From The Philadelphia Inquirer

February 3, 2000

Learning Black History Is a Way to End Ignorance about the Races

By Walter C. Uhler

Do we need Black History Month? You bet we do. We need it for the same reason we need affirmative action.

And what is that reason? Our ignorance. We need social institutions that will help us all learn our way out of centuries of prejudice and misinformation that still are too much with us.

John Rocker, relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, has been suspended and required to undergo psychiatric counseling for publicly uttering his despicable remarks about, among other things, non- whites populating New York. Is he just a fringie? I don't think so; I think uncounted masses silently share his views. An otherwise decent friend of mine refused to root for any football team having a black quarterback. Two acquaintances, both avowed sports 'fans, refuse to watch the best basketball in the world, the NBA, because the league has too many black players.

This country has much to explain: why there is even a controversy over the Confederate. flag in South Carolina; why a state representative from South Carolina apologizes to retarded. people when called to explain his assertion that the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) actually stood for the National Association of Retarded People; why three men in Texas would think of dragging a black man behind their pickup truck, decapitating him, simply because he was black.

How do we explain the arrests for "driving while black"? How do we explain certain habits of mind that still persist? When. discussing crime, many Americans instinctively think of inner-city blacks - when the white rural South actually has the highest per capita crime rate in the country. Many think the inner city is the heart of the drug world, when, according to a recent Columbia . University study, drug use is higher in suburbs than in cities.

To be sure, matters at the approach of the 21st century are significantly better than they were during the early 20th century - but today's problems remain a national disgrace. What's missing is an informed discussion among us of the consequences of persistent racial tensions. Ignorance of our sordid racial history appears to be universal, the result of a general unwillingness to expose our students to unpleasant, but undeniable, facts.

So what untaught things should we teach? Well, first we should unlearn the notion that race has always been a determining force in human and American history. A painstaking study by Ivan Hannaford demonstrates that the very idea of race as we construct it - was unknown to both the ancient Greeks and Romans and did not emerge as an important idea before the 17th century—just in time for the advent of colonialism.

Americans should unlearn the notion that biological differences account for the different stages of development among people around the world. Read, for example, the Pulitzer Prize-winning study by Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." Diamond demonstrates that development very often has to do with nothing more exotic than favorable geographic location.

Americans should be taught that the false and obnoxious assertion of the African American's inferiority was but an inhumane after-the-fact justification for the crass economic decision to enslave blacks to Colonial America's first tobacco plantations: Edmund Morgan and the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. are two scholars who have written persuasively on these matters. Although it is easy to demonstrate that most Americans (including the author) are poorly informed about the reasons for our racial predicament, it is idiocy of a more fundamental sense which prevents its resolution.

The ancient Greeks distinguished themselves from barbarians by emphasizing the civilizing power of performing one's civic duty. Civilized people discussed their common problems at public meetings in the agora or public square. A premium was placed on eloquence and reason. One indication of the high value placed upon such political discussions appears in the term they applied to those private persons who neglected their civic obligations: idiotes. Until we gather seriously to discuss the terrible legacy of this artificial construct called race, goodhearted people must fight fire with fire. Not only through affirmative action, but also through the celebration of Black History Month

Walter C. Uhler
Philadelphia
waltuhler@aol.com