"'No, No. That's not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don't forget to line them up.'"
Schoolteacher (slaveholder), Toni Morrison, Beloved
Some 18 years ago, a professor in Philadelphia, I won't name the university, invited me for an interview to teach in the English department. I can't remember if the interview was for an unassigned English composition or for an American literature course, but it was, unfortunately, still a part-time position. Teaching while black often means you have a full-time position for a year or two, and then you'll hear that there are "budget" concerns.
In my fifties by then, I was also not a young woman. I had been teaching nearly two decades; however, in a hurry to continue to keep a roof over my head and food on the table, and I usually had a cat or two, and I never married, meant I had to apply to teach a class or two wherever one became available. In the meantime, I continued to study my subject and always carried along one of the books I'm reading. I happened to be reading Eduardo Galleano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.
In 1492, Columbus thought he landed on the isle of Zipango, Japan, writes Galleano. Columbus, too, is carrying the book Marco Polo wrote describing "gold in the greatest abundance." Columbus lands in the Bahamas, and there's gold and he sees the future of the New World bathed in gold. He hands off to the indigenous "some red caps and strings of beads, and many other trifles of small value" while he, the Admiral, helps himself to "'great cups full of gold, and in large quantities.'"
The professor, a confident, white male, in his middle fifties, glanced at the book I placed on the table beside my open planner. I caught the smirk on his face.
I'm past that!
One wonders, Uncle Baldwin once asked, "if anything could ever disturb their sleep"?
What of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, are they pass you? Are they past American imperialism, Henry Kissinger, Pinochet, and packed stadiums? The "disappeared"? But I remain silent. There's no future here for me at this university.
Welcome to the teaching of innocence! Long before Trump, the presence of black faculty and the teaching of what was called "diversity" classes, such as African American Literature, was often designated as an elective. If no curiosity, isn't any recognition either that black history and literature is American history and literature. Students, too, passed on taking these courses.
I came to realize that white professors of literature may never have read one book written by a black American or latina American. A white professor of American literature may never have read one slave narrative, let alone studied that text as part of their doctoral study.
Ignorance of the black experience for white university professors is acceptable. Has always been acceptable. Long before Trump!
I sat facing this Baby Boomer generation professor, and I could hear Dr. Martin L. King loud and clear, as if speaking to him, where are you my white brother? Where have you gone?
The beatings of blacks on Pettus Bridge, the dogs and water holes used on children, the killing of Emmett Till and four girl children at a church in Birmingham was upsetting, unnerving, embarrassing. But dedicating a life to the ending of white supremacy and solidifying democracy for all citizens requires true heroism in a country that would rather cowardly lie about itself.
Before I could say a word, answer any questions about teaching a course that I was overqualified to teach, I was already dismissed as someone too threatening to the wellbeing of a free uni versity, an Ame rican univer sity.
It's not just a matter of keeping a book hidden.
I remember an older white woman, tired professor at a major university in Wisconsin, talking with me over the phone and at a local cafe, until I mentioned the core of my subject, slavery. How does anyone study the 20th century, 20th-century America, in particular, without confronting American slavery? Not just 1619 but the beginnings off the coast of Africa! The Portuguese and the Spanish explorers for gold! The Dutch ship builders! The Catholic Church and the Papal Bull! Dutch ships and the peculiar cargo! Auction blocks and naked people! The exploitation and wealth building on plantations in the Caribbean and in New England! The South! The Southern representation of the "crucifixion."
No wonder, she said to me with anger, they [the university] doesn't want you!
It was as if these white professors could envision a day arriving in the US when enough citizens would join them in saying enough is enough. And acting on that anger, for the sake of the children! Enough! And, here we are in the 21st century, the disappearance of anyone not Anglo-Saxon beginning with that history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Books about slavery, colonization, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, the Civil Rights era, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks would be banned along with any reference to any white violence enacted against black people or indigenous people in the so-called "New World."
I imagine that professor, some 17 years ago, arriving home to his wife and maybe a son or daughter, telling them about this silly ol' black woman who brought along a book about the conquest of the indigenous in Latin America. "Let-me-tell-you-something-funny."
Trump's authoritarian regime, in its effort to totally destroy the promise of democracy in this country and act on his hatred of black people, has ended Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. Similar to his conquering predecessors, he's disappearing as many blacks as possible.
DEI is prohibited at universities, now.
Perhaps a generation or more, who knows, will miss us. We are Lucy, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Florence Price, Langston Hughes, Rosa Parks, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Shirley Chisholm, Richard Pryor, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Mae Jemison, Toni Morrison, Katanji Brown Jackson. We are sisters, aunts, grandmothers, mothers, teachers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, community organizers, activists.
We are America! But America doesn't want to hear our story, their story. Fantasy is better!
And it doesn't matter who is hurt or who is made to suffer. Cruelty is the thing! Always has been! The photo of an enslaved man who tried to escape, Peter Gordon, his "scourged" back told us that stories of learning a job skill or being gardeners in the garden were lies. It reflects a "negative" view of American History, say the fascists! What's needed now is a restoration of American values: "truth and sanity." No more about references to George Washington "owning nine enslaved blacks.
The cruelty is foundational. After all, what was that brutal removal of indigenous and the exploitation of Africans and their descendants?
It doesn't matter if descendants of enslaved blacks who built this country, built the White House he has defiled with the crass display of gold and of a plaque to Andrew Jackson (think, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and incredible cruelty), refuse to agree with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that Trump is "'a student of history.'" Outside of a history text in school, he properly hasn't read D. E. B. Du Bois' Reconstruction or Gaspar and Hine's More than Chattel or Cash's The Mind of the South.
He doesn't care what black Americans think. He doesn't care about little black children wanting to be proud to be black. He and his regime don't care if children, black or white, wonder how most blacks arrived in this country. But does it matter to any American that a black college student will read books portraying blacks as Sambos and Jezebels?
Just last week, using AI, Trump posted an image of the first black president of the US and his wife, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, as apes.
How are black children to understand American today, in 2026, during Black History Month?
How are black children to understand this restoration of an innocent America? How are they to understand this monstrous edifice of lies to the glory of white supremacy?
"And you've taken sweet life/Of all the little brown fellows," writes Langston Hughes.
But let's continue disappearing the truth and glorify a lie.
Where is the outrage from the white community? What does it say when there's silence from universities regarding the removal of black presidents (Harvard University), faculty, departments of black and African American studies, and text written by or about the black experience, including enslavement and legalized segregation? Is it just the regime in power wanting white supremacy to also remain front and center stage in America?
Where are the protesters, day after day, blocking the streets of our cities? Where are the people who claim Christianity as their faith and who claim compassion to be in their hearts and who claim knowledge of Kendrick Lamar's lyrics?
Here we are in 2026, Black History Month, and 51.63 million black Americans, 15.2% of the total American population (The World Data), are to accept that our experience in the US doesn't matter to anyone not black!
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