Member-only story
The West Is Burning; What Do We Tell the Children?
How transparent should we be during 2020’s tirades?
In the fall of 2019, my daughter’s fourth-grade class took a field trip to the Portland Art Museum to see Hank Willis Thomas’s All Things Being Equal. In a series of emails prior to the visit, her teacher prepared parents for what our children would encounter: a thoughtful exploration by a Black artist of race, social justice, violence, and privilege.
My children’s public school strives to prepare students to be engaged, participatory citizens and residents of the world, and they tackle issues with empathy and curiosity. When the State of Oregon instructed schools to educate third graders on Oregon history, my daughter’s class explored the racist language in Oregon’s founding documents, the Chinese exclusion laws, and the razing of predominantly Black neighborhoods to build highways and hospitals.
I fully supported students learning Oregon’s true history, one steeped in discrimination and stolen lands. They critiqued the popular cultural narrative involving hipsters, beards, pour-overs, and naked cyclists, a story scribed by White people, that minimized and ignored a deeper, more painful history.
However, visiting the Portland Art Museum and Thomas’s work somehow felt different to me. The teacher…
