Real Talk | Threats to African American history in White and Black – The News-Gazette

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A few clouds. Low 57F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph.
Updated: May 11, 2025 @ 2:57 pm

African American history has always suffered from neglect. But currently it is under attack. The assault comes from two disparate sources: one White; one Black. The onslaught by these reactionary forces are separate and unequal. Both are dangerous, though for different reasons.
African American history has largely been missing from the K-12 public school curriculum. As of 2023, only 12 states mandate the teaching of “a unit of instruction” on the sociohistorical experiences of African Americans. Illinois’ Black History Curriculum Task Force defines the unit on African American history as eight lessons. Given the 45-minute class time, this number is consistent with LaGarrett King’s finding that “only 8–9 percent of total class time is devoted to Black history in U.S. history classrooms.”
Black history has historically been neglected. This record of disregard does not negate the fact that something changed after the 2019 publication of the 1619 Project. In response to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ publication, the U.S. right intensified their efforts to eradicate, restrict, and distort the teaching/learning of African American history.
The main threat to instruction in Black history comes from the fascist Trump regime and the MAGA movement. Through executive orders such as 14190, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” and 14235, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the White supremacists seek to erase documentation of racial oppression and resistance to it. These racist initiatives include book banning, ideological restrictions on what can be taught, and sanitization of historical markers and the information on museum exhibits, etc.
The fascists desire to eradicate historical knowledge that exposes the U.S. empire’s racist colonialist genocidal past. They want a chronicle of celebration. The White supremacists aspire to continue indoctrinating the U.S. public in a false history that glorifies the savagery of U.S. capitalism, imperialism and colonialism.
Undoubtedly, the White supremacists’ effort to circumscribe, erase, and misrepresent African American history is the primary threat.
In this column and in my broader career, I have been guided by the fundamental propositions of the 1960s-era “Black Perspective” school of African American historiography. Their axioms were first, to speak the truth to the people. Second, to view African American history as an exposé of anti-Black racial oppression. Third, to center Black agency — to amplify Afro-descendant peoples’ humanity and highlight their resistance to a society that exploited, oppressed and dehumanized them.
These axioms have guided my column since its appearance in September 2015. The issue of Black historical knowledge, particularly efforts to curtail it have been especially prominent in my most recent commentaries. Unfortunately, my focus on the main threat has led me to underemphasize, if not ignore, the danger posed by retrograde popular myths in the Black community.
To address the internal menace, I want to turn my gaze toward historical fallacies circulating in African America. Since the early 2000s, a dangerous myth has gained currency in the Black community. This ahistorical fabrication is most succinctly articulated in a self-published book by Dr. David Imhotep, The First Americans Were Africans.
I was introduced to this fallacious idea around 2012. After my lecture on the European Slave Trade, an African American male student asked if I considered that we, African Americans, did not come here via the slave trade. Baffled, I asked him to elaborate. The young man contended, there were not enough ships and not enough Africans on those ships to account for 12-15 million Black folk in the Americas by the late 18th century.
I then asked him, when and how he believed we got here? His answer was short and straightforward. He responded, “we’re indigenous.” Shocked but now aware of where he was coming from. I asked him to provide a few sources, especially primary evidence to support his claim. Essentially, he stretched Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus (1976) slim evidence to its breaking point.
A decade later, it seems this erroneous theory has attracted a much larger and more impassioned audience. Perhaps, the most important question is why some African Americans find the “indigenous Black American” argument appealing.
Like the White supremacists, they’re looking to construct a fictional past. However, in their case, they desire stories that glorify middle-class actors rather than the working class Black majority. And somewhat contradictorily, but in a worldview shaped by contemporary hip-hop culture, drug lords are preferable to bus drivers, healthcare workers, postal clerks, and common laborers.
The “indigenous Black American” argument allows younger African Americans to distance themselves from enslavement, and from Africa. Ironically, despite the revision of “slavery studies” to center the practices and perspectives of enslaved persons post-Black Power generation African Americans shun that experience. Routinely, Black students tell me they are “tired” of films on slavery.
Though Van Sertima miscredits Africans with founding, inspiring or significantly influencing the cultures and civilizations of Mesoamerica, Black youth who claim indigeneity tend to be detached from Africa. Some speculate this is due to a largely conflictual relationship with African immigrants. I’m certain that’s a part of it. Although, I suspect it’s more reflective of shame, their embarrassment with the numerous depictions of Africans as a starving undeveloped people.
To preserve and extend the production of Black historical knowledge necessitates that we focus on the fascist attack. But we can no longer ignore the dangers of the indigenous Black American thesis.
Sundiata Cha-Jua is a professor of African American studies and history at the University of Illinois and a member of the North End Breakfast Club. His email is schajua@gmail.com.

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Gilliam Nii Lighter

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