• All youth struggle with their identities during their adolescent years. However, African Americans are faced with added social character challenges, such as having to deal with the notion that society doesn’t think they can become high achievers. There are also significant, proven inequalities that come from being black. This creates a pressure and identity as an underdog that can seriously affect an adolescent’s development of healthy self-esteem. Many adolescents and young adults are left to deal with a sense of hopelessness and failure before they can even begin to explore the world and what it has to offer.
• According to Stefan (2007), it’s important that African American students disregard this idea of cynicism and find self-empowerment. Knowledge of their history, which was taken from them during slavery, must be made available, as this knowledge sets up a framework for a positive self-image and identity. Ultimately, knowledge of one’s history can teach students that they can achieve and overcome adversity as their ancestors did before them.
• Harper (1977) points to evidence-based research that African American children who understand their history are more engaged in the educational process and contribute more. On average, they have have greater school morale and perform better academically.
• Given this research and the obvious problems we are currently experiencing with the high drop-out rates of African American males especially, this should be an incentive for every educator to embrace the opportunity to educate themselves on African American history so they can be fully prepared and equipped with accurate stories of African Americans and their contributions throughout history.
• Based on a nationwide study of teachers by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), who implemented an African American curriculum, teachers are interested in teaching the complexities of African American history and going beyond a simple social studies curriculum.

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• The threat from right-wing terrorists in the United States of America is of particular concern. There are extremists who are anti-government, along with white supremacists, including militia groups and the sovereign citizens who show interest in conspiring and planning attacks against religious, racial, and political targets in the U.S.
• Hate crimes have increased nationally in recent years after bottoming in 2014, with the CSHE/WVU analysis of police databases and the Federal Bureau of Investigation representing the biggest projections in politically conflicting time durations in October 2008, November 2016, August 2017, and fall 2018.
• African Americans have consistently been the top target for hate crime, but in shrinking proportions.
• Recent social surveys mirror these findings, showing an increase in social distancing and fear, as well as reduced tolerance for certain outgroups.
• Even as big commercial corporations struggle with prejudiced content, hatemongers have increasingly switched to code-converted and inclination-based platforms and messaging services, where animosity speech is even more abundant. Like hate crimes, activity on these platforms tends to spike around catalytic events.
• Virtual anti-Semitic and anti-Black hate speech had the most sustained digital increase, even as white supremacist and neo-Nazi presence at large rallies plummeted amidst a post-Charlottesville breakdown of more organized extremist groups and their leaders and the closing of an election cycle.
• The Internet has helped in enabling new extremists to maintain a public presence, but it also offers unaffiliated loners and extremists a tool to assemble, radicalize, and broadcast fanaticism, along with disturbing actions of mass violence that reference prior attacks.
• Social media has also been adapted for use as a weapon, not only by domestic and foreign extremists, but also by state actors like Russia that are seeking to “sow discord” and launch conspiracy theories amongst the electorate to advance prejudice and political division.
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• Bryce-LaPorte further supports Black Studies on the basis that mutual respect for Afro-Americans must come through increased knowledge of their contributions to American culture.
• However, Devlin (1970) remarks that the rewriting of American history to give the Negro his rightful place is overdue.
• Since the fifteenth century, ethnocentrism (belief in the superiority of your own ethnic group), and xenophobia (extreme dislike or fear of foreigners) have characterized, constructed, and conditioned the European attitude towards African community. As such, in the spirit of Euro-centrism, the African community could not become integrated into society with equality. Euro-centric exclusivity and its continuous reach for global dominance left no place for the African race except bondage, slavery and second-class citizenship. Euro-centric doctrine does not accept Africans based on their humanitarian virtues, but instead devalues them based on the color of their skin.
   
• Linus A. Hoskins (1992) said, “The delightful history and forward-looking advancement/contribution of African community to humanitarian traits have already been well documented to drive off the Euro-centric fable that the African continent was dark and its people backward, inferior, and uncivilized.”
• The point of focus here is that mere survival forced Europeans to adopt this offensive geopolitical strategy; in other words, Europe had to formulate a reverse intellectual conflict to purport that they were exceptional and better than the Africans, who were thus inferior.
• It is also important to understand that a predominant mode of imperialism or colonialism was to associate Euro-centrism (Western-centered thought) “with ingrained qualities of excellence in intelligence, beauty, and the right to rule other races. Its reverse impact on the African continent was to demean his physical subordination and color … and came to be associated with the (African’s) inherited qualities” (Magubane, 1989, p. 33). This mission was accomplished through poor education or intentional miseducation of the African community and the fabrication or distortion of his history.
• As Kwame Ture (1975) once warned: “If you don’t know who you are, you would not know what your interests are.” A people without a sense of history are not well equipped to visualize and plan for their future because of an unclear and forged or falsified picture of their past. People without the knowledge of “having done” will have greater difficulty acknowledging the motivation of “can do.”

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• When we look into African American history, we discover that African Americans helped to build and improve our nation and influence society as a whole. All people look for ways to improve and increase their voice. By learning history, African American students can do just that.
• According to Mamer, the history of African Americans must deal with the fact that people felt that Africans should be quiet and educate themselves, leaving civic rights and other political goals for the whites (Mamer, 2013). This, of course, was where African Americans ultimately made some of their biggest contributions, fighting politically for the right to share their voice. Throughout this fight, they were able to find a new identity and work through conflicting social situations that caused identity struggles.
• Much of the discrimination against African Americans was based on greed. However, many, if not the majority of whites, were against the shackled slavery legacy. The slave trade gave people political power and wealth and many parts of history remain unknown to the general public. For example, many of the colleges and universities throughout the United States were established because of African American slaves and labor that they put into the schools so that everyone could be educated, giving blacks a place to learn, even if it was under a system of bondage (Smith and Ellis, 2017).
• The African American experience should be fully be appreciated for what it has always been, a commentary on the American experience, making it more difficult to ignore contradictions in favor of oversimplified slogans that sometimes pass for national history. While a true history will surely be a more troubling one for most Americans, it will ultimately be more useful, providing the historical context for contemporary conversations on the nation’s most difficult and pressing problems.

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• Racial identity can impact the self-esteem of a child while they are developing and throughout their lifetimes. Swanson, Cunningham, Youngblood II, and Spencer purport that children who are taught at a young age about their racial identity are less likely to feel a difference between their personal identity and their group identity. They are also more able to identify people with positive attributes, no matter what race they are identifying (2009).
• In the study, Swanson, Cunningham, Youngblood II, and Spencer asked two questions: How are racial attitudes shaped and what mechanisms and factors contribute to these processes? They found that by teaching young children about their race, they were more likely to grow up to understand and accept themselves and the other races around them in an equal fashion (without prejudice). They also found that by teaching history and self-appraisal in school at a young age, children could better understand and balance social assumptions or biases against the concept of self (Swanson, Cunningham, Youngblood II and Spencer, 2009).
• Adolescence is a difficult time for all children, as most people struggle with identity. It’s particularly difficult for African American students, who are left to deal with the notion that society thinks they are lazy, unintelligent, lacking abilities, or even dangerous. This feeling of inequality creates an environment of defeatism that seriously diminishes self-esteem and self-worth.
• According to Stefan McDonald (2007), it is important that African American students defy this idea of defeatism and find self-empowerment. Knowledge of their history, which was taken from them during slavery, must be made available, as this knowledge sets the framework for a positive self-image and identity. It teaches them they can achieve and overcome adversity, just like their ancestors did before them.

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• History can help us understand what is going on in the world, gain knowledge about ourselves and others, inspire change, reveal the best ways to be good citizens, and help us make better decisions. It can also help to prevent the repetition of past mistakes.
• Sheehan talks about how history can provide us with lessons from the past so that we can live to have a better future (2005). He argues that by sharing history with students, moral and practical lessons can be taught so that we know how to behave in the future.
• Sheehan also brings up an important point about using more than one history to teach students so that falsehoods can be brought out in the open (Sheehan, 2005). This is extremely important for African American history. Students need to be able to understand their history and recognize that their ancestors helped to make America a better place to live.
• Racial socialization has been defined as “the developmental processes by which children acquire the behaviors, perceptions, values, and attitudes of an ethnic group and come to see themselves and others as members of the group.”

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