“Beyond providing the language for a young person to name the world around them, engaging with the histories we too often fail t
o name helps us better understand the contemporary landscape of inequality. One cannot begin to understand what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (2014), without understanding the decades-long history of state-sanctioned housing segregation that created the conditions of the community in which he lived. One cannot begin to understand what happened at the White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (2017), without taking into account the ways in which the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy warped the narrative of the Civil War into an ahistorical caricature of itself. One cannot begin to understand what happened to the nine victims of the Charleston church massacre (2015) without making sense of how, two hundred years ago, South Carolina was one of the single most important slave ports in the United States.” What does this quote from the excerpt above suggest to about how important understanding history and context is for unpacking current events? (Black live Matter)
