Lenoir City, TN is situated on the periphery of the Knoxville metropolitan area and has a population of roughly 10,000 people. While our mission trip technically took us to this small community, the places we served were farther out into unincorporated country. I was a high school freshman at the time, and my team helped by replacing a roof and building a back porch for an elderly white woman who lived in a small isolated country home. She and her family owned a few acres along a dirt road far off the beaten path, and her children and grandchildren lived in their own small houses nearby. The family had a few animals who were always around, and I developed a particularly strong connection with a black lab puppy who rolled around in the grass while I worked nearby with a mattock to level the ground where the porch would go. On breaks, I would give this puppy belly rubs and play fetch. It wasn’t until the fourth day of our five-day project that I finally got to ask the old woman’s granddaughter (a child no older than seven) this puppy’s name. With an innocent smile, she answered, “N****r.” I was flabbergasted. This girl clearly had no idea the offensiveness of the N-word. She smiled and played with the puppy as if nothing was wrong at all. In her mind, it was a perfectly normal thing for her and her family to say. While this child may not have been born a racist, she was being taught racism both implicitly and explicitly by her family.

Now, I’m one to talk. I grew up hearing plenty of racist things, especially at my predominantly white Southern Baptist church. I heard a Sunday School teacher refer to Martin Luther King Day as “James Earl Ray Appreciation Day.” A few vehicles in the parking lot sported Confederate Flags, and while I don’t think I ever heard someone say the N-word aloud, I’m confident it was being whispered here and there. When I came back to visit after a year away at a liberal arts college, someone even asked me, “So, are you dating a black girl?” as if this was a totally normal question. (“How are classes? What are you doing in your free time? Are you dating outside our race? Car still holding up alright?”) Yeah, it was not a bastion of tolerance. Still, for the most part, the racism I was taught there was usually more implicit; there’s a reason black people and white people worship separately on Sunday, and best not to question it. In my naive adolescence, I really thought this style of racism was just going to die out over time— that society would just become more loving and accepting because that’s what progress looks like.

Then I learned that black lab puppy’s name, and the illusion shattered.

It would still be many years before I started to peel back the layers of indoctrination I myself had received (and, for the record, I’m still peeling today), but that experience with the puppy taught me an important lesson: things don’t just “die out” when they’re being consistently taught and reinforced. And when we fail to examine the things we’re teaching, it’s all too easy to default to what past generations taught (no matter how incorrect or harmful).

This is why what’s happening in Florida’s education system right now is so dangerous. While I know these things are happening in other parts of the country, I live in a state where our governor is explicitly trying to whitewash history (likely to garner national attention for a presidential run). In particular, an AP African American History class has been the target of extreme revision, and the AP board has done disturbingly little to resist. Mind you, AP classes are all electives which meet college level equivalencies and are usually only offered to juniors and seniors, so this isn’t “indoctrination”; students have to sign up for these advanced classes with parental consent. That means parents already have control over whether their children take the class, but that’s not enough for our overreaching governor, who is attempting to rewrite history to remove anything that might make white people look bad.

If we deny the existence of racism —downplay it, ignore it, or act like it’ll just going away—, then it will fester. I know. I learned this lesson as a teenager when I met that little girl who was being taught racism at home. Racism isn’t going to just die out. We need to acknowledge it, study it, and confront it in ourselves and in our institutions and systems. Then, hopefully, we can begin to treat it, heal it, and one day see its power wain.

It takes a lot of work to root out racism in our institutions and in ourselves.
The work begins with acknowledging racism is there in the first place.