Black History Still Matters

Insert the joke here about how Black History Month in America is the shortest month of the year, but apparently in one Utah school, Black history actually doesn't matter.

A Utah charter school that incorporates Black History Month into its lesson plans is now facing backlash from some after the school announced it was allowing parents to opt students out of the curriculum.

Maria Montessori Academy Director Micah Hirokawa announced the decision in a Friday post on the school’s private Facebook page, according to local news outlet the Standard-Examiner.

Hirokawa wrote that he “reluctantly” sent a letter to families stating that administrators were allowing them “to exercise their civil rights to not participate in Black History Month at the school.”

Hirokawa said in the post that “a few families” had asked not to participate in the curriculum, though he declined to tell the Standard-Examiner the exact number of parents who had contacted the school or the reasons they gave for making the request.

The public charter school director added that the demand from parents “deeply saddens and disappoints me.”

“We should not shield our children from the history of our Nation, the mistreatment of its African American citizens, and the bravery of civil rights leaders, but should educate them about it,” Hirokawa said.

Hirokawa told the Utah news outlet that the school, which serves elementary and middle school students, incorporates Black History Month into social studies and history lessons, with a particular effort this year to highlight the achievements of African American figures in U.S. history.

Hirokawa, who is of Asian descent and noted that his great-grandparents were sent to a Japanese internment camp, told the outlet that he believes there is “a lot of value in teaching our children about the mistreatment, challenges, and obstacles that people of color in our Nation have had to endure and what we can do today to ensure that such wrongs don’t continue.”

"Why should THE BLACKS have their own history, they're American and they should be grateful for it, they could be back in Africa!", said Joe Whiteman, whose Irish paternal and Italian maternal grandfathers respectively were not considered "real Americans" seventy years ago, and who didn't consider Black folk to be human either.

Black history *is* American history, because y'all brought us here, and we built the monuments to America's "singular vision of freedom" with our bloody hands and bowed backs while your ancestors congratulated themselves on how clever they were for owning people as chattel. The African diaspora didn't exactly arrive on this continent through our ancestors' own volition, dig?

And hey, let's remember that kids today are learning how slavery wasn't that bad and "MaDe LiVeS BettEr FoR PoOr AfRiCaNs" just like their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents learned over the last century.

That brings me back to a hard and fast rule that the Biden administration is going to have to deal with: charter schools are always a scam, and none of them should get a dime from the federal government.

Not a dime.

You want to exclude your kids from Black History Month?

Homeschool them to be ignorant assholes who can't pass a GED, can't hold a job, and grow up to hate the folks "taking our jobs", but I sure as hell don't want to pay tax dollars for that.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Black History Still Matters.