Humanities Classes and Black Power
A Humanities course in high school is used to disguise complete indoctrination. This course in on the approved list of adopted TEA materials (p.262 on the bulletin), and the only approved text for this high school Humanities course is called African American Poetry published in 2019 by Schmoop University Inc.
Schmoop University is a digital learning company, and if you go to their website at www.schmoop.com, they have a digital course called "African American Poetry", which is the course Humanities teachers use in high school. I will post samples and information from their website below.
African American Course Description:
"Sad truth: much of African American poetry started with slavery. A few slaves, tired after a long day's work, sat down and wrote some of the first poems in the African American tradition. This course follows slave narratives, songs, and traditions, as well as everything that came after—Black Power, double-consciousness, and simile, metaphor, and personification to boot. Poetry (plus, obviously, close reading) will be covered extensively in this fifteen-lesson Common-core aligned course, jam-packed with readings and activities.
In this course, we'll
meet poetry VIPs who wrote through old-timey quill pens, oral traditions, typewriters, and slam poetry competitions.
learn about American history and the African American experience through their allegories, metaphors, and allusions.
try our hand at some poetry-writing and performing of our own. Not to give you preemptive stage fright or anything.
Sure, studying Shakespeare and Pound is fine...if you're into old white dudes. It's time to get a new poetic perspective with this course."
Notice how they make Shakespeare and other "old white dudes" sound so uncool. Hey, Schmoop University has some new "poetic perspective" "plus, obviously, close reading" about "Black Power" and "double-consciousness". Who needs Shakespeare?
If you want to know what "double-consciousness" is, the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy defines it thusly: "Double-consciousness is a concept in social philosophy referring, originally, to a source of inward “twoness” putatively experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society. The concept is often associated with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who introduced the term into social and political thought, famously, in his groundbreaking The Souls of Black Folk (1903)."
Sample Activity On the Website:
Sample Lesson - Activity
Activity 1.01c: Instruments of Torture
It's super depressing to hear, but America was struggling with slavery and race relations long before we were even...America, and you won't take a course on African-African poetry that doesn't cover slavery.
However, we want to note early on in this course that African-American poets have earned their place in the literary world for more reasons than just writing about oppression, violence, and racism—the more obvious themes that we'll see in a lot of these poems. Aside from teaching us about history, African-American poets can roll with—and challenge—literary greats who haven't experienced slavery, and they have plenty to say about gender, religion, class, sexuality, identity, and the enduring marginalization that African Americans face. So, keep that in mind.
That being said, the history of African-American poetry is marked by slavery. And slavery is marked with some particularly gruesome realities. We'll get a sense of that in this activity by learning about some of the terrible ways slaves were punished under slavery.
Have a look at the picture gallery, "10 Barbaric and Heartbreaking Ways Enslaved Black People Were Punished by Their Slave Masters."
Now that you've gone through the entire gallery, which of these punishments do you think is the most violent or cruel? Write 75 – 100 words indicating the following:
Why do you think this particular punishment is the worst? For instance, you might say that pouring salt into a wound is, like, the definition of cruelty.
What does the punishment you chose say about how slaves were treated then? For example, you might say inflicting sexual violence on slaves is like adding insult to injury in an effort to dehumanize them.
You may click the button below to see the picture gallery that they use in the lesson. (Warning: very graphic images.)
Do you think that this language and topic is appropriate for high school students?
Lessons From the Syllabus:
Notice how students are enticed to "start a revolution" and they mention that "there's a riot goin' on" (to quote from their syllabus above):
Unit Breakdown
1 African American Poetry In this standards-aligned poetry course, you'll survey African American poetry from its origins abroad and in the early colonies to contemporary works. You'll perform close readings, read informational texts, and make connections between African American history and its major works of poetry. By the time the course is through, you'll be not only a poetry lover, but a poetry creator—or, uh, as it's more frequently called, a "poet."
Students are encouraged to "slam their lives into poetry" and create poetry themselves. This is how Marxist teachers are creating revolutionaries. (See the videos on the Project Veritas website at www.projectveritas.com of the teachers who didn't know they were on hidden camera.)
Slavery was horrible, to be sure. But, it ended over 150 years ago. We should learn the lessons from it and never repeat it. The Holocaust when millions of Jews were murdered happened more recently than slavery. The New York Times knew about it and covered it up. In his book Unfreedom of the Press, Mark Levin writes
“How is it possible that such colossal media failures of integrity, morality and professional canons in the face of the mass extermination of Jews and Ukrainians do not permanently cripple the reputation and standing of the New York Times and the other press organizations, or at least force serious circumspection within and reformation of the media industry? And what of the weak excuses and feeble explanations offered decades later, as if they are atonement enough for the abhorrent consequences of the media’s role in the cover-up of the genocidal murder of millions? Is there another industry of any sort that can so blithely if not arrogantly and self-righteously carry on as if none of this happened? Surely, if the dead could speak, they would declare the Times and the other press outlets “the enemy of the people” for their wanton inhumanity in the face of genocide.”
Many Americans have family members who were killed in the Holocaust. Yet, I don't hear the Marxists criticizing The New York Times or demanding reparations for Jewish people. So, they are selectively outraged. They use slavery as a way to indoctrinate people into their various agendas including dividing Americans and developing people who will riot, demonstrate for their Marxist causes, vote for them, etc.
Are you shocked that this online course is the approved TEA textbook for a course called "Humanities" in high school in Texas? Parents think their children are taking a class about "Humanities", but it is pure indoctrination.
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