You'd think those opposed to CRT would have stopped making a certain claim by now, as referred to in panel 4...

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2022/05/22

At any rate, here's one comment that really caught my eye.

Mere_Cat about 1 hour ago
"I was taught about slavery and emancipation as a child in the sixties, but it was much later that I learned that the slaves were black."

(Of course, it wouldn't be too surprising if SOME text books - for certain grade levels, anyway - didn't have pictures, back then.)

It reminds me of how, as a kid, I didn't realize that certain fictional Jamaican characters were black, given my lack of knowledge of that country. Namely, the hotel maid in Roald Dahl's "The Boy Who Talked With Animals" and Quarrel in Ian Fleming's "Dr. No." (I didn't read the book cover to cover.) Quarrel's accent didn't make me assume anything - after all, white people can have very different accents from each other as well.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/jamaica-population

Excerpt:

"Jamaicans of African descent represent 76.3% of the population, followed by 15.1% Afro-European, 3.4% East Indian and Afro-East Indian, 3.2% Caucasian, 1.2% Chinese and 0.8% other."

To put it another way, Mere_Cat's comment makes sense if it was a pretty short lesson - or a very short chapter in the textbook. It also reminds me of how I was assigned to read Isaac Asimov's "The Fun They Had" at age 8, but even though the "date" - 2155 - gets mentioned in the first paragraph, I still couldn't really grasp the idea of a story that takes place in the future, so I promptly forgot that detail. In the same vein, while Mere_Cat's textbook would almost certainly have included the word "Negroes," there's still a chance that word could simply have disappeared from memory. Especially if there were no black students in Mere_Cat's class! Also, Mere_Cat's use of the word "child" implies that it was a middle school - or maybe even elementary.

Btw, I found a 1950s history textbook that belonged to two relatives of mine - both raised in Massachusetts. My guess is that it was written for highschoolers, so they would have used it in the 1960s. It has over 700 pages. The title is "History of a Free People," by Henry W. Bragdon (from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire) and Samuel P. McCutchen (from NYU). One thing that's interesting is chapter 16's title, "The War Between the States" - the term "Civil War" does not appear in the index. Also, while slavery gets mentioned multiple times, very few of the pages are consecutive; it doesn't have its own chapter, and I think there's only one drawing of the slaves - in a chapter subsection called "Cotton Culture in the South."

Needless to say, racism as a justification for slavery doesn't get mentioned either. (I know, of course, that black Africans enslaved each other and helped to capture slaves for white slave dealers - but the above point is still pretty damn important.)