.

Perhaps we were too young to learn that Thanksgiving was a sham. The Trail of Tears was glossed over even in high school. We were freshmen before there was any acknowledgment of reservations and casinos and alcoholism.

Maybe elementary school kids are too young and fragile to know about alcoholism. And yet I remember a teacher asking an eight-year-old kid in front of the class if their mother smoked because his signed report card smelled of it. I moved to a wooded street, completely secluded in a suburban town in fifth grade; before, I lived in a very clean neighborhood where the houses were barely touching, just down the road from apartment buildings where all of the kids whom I had once had the audacity to call "bad" lived. They didn't care about their education because their parents did not care. Some were impoverished, some swore at teachers. Horrible stories of fights and beatings trickled down from the middle school to us. Perhaps we were not ready? Perhaps they could have tried us.

And they did try us. They did see what we could handle. They taught us about 9/11 in fourth grade; that was never censored. We saw documentaries about drinking and driving and the destruction it brings to families. I was traumatized by the image of a girl with a severely disfigured face after a drinking and driving accident; I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night!

And today there are students in elementary school being told guns are for hunting while they see the photos of children their age whom we have lost to those same guns.

While wars shaped our borders and the passage of time shaped our clothing, it was simply ignored that the persistent denial of human rights to so many people has no haunting effects today. We had to be told that racism is institutionalized because we were children who did not read the newspaper, who did not travel. We were young and unable to pick up on nuances and we are privileged. But they told us nothing of the sort.

Freshman year, our history teacher gave us passages to teach us the importance of not believing everything we hear. One was from the KKK website and it talked about how they are not a hate group; they just hate everybody who is not white. We laughed at that stupidity because their foolishness and widespread hated did not affect us because we are privileged. The KKK to me was just a petty group of gun-wielding idiots with sheets in the south, stuck in the past, primitive in their morals. I did not know they are more than just a relic of a dark span of history. It did not occur to me that African-Americans fear them as well as the police. To me, corruption was a storyline in an interesting book.

I was ignorant then and I still am, just hopefully less than I used to be. It took one death and weeks of protesting to wake me up and see what I have been blinded to and what I even allowed myself to be blinded to. And all of the sudden, as if by some coincidence, I begin hearing the stories of what my friends have been through. People I thought I knew everything about and then I hear the real reason why they had moved here or why they avoid someone they used to be friends with. I see my classmates whom I thought were smart with Donald Trump bumper stickers and T-shirts. Some people can lose my respect so quickly.

I have heard many people say we should apologize for slavery even though we were not alive for it. I believe we should apologize for the ways we perpetuate those enduring effects of slavery that we were conditioned to ignore. Individually we should check our privilege and as a society we should implement progress and change. Were the failures of elementary school just a faultless mistake or a cover-up of the truth in order to keep things the same? You decide.