“It’s a bomb truck,” the student told Zaman, asking them if they were Arabian. Vega Zaman walked into a middle school robotics class last year to find a fellow student playing with a Lego truck. They are confronting difficult history, pushing for inclusion and searching for their place within their communities. Reporters spoke to teens and educators in Alabama, Texas, Washington and Virginia who are working to build a broader understanding amid the political fights engulfing schools. But it’s necessary to learn from the conflicts, they stress. Navigating these conversations takes courage, teachers and students say. And teachers are watching as attempts to foster inclusivity in their classrooms go punished. Meanwhile, vague laws passed in response to the ongoing culture wars threaten to chill candid conversations about history. Some conservative students feel like their political beliefs aren’t welcomed on campuses while their families are set on “taking back” school boards, fueled by a desire to expand parental rights and block students from learning about their interpretation of critical race theory. Educators are left to answer tough questions about history, race and sexuality, hyperaware their responses are under increased scrutiny. Richmond Superintendent Jason Kamras, who first proposed the idea for the REAL Richmond course – REAL stands for relevant, engaging, active and living – said he worries the order is a “thinly veiled effort to stop the discussion of race and its implications for our community.” He’s heard from parents who are worried their kids won’t learn about the impact of the domestic slave trade on Virginia, or grapple with current events that are affected by that legacy, he said.Many children are trying to be comfortable with who they are even as their identities come up for debate among adults. In January, Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new governor, signed an executive order banning the instruction of “inherently divisive concepts.” Youngkin also set up a tip line enabling parents to report teachers who taught students “divisive” subjects. Since the district launched the course in 2020, history instruction in the state of Virginia and nationwide has become more fraught. “It makes you think, when you go to places, I have the instinct to question, to wonder what the history behind it is,” said Zelaya, one of approximately 55 students enrolled in the class in Richmond Public Schools. The curriculum is meant to cover the history of its development, from its earliest inhabitants to its current incarnation as a growing metropolitan hub in King County’s Eastside.
Japanese incarceration isn’t the focus of the Bellevue Then and Now unit. It’s a history that still stings: In 2020, the president and vice president of Bellevue College left their jobs after they allowed a mural of two Japanese American children in an incarceration camp to be altered by whiting out a reference to anti-Japanese agitation by area businessmen. In 1942, those families were ordered out of their communities by the U.S. But in 1940, it was an unincorporated area of about 1,000 people, including 300 Japanese Americans who put in the hard work of clearing the once-heavily timbered land to make it suitable for growing popular crops, like strawberries, and for building houses. Today, Bellevue - a city of 150,000 just east of Seattle - is a thriving center of commerce.