Teaching Black History to White People

by Leonard N. Moore

Overview

Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone.

With Teaching Black History to White People, which is “part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to guide,” Moore delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the Black experience in America. He poses provocative questions, such as “Why is the teaching of Black history so controversial?” and “What came first: slavery or racism?” These questions don’t have easy answers, and Moore insists that embracing discomfort is necessary for engaging in open and honest conversations about race. Moore includes a syllabus and other tools for actionable steps that white people can take to move beyond performative justice and toward racial reparations, healing, and reconciliation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781477324851
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	435,139
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Leonard Moore is the George Littlefield Professor of American History at the University of Texas at Austin and a graduate of Jackson State University. He is the author of three books on Black politics, the most recent being The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Teaching White Students about Blackness
Teaching Myself
Teaching Black Anger
Teaching Enslavement and Emancipation
Teaching Jim Crow
Teaching Black Urbanization
Teaching the Civil Rights Movement
Teaching Black Power
Teaching White Liberals
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Syllabus for History of the Black Experience
Suggested Reading
Index

What People are Saying About This

Stefan Bradley

Teaching Black History to White People, with its elucidating vignettes, is at once hilarious, terrifying, and insightful. Now is the time for such a book—as the nation confronts domestic conflicts, and people are searching for something that makes sense, and Moore obliges them with his matter-of-fact style and engaging stories.

David "Dee-1" Augustine

I watched Dr. Leonard Moore masterfully teach Black history when he was my professor at Louisiana State University. As a young, Black college student, I was inspired by his boldness, passion, and commitment to speaking truth to power. His teaching methods provided a platform that encouraged meaningful dialogue and critical thinking. Everyone grew wiser and more equipped to appreciate Black history as a result.

Peniel E. Joseph

Magnificent. This book is a gift. Teaching Black History to White People is an urgently needed practical guide to meeting this national moment of racial and political reckoning with pedagogical erudition and intellectual sophistication. Leonard Moore is one of America’s finest historians of Black history and this book should be read by all people interested in transforming the rhetoric of antiracism into practical reality.

Sevetri Wilson

Teaching Black History to White People is essential for any institution seeking to create or enhance an inclusive environment. Whether Dr. Moore's message is applied to the workplace or to one's personal life, its authenticity and intent won't be missed by anyone. Why? Because Black History Matters.

Al Reid

I am a white male who has worked in the advertising industry for most of my career. Like those in other industries, we are beginning to understand the ways in which the complexity of white supremacy and unconscious bias affects how we work. Within this context, I believe Dr. Leonard Moore’s book is both seminal and mandatory reading for starting a discourse on understanding the Black experience in our country. I will never truly know what it means to grow up Black in America, nor work as a Black person in America, but Dr. Moore provides the insight to better see, feel, understand, and comprehend this truth—a truth we all must seek to understand if we are to progress as a people.

Joe Karlgaard

If you care about the future of race relations in the United States, you need to read this book. Dr. Moore provides a valuable starting point for anyone interested in learning more about the Black experience. He is also a gifted author who weaves his personal story into the larger context of American history to help cement his key point: you cannot understand the perspective of Black people in this country without learning their history, most of which has been left untold in our classrooms.

Jesse Washington

"Teaching Black History to White People is a blast of fresh thought to stale conversations about race. Moore’s sharp, direct style reframes old dialogues and slices to the heart of difficult challenges. Sometimes this book made me laugh out loud; other times I was encouraged by Moore’s accomplishments or angered by how he has been treated. For anyone seeking to break down resistance to the true history of our nation, this book is an absolute gem."

Jacqueline Jones

I highly recommend this book to any instructor who appreciates the fact that a full understanding of American history is key to a just society. Each year, hundreds of University of Texas at Austin students take a history class with award-winning Leonard Moore, and they find the class to be a life-changing experience. How does Moore reach both Black and non-Black students, and why do they go on to recommend his courses to their friends? In this book, Moore combines stories from his own life with social commentary and discussions of his teaching techniques, honed over two decades in the classroom. He begins the book with this simple observation: Every white person in America should be required to take a Black history class in either high school or college. Period. Moore’s straightforward, no-holds-barred approach—about African American history, about the realities of race in America today—inspires students even as it enlightens them. This practical guide will prove useful for all teachers who want to educate students of all backgrounds and any age in an inclusive, compelling way. A course in Black history, taught with sensitivity and honesty by a knowledgeable instructor, as Moore illustrates here, can generate difficult but necessary conversations that are truly transformative for instructor and student alike.

Mark K. Updegrove

Teaching Black History to White People is a blast of fresh thought to stale conversations about race. Moore’s sharp, direct style reframes old dialogues and slices to the heart of difficult challenges. Sometimes this book made me laugh out loud; other times I was encouraged by Moore’s accomplishments or angered by how he has been treated. For anyone seeking to break down resistance to the true history of our nation, this book is an absolute gem.

Editorial Reviews

Engaging and thought-provoking for a wide range of readers...Moore sets forth provocative questions—for instance, 'What came first? Slavery or racism?'—while simultaneously providing complex, nuanced answers.

Texas Highways

University of Texas at Austin Professor of American History Leonard Moore draws on decades of his in-classroom experience teaching Black history to white people to illustrate the importance of Black history education for everyone and anyone. Using his time in the classroom and his own personal history, Moore creates an engaging book that marries personal anecdotes and pedagogy to create something all anti-racists should read.

Wealth of Geeks

[A] timely book...Moore guides readers—many of whom Moore, who is Black, presumes will be white—through Black history and his own personal experience in academia.

Texas Observer

Moore is a scholar and professor of history whose passion for teaching oozes off the page...Teaching Black History to White People illustrates his uniquely engaging pedagogy that has won awards and made Moore a highly respected and sought-after professor and speaker...What I like most about this book is that Moore explains how teaching Black history, something he’s done for three decades, was different during the 2020 racial uprisings, and he provides actionable insights for white people (or any non-Black person) to counteract anti-Blackness and racism in America.

EdSurge

An important book that joins the ranks of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Henry Lewis Gates’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me in assuring that all of American history is preserved and taught.

Southern Literary Review

2021-08-26
A popular University of Texas professor offers a trenchant survey of Black history—and an argument for why every American, of every ethnicity, needs to learn it.

“African American history should be a graduation requirement in every high school, college, or university in America. Every. Single. One.” So urges Moore, who allows that he took a circuitous path to academia. He was an average student in college but was awakened when he discovered some of the awful facts about being Black in America, past and present. For one, as he observes, not so very long ago, Black drivers were not allowed to pass White motorists in Mississippi, for “it was believed that the dust from the Black person’s car would fly up and hit the windshield of the white person’s car, which would symbolize domination of Black over white.” White students in Austin have flocked to Moore’s survey courses and emerged with a clear understanding of such injustices, and many have gone on to teaching and activism themselves. The author writes cogently of how he handles such ticklish subjects as reparations—he supports them—and, with a look back at Jim Crow laws, current Republican efforts to suppress the Black vote. He is especially good on economic inequalities: Moore observes that if Black and White people were to sit down and play Monopoly together, the Black player wouldn’t be able even to start to accumulate property until the 20th move. He urges that White liberals, many of whom “value trees and the environment more than people,” learn foremost how to be uncomfortable, for the history that he teaches will expose them as being implicated in the same system in which White supremacists operate. Moore closes with a syllabus of suggested reading that “highlight[s] the historical issues and themes that best connect to contemporary Black life in America.”

An important, sympathetic effort to elucidate matters of Black lives while expanding intellectual horizons.

Kirkus Reviews