As part of Black History Month this year, I had the opportunity to talk about The Black Experience in America: The Course with a group of people whose work played a significant role in making it possible.

During the month I was the guest for an online gathering of more than 1,000 Adobe employees, hosted by the company’s Black Employee Network. (See a recap on the Adobe blog here.) I spoke with Chief Talent & Diversity Officer Brian Miller about my work on The Course, my career journey in business and technology journalism, and the importance of understanding the stories of people from different backgrounds.

The conversation was significant for me for a number of reasons. Adobe was one of the first companies I covered as a beat reporter when I moved to Silicon Valley 22 years ago, and I’ve gotten to know all three of the CEOs the company has had. I also consider myself a multi-platform storyteller, having reported for newspapers, magazines and broadcast. Along the way, I’ve produced audio podcasts, video packages, photo illustrations, printed newsletters and interactive online experiences. In the digital sense, I tend to get my hands dirty — not only in front of the camera, but also behind the scenes, designing and building the digital product.

Outside of my work as a business journalist, I’m also an Adobe customer; I pay for Adobe Creative Cloud, and have used the software tools to design the graphics and PDF downloads for The Course and to edit the video components. I also use the tools to illustrate my Fortt Knox newsletter and to transcribe, caption and edit Fortt Knox videos.

Part of my message to Adobe was that the power of software has enabled storytelling at a scale that was scarcely imaginable two decades ago when the Internet was young and I first started covering the company. These days one individual creator can affordably conceive, design and deliver detailed learning materials to a global audience at professional quality, without having to go through traditional publishers. As we equip more people with these storytelling tools and the skills to use them, we’ll gain a richer understanding of our past, and the path forward.

Free resources are available in The Black Experience in America: The Course. Download the Black & White Curriculum Book for an overview of the structure and ideas:

And it’s not just for Black History Month: Download these free images to honor figures from Black history:

For the broadest access to The Black Experience in America: The Course, purchase this premium bundle. It includes the full-color curriculum book, and lessons The Souls of Black Folk, Othello, Civil Rights, and Multiculturalism.

To download free social media images to celebrate Black history, click here.

I spent the hours before Black History Month preparing for and executing an interview with Roy Austin, VP for Civil Rights at Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook). We talked about voting rights, algorithms, and whether it’s possible to help justice scale as quickly as misinformation can.

You can watch the whole thing here:

I’m heading into Black History Month 2022 with a fresh sense of purpose. I think people from every background can gain inspiration and insight from the stories of women and men who have shaped culture, policy and economies, against the odds. An exploration of Black history can help us understand the Black experience — but it also can provide a gateway to understanding people from other walks of life.

I’ll be looking backward, and also looking forward.

Looking backward, the curriculum I designed, The Black Experience in America, provides a launch point to explore social dynamics in a way you might not have in the past. To get started, download this free curriculum book:

Looking ahead, I’ll be introducing my audience to Black leaders like Austin, who are trying to make sense of our turbulent times. In my Fortt Knox interviews and CNBC Working Lunch segments, and in conversations on other platforms, I’ll consider the work that’s still to be done.

If you’re looking for a way to honor Black History Month, try this: I’ve created a special module in my Fortt Media publishing platform that offers free downloads of images and quotes that recognize figures from Black History. Just sign in with an email address, create a password, and access the images, which are specifically designed to fit Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. (The Malcolm X image above is just an example.) Get started here:

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My mother is an artist, and growing up I would often see her swept up in a current of inspiration. It might happen during church, where she would sketch images of the Biblical stories as her way of taking notes; those sketches might turn into the foundation of a painting or a print I’d see taking shape in her studio days later.

I’m not a professional artist, but I’m driven to create, too. This weekend, I had an idea.

What if everyone could easily use digital images to celebrate Black history?

I have a few ink-drawing-style images I’d made of notable figures in Black history, that I’ve used to illustrate materials for The Black Experience in America: The Course. I started noodling with them, pairing them with a quote and a date of birth and death, as a way of memorializing them. Then I designed different templates for the profile banners on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter:

The images are free, and designed to precisely fit the specifications for banner image sizes on those social platforms. I even made sure that your profile photo won’t awkwardly cover the artwork either in desktop or in mobile apps and browsers. Download them and add them to your social profiles, and get a jump on Black History Month.

Accessing the images is easy. If you’ve signed up for the free curriculum books or any of the interactive courses, you already have a login. If not, it just takes a few seconds to create an account here:

Let me know what you think! I might make more.

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Back in the summer of 2020, I set out to design a course that presents the Black Experience in America in a different light than usual. Instead of focusing mainly on slavery and civil rights, I wanted to focus on cultural identity, American ideals, and recurring themes and challenges that still resonate today.

But I also had to cover the Civil Rights Movement, of course. So I made the decision to do that in one lesson.

Ambitious, sure. I did it for two reasons: context and clarity. For context, I wanted to honor my original intent to show a breadth and depth of the Black experience beyond the well-trodden ideas. For clarity, I wanted to honor the approach where sometimes less is more.

If I had to present only 90 minutes worth of material on the Civil Rights Movement that would intrigue the audience and challenge them to explore the ideas more deeply, what would I offer?

Here it is. Lesson 15 has four parts, starting with part of the first episode of Eyes on the Prize (an additional $2.99 at Amazon Prime). It covers catalysts for the movement, including the murder of Emmett Till. The sections on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X use their actual speeches. Their contrasting approaches illuminate nuances of the struggle and prompt us to reconsider what elements of their messages remain relevant today.

As we celebrate King’s life and legacy this year, I invite you to embrace the complexity of the leader and the movement. Share the lesson with your family and/or community and discuss it together. And if you want more, you can continue your exploration during Black History Month and purchase a discounted ($16) bundle of four lessons:

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Education is both a goal and a theme in The Black Experience in America: The Course.

With that in mind, I’d like to invite you to the digital audience of a special conversation with the presidents of three historically Black colleges. It will be live today, Monday 10/11, at 2:30 ET, and the recording will continue to be available at the link below. (You can share the link below with others before, during and after the livestream.) Feel free to join us live, or watch later:

This conversation is part of a series I started earlier this year with my friend Jayson Council, whose work focuses on social impact. The March Forth series lives at the intersection of the work I do as an anchor at CNBC, and the work I’m pursuing to close opportunity gaps in society. Here’s the context for The Course:

In The Course, the goal of the material itself is to educate. And from the very first lesson featuring W.E.B. Du Bois, his education clearly plays an outsized role in both elevating him, and helping him to elevate others. In Cycle One, Double Consciousness, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Paul Laurence Dunbar show how education can awaken talents and possibilities.

Cycle Two, How We Got Here, exposes how a lack of information can stymie cultures and groups. Specifically, Lesson 7, Forgetting, and Lesson 10, What Slavery Stole, explore the damage that occurs when people lack access to detail about history and context. And in Cycle Three, False Restarts, we see Du Bois and Booker T. Washington’s different approaches to progress, and how education is central to both.

In this conversation with three leaders, we’ll get a sense of the state of HBCUs, their creative approaches to higher education, and the challenges and opportunities ahead in a digital age.

Download the Premium version of the lesson outline of The Course here for $5. You’ll also find a free version here.

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The last full lesson in The Black Experience in America: The Course — and this material is for adults down to junior high — is called The Microscope.

It’s called that because I believe that’s an apt name for today’s reality when it comes to race in America. Under digital technology’s microscope, we can see that the push for multiculturalism in the post-Civil Rights era came up short.

One element of the digital microscope is the quantitative data we see from places like public schools. In community after community, we see that many Black students and others from disadvantaged backgrounds aren’t receiving the services and outcomes we would have liked to think they were. Magnet schools that brought mostly White and Asian students into urban environments often haven’t closed achievement gaps for everyone; they’ve benefitted some, but also allowed schools to paper over the needs of some demographic groups by using the high scores of others to boost the average.

Another element of the digital microscope is the qualitative data we get from smartphone cameras that show the footage of street-level tragedy, and how that often differs from the narrative we get from official sources. Without the smartphone video that showed Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, I think it’s fair to say that trial would have turned out far differently … if there’d have been a trial at all.

One way of looking at The Microscope — and it’s the way I look at it, because I’m a communicator — is that it’s about storytelling. At the macro level, the data uncovers stories that otherwise would have been ignored. At the micro level, digital video clarifies stories that would have been dismissed. Stories have power. Right now, that power largely serves to disrupt the popular narrative of a post-racial society.

But what if more stories served instead to build support for progress?

That’s what I see happening at Ward Infinity, a program out of Johns Hopkins Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., my hometown. The program helps local entrepreneurs in Southeast D.C. to launch companies that benefit public health.

I signed on to be an adviser to the program earlier this year, after talking with Veronica Vela, director of community health design and innovation at the hospital. (She also happens to be a high school friend of mine.) And a few days ago I had the privilege of presenting a workshop I created on the power of storytelling in business.

It’s my hope that the change these entrepreneurs make, and the stories they create in the process, will hold up under The Microscope. That’s the challenge of our time.

To learn more about The Course, and Lesson 17, The Microscope, see the downloads below:

Download the Premium version of the lesson outline of The Course here for $5. You’ll also find a free version here.

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I was thinking about Bessie Smith today, because I’m working on a personal project and I need some inspiration. And as I was designing The Black Experience in America: The Course, she brought me one of those “Aha” moments.

A little more than a year ago I was in the post-Civil-War home stretch of structuring The Course, looking to illuminate the period between the botched Reconstruction period and the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement. I settled on a period that included the beginning of The Great Migration and The Harlem Renaissance.

There I encountered Bessie Smith, in a new period of self actualization for Black workers and Black creatives in general. Here was this woman from Chattanooga, Tenn., trained up under Ma Rainey, who would earn the nickname “Empress of the Blues.” She broke convention in her personal life and in her art — which is evident in this music video for St. Louis Blues, which she recorded in 1929:

Smith was part of a cohort that created the blues and laid the groundwork for rock, while facing extreme social exclusion and discrimination. This, I believe, is part of the universal importance of the Black experience as part of the American experience: As the nation struggles to emerge from a pandemic, we know our creativity can overcome hardship — even when the hardship is self-imposed.

So do yourself a favor, and watch Bessie Smith perform in the video, shot in Queens. And Check out Lesson 14 of The Course. And pursue your challenges with confidence.

Download the Premium version of the lesson outline of The Course here for $5. You’ll also find a free version here.

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When I was growing up in Washington, D.C. in the '80s, identity — blackness — was a smorgasbord. Through eighth grade I went to mostly Black public schools. My mother, an artist, started an afrocentric greeting card line. My father pastored a Black church in Northeast, and beginning when I was nine years old we forged new traditions, observing Martin Luther King Day by gathering with another Black church in a service that included Lift Every Voice and Sing and old Negro spirituals.

Against all of that positivity, though, flowed countercurrents.

Some were external.

As a Black pre-teen, I felt bombarded by evidence of society’s skewed expectations. Strangers who met me would ask me what sport I played, even though my hobbies were drawing comic books, writing sword-and-sorcery stories and (in sixth grade) singing with a professional opera company. The Washington Post, the newspaper in a then mostly-Black city, started a new upscale weekend magazine that at first avoided image or mention of Black people unless it was highlighting Black misery. The emerging genre of gangsta rap made my race a topic of fascination; kids at my suburban day camp had questions when they found out I lived way down in D.C. — like, had I ever been shot?

Just as many countercurrents were internal.

Through the Black youth community ran an insidious narrative: If you were “really Black” you played basketball well, or at least football. You spoke a street vernacular. You had a ready command of the latest rap lyrics. Your Black bona fides got a boost if you struggled in school; do too well and you’d be accused of “acting White.”

So there were currents of positivity when it came to Black identity, and countercurrents of negativity. The negative countercurrents had their roots in false racial narratives about Black people — no matter that some of those narratives were now amplified in our own community. What would I believe? What would I internalize?

When I designed The Black Experience in America: The Course, I wanted to capture this dynamic of currents and countercurrents, because I still see it playing out in my children’s generation. My goal was to offer them tools to think critically about what it means to be Black, who gets to define Blackness and what it means to them. I placed internalized racism as the topic of Lesson 5 in the Double Consciousness cycle, because it’s very much a manifestation of that ongoing tension between being Black and American.

To make the lesson work, I needed a way to illustrate the somewhat complicated concept of internalized racism and its impact. As I pondered fables, stories and characters, I remembered the Ugly Duckling.

A YouTube search surfaced an old cartoon depicting the tale, and it was eerily perfect. A young swan falls in with a family of ducks, and is rejected for being different. The rejection makes the swam believe it’s ugly. It then tries and fails to find a family where it belongs — first among other birds, then a duck decoy. Only when the swan comes to an understanding of its true identity does it find peace and perspective.

In a sense, I believe we’re all on a similar journey to the little swan’s — and sometimes we have to repeat the journey several times in different stages of life.

Download the Premium version of the lesson outline of The Course here for $5. You’ll also find a free version here.

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The mental health of the high-achieving is getting attention lately, as first Naomi Osaka and then Simone Biles stepped back from big competitive moments for reasons many in the public did not understand. As I’ve reflected on it, the dynamic at play for these athletes — the pressure to remain composed and perform, even at the cost of their wellbeing — reminds me of a lesson in The Black Experience in America: The Course.

That lesson is Masks, the fourth I designed as part of Cycle 1, Double Consciousness.

My goal throughout Cycle 1 of The Course is to introduce the tension in being Black and American, and to show how that tension informs both the Black experience and the American experience. W.E.B. Du Bois gave it the name Double Consciousness, but the tension preexisted America itself; Shakespeare wrote about it in Othello (the subject of Lesson 2).

One of the ways of dealing with this tension is to bottle it up and hide it, and put on the performance that the public wants to see. That’s what Paul Laurence Dunbar describes in his famous poem, We Wear the Mask. The first stanza:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Dunbar himself was a brilliant, prolific writer despite the racial barriers to his success. Though he wrote many poems like We Wear the Mask that were in standard English, his works that got the most attention in his day were “dialect poetry” that captured the homespun way many Black people talked. He’s said to have expressed frustration with how he was pigeonholed in dialect poetry, which makes me wonder whether writing it felt like wearing a mask to him at times.

Bringing it all together: The goal must be health and wholeness, whether we’re under the weight of global expectations or just in our individual lives. Sometimes that means getting past the masks that society’s expectations can tempt — or force — us to wear.

(Maya Angelou’s image above represents the lesson because of her spin on Dunbar’s poem; you’ll find that as part of the lesson if you download it.)

Download the Premium version of the lesson outline of The Course here for $5. You’ll also find a free version here.

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Above: A screenshot from the opening of the Teaching Black History Conference

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Friday I had the privilege of presenting a session called “Tech Tools and Grassroots” at the Teaching Black History Conference, put on by the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri. I presented my work on The Black Experience in America: The Course, with a focus on how technology can amplify the reach and impact of learning beyond the classroom.

Like much of our interaction over the past year and a half, the conference took place over Zoom — and in a way, that was appropriate for my subject matter. Zoom is where I originally taught and tweaked The Course last summer, where I’ve fielded questions from college students and professors who are taking it now, and where I’ve built workshops to empower more teachers to bring it to their classrooms. This time I got to address a group of educators interested in improving the way Black history makes an impact on the learning audience.

My takeaway from the experience: We’re on the right track.

We’re at a rare moment when tech tools are making it affordable for educators to reach massive audiences not only with writing, downloads and video, but also with interactive environments and experiences. And when it comes to Black history, those independent resources are badly needed, since political pressures are having a fresh impact on what information is likely to be presented in mainstream textbooks.

The challenge now is to raise awareness of the resources, and equip educators to get the most out of them. With this growing community committed to exploring truth, I’m excited to figure it out.

You can take The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

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A couple of years back, before I had the spark of an idea to create The Black Experience In America: The Course, I spent a few months doing some obsessive digital sleuthing. Using public records on Ancestry.com, I was determined to see how far back I could trace my family tree.

For African Americans, this is often a fraught process for several reasons. Among them: Racist laws and practices in the North and South made property ownership and small business longevity more difficult, so there was a lot more moving around. The education available to Black families was generally substandard, so there’s less likelihood of finding written family genealogical records to augment the public record. And of course before the Civil War and the 13th Amendment, most Black people in America were considered property, not persons, and were listed that way in public records — without full names, or birth dates or any other humanizing details.

Still, I was surprised how much information I was able to dig up by pulling hundreds of records and doing dozens of searches across Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina and many other places. And while my parents knew little about their lineage before their grandparents’ generation — and even some of that was apocryphal — I was able to trace several branches on both sides to people born before 1850. (One branch, above, includes Elijah Powell, my 4th-great-grandfather, born in 1803 in Nash County, North Carolina.)

Seeing that — all those family tree branches, stretching back so far — had a profound effect on me. I love America, this work in progress, rife as it is with contradictions. And it occurred to me that with branches that reach this high, roots this deep, no one gets to tell me how to be an American. It’s not “love it or leave it.” It’s “love it and build it.” That’s the work ahead.

* I’ve long had mixed feelings about the Woody Guthrie song, since staking claim to land on this continent has all kinds of messy connotations. But in this case, that complexity is exactly what I wanted to evoke.

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My oldest son turned 13 last week, and I was hunting for something to get him (besides the smartphone my wife and I will be bankrolling). And then, earlier this month, there it was: a new online store selling clothing connected to a new anime series on Netflix, Yasuke.

The series is about a Black samurai in Japan, and it’s loosely based on a real person in the late 1500s. My son is Korean and Black, and he likes anime, so I figured this character might serve as an interesting touchstone as he crosses cultures and forms his identity. But what I really loved about the Netflix shop for the show is that the clothing is designed by Hypland, a streetwear brand created by an anime-loving Black entrepreneur named Jordan Bentley.

When I designed the curriculum for The Black Experience in America: The Course (overview available for download free here), my big-picture goal was self determination; I wanted to equip my sons, and anyone else who engaged with the material, with resources to push past the trite definitions society often hands us — of what it means to be Black, American, patriotic. One of the early lessons in The Course is called Secret Identities, and it explores how we might find wholeness in a culture that can feel like it’s trying to slice us up into demographics.

On Saturday afternoon, the day after his birthday, my son and I watched the first episode of Yasuke. He’s into it so far, and he loves the Hypland shirt. Most important, I think he gets the message: it’s possible to contain multitudes. The original Yasuke did. So does Jordan Bentley. And as the Black experience in America shows us all, so can we.

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Download the overview of The Black Experience in America: The Course for free.

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A dance group from a local middle school was performing as I arrived with my wife and sons, and another group followed with an impressive routine to Ciara’s Rooted. An MC read “The Order,” a Juneteenth tradition.

That was the scene at the sparsely attended Juneteenth celebration at our local park on Saturday, and the sensation was at once jubilant and strange. We live in a diverse suburb outside New York City that is fluent in the lingo of “equity” and “allyship” but had never officially marked this occasion before.

It’s not that I’d never heard of Juneteenth. I think I first became aware of it in college as a regional Black community tradition, mainly in the Deep South, particularly Texas. It marked the day — June 19, 1865, long after the Emancipation Proclamation — when a large number of African Americans first learned that slavery had been abolished in their area.

For me, growing up as a Black kid in Washington, D.C., Juneteenth wasn’t on our radar. Never came up. And we were into Black community stuff. I went to D.C. public schools for elementary and middle school, where we learned all three verses of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” My dad pastored a church that came together with others annually for M.L.K. Day services (where we would sing those verses), and my mom started a line of afrocentric greeting cards that included a set for Kwanzaa. (I wrote a poem for each of the seven days.)

Given all that, it’s honestly a bit jarring to have Juneteenth suddenly in the mainstream — a bit like the photo last year of White Democratic lawmakers kneeling in the kente cloth scarves/stoles long favored among ministers in the Black church. Juneteenth went from being not a Black community observance, but a regional Black community observance, to a federal holiday at warp speed.

That means there aren’t many clearly defined traditions for celebrating Juneteenth in the mainstream. And there are a lot of uncomfortable questions. How is it different from M.L.K. Day? Is it an independence day somehow in parallel to July 4? Is it a problem to think of it as an independence day, when post-emancipation laws denied Black people access to full citizenship?

I don’t have answers to these and other questions, but I do believe that the mainstreaming of Juneteenth comes with certain tradeoffs. It must have a national meaning now, with a resonance for everyone. It should mean something in Anchorage, just as it means something in Atlanta.

As for how we can all reflect on it, here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1. Data. What makes Juneteenth different is that its story is specifically about information. It took two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued for it to be proclaimed in Texas. Maybe we can use Juneteenth as a convenient mid-year point to look at data on the progress of underrepresented groups in society and the economy. By June, we should be able to gather data and surveys from the previous year and analyze them; it could become an annual moment to chart progress and consider continuing gaps.

2. Enforcement. Proclamations are not enough. Why did it matter that Union General Gordon Granger read “The Order” in Galveston that day? Because it took the presence of the Union Army to actually enforce the end of slavery in the Confederate states. That’s a reminder that it’s not enough for communities and companies to state that they’re going to do better with hiring diverse workforces or to commit to giving money to diverse causes. Leaders have to measure progress, and communities have to hold leaders accountable.

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Often, my first impulse when solving a problem — and this is not a good thing — is to invent a solution from scratch. So a year ago, when I told a group of Black friends from my alma mater that I was thinking about designing a course on the Black experience, they wisely advised me to look at what’s already available out there.

I didn’t find anything that fit what I wanted. And that convinced me we should make major changes to the way we teach Black history.

Since last year, I’ve learned that there are a lot of skilled educators who feel the same way, and who have been working to improve Black history education. And I’m thrilled to be joining many of them for the 4th annual Teaching Black History Conference on July 23. (A major theme, as you can see above, is teaching about Black Wall Street.) It’s organized by the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri.

At the conference I’ll share my goals in crafting The Black Experience in America: The Course. I’ll share what I’ve learned from designing free digital materials, interactive online classes, and teacher training videos. And I’ll share my hopes for tech’s potential to extend learning beyond the classroom.

Feel free to share information about the Teaching Black History Conference with educators. Registration is $99, and you can sign up here.

You can take The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

I’m excited to unveil the latest interactive offering in The Black Experience in America: The Course. Lesson 2: Othello.

Shakespeare is a pillar of Western culture, and it’s profound that he tackled race, belonging and power in a play written before the first African slaves arrived in Virginia. In this lesson, we look at Othello through modern eyes (and at the modern world through Othello), and consider the inner toll of double consciousness.

When I first set to work designing a curriculum on the Black experience, I knew I wanted Othello to be part of it. I first studied the play in Professor Cynthia Cornell’s Shakespeare class as a freshman at DePauw University, and it blew my mind. There I was, an 18-year-old Black kid from Washington, D.C., trying to learn and build relationships on a tradition-steeped campus in rural Indiana. I wasn’t just reading about the Moor of Venice. I was the Moor of Venice.

In the context of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, introduced in Lesson 1, Othello’s tale carries extra weight. Doesn’t this, from Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, sound like Shakespeare’s tortured general?

The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.

For everyone who is tempted to believe that race and racism no longer matter at all, and that class alone affects people in our society, this lesson and this play pose what I hope is a thought-provoking challenge.

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You can take The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

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Fully-paid access to a lesson bundle will go to the recipient of your choice. This is a great option for introducing young people to the curriculum.

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What’s the right way to teach American history, and the role of race in it?

A bill in Texas, HB 3979, takes a stab at the question. It’s part of a push to direct the way students learn about racism and participate in activism. It’s also part of a broader backlash against an approach to history called critical race theory. You can read more about the Texas bill in this Texas Tribune article, which says in part:

The Senate-approved version revives specific essential curriculum standards that students are required to understand, including the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. But it stripped more than two dozen requirements to study the writings or stories of multiple women and people of color that were also previously approved by the House, despite attempts by Democratic senators to reinstate some of those materials in the bill.

The Senate did vote to include the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 13th 14th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the complexity of the relationship between Texas and Mexico to the list of required instruction.

Now, let’s look at the bill itself. What I think is most interesting is tucked into a couple of paragraphs on page 2:

(1) no teacher shall be compelled by a policy of any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs;

(2) teachers who choose to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs shall, to the best of their ability, strive to explore such issues from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.

The temptation is to get caught up in the Texas controversy, and whether critical race theory specifically should be baked into school curriculum. But I don’t think that’s an essential conversation. More important, I think, are a couple of questions the bill’s language raises: Must Social Studies teachers be relevant? And when they try to be relevant, must they be fair?

They're not simple questions. In a perfect world, we would want teachers to bring their lessons as close to the present day as possible. We love it when Math teachers craft word problems that show the practical use of algebra, when English teachers relate the emotions of characters to how students feel, and when Social Studies teachers connect past struggles to current events. The information is more valuable when students understand immediately that it’s useful.

But making those connections is challenging in any subject, and especially so for Social Studies teachers. It’s a lot easier to offend someone with a political debate than with a brain teaser.

So what should we do?

My personal answer is that we should take more ownership over the learning experience, as families and communities. That’s because in many ways, I developed The Black Experience in America: The Course from the very conditions the Texas Senate is trying to avoid. The swirl of controversy inspired me to put together a curriculum to better illuminate where our country has been, and where it might go next. And I tried to frame the lessons in a way that doesn’t force a particular point of view, but encourages people to explore ideas. Technology is making it possible for families and communities to access this kind of information more seamlessly and affordably than ever.

Sign up today for the online lessons available!

You can take portions of The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

Also, it’s now easy to purchase a lesson as a gift:

Buy a $5 lesson in The Course for someone else! Fully-paid access to an interactive lesson will go to the email address of your choice. This is a great option for introducing kids to the lessons.

Now available: Teacher training materials for presenting The Course in middle school, as part of a licensing bundle.

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After I designed and taught The Black Experience in America: The Course last summer, I wanted to share its impact. What began as an effort to give my sons a deeper sense of identity, history and culture had turned into something more significant. They and the other kids who went through the material brought their knowledge into their classrooms, on vacations and into family discussions of current events. How could I make the experience available to more people?

Over the last several months, I’ve been working to expand the impact in several ways. I’ve built out interactive lessons at classes.forttmedia.com so that anyone can access the material. I’ve worked with my alma mater, DePauw University, to make lessons available to the campus community and alumni. And I’ve been working closely with educators on a project that I hope will make The Course available to even more students, by empowering teachers.

For the past several months, I’ve been meeting with experienced social studies teachers. The goal: to prepare training materials that will help other teachers present The Course. Identity, history and culture are challenging subjects in a classroom, especially during times like these. I wanted to provide teachers with some support from veteran peers who can help them make the material relevant to students. I’m now making those materials available to schools that are looking to license The Course.

So far, I’ve workshopped four lessons: Lesson 1, The Souls of Black Folk; Lesson 6, Secret Identities; Lesson 14, Renaissance; and Lesson 15, Civil Rights. More to come.

In the workshop videos, we break down each lesson in four discussions:

Sensitivity:

Whether it's the material in the lesson or the ways students will be challenged to connect to it, there are reasons you'll want to approach certain parts of the lesson with caution. We've tried to talk through some of those.

Context:

If there are time periods or important historical figures who loom large in the lesson, we try to call those out. If there are works of literature, music or film that might help students connect with the setting and themes, we try to surface those as well.

Assignments:

Whether it's journal entries, essays, presentations, videos or other exercises, we've tried to offer ideas for assignments that will extend students' connection with the material.

Adaptations:

The teachers who joined me for this workshop focus on grades 5 through 8. There's quite a range of maturity levels in those grades, and we talk about how teachers might want to adapt the material and the assignments to suit a particular class.

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If you’re interested in learning more about the workshops and bundles for education, drop me a note at jon@forttmedia.com.

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You can take portions of The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

Also, it’s now easy to purchase a lesson as a gift:

Buy a $5 lesson in The Course for someone else! Fully-paid access to an interactive lesson will go to the email address of your choice. This is a great option for introducing kids to the lessons.

Subscribe now

The calendar returns to May. A year ago in 2020, the road to The Black Experience in America: The Course started for me. That’s when Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and a bunch of things collided that I’d been reading and thinking about.

I’d been writing a memoir about my high school journey, which spanned fall 1990 to spring 1994 (stay tuned for that); the Rodney King beating was in my freshman year and the O.J. Bronco chase was less than a month after my graduation. For me as a teenaged Black male, both King and Simpson had become cautionary tales. King lived on the fringe, Simpson in the spotlight; both ended up getting chased by police down L.A. highways and exposing America’s unsettled relationship with race. As I tried to flesh out the story in 2020, I also read Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison and revisited Richard Wright. I reflected on culture and history.

And then, May 25.

For me, the most jarring thing about George Floyd’s killing wasn’t that it happened, it was that so many people paid attention this time. Something about this particular episode of Black misery electrified the cultural algorithm, and the country’s institutions felt compelled to react. Masses marched. Celebrities tweeted. Companies pledged money to various causes.

At the same time, I’d reconnected with some Black alumni from college on Facebook. Among our many conversations, some of us had taken up posting written raps now and then. It had put me in a poetic mindset. So on June 12, I wrote this:

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2020: wide awake, still asleep;

29 years, Rodney still getting beat;

Crooked cops still walking these streets;

Emmett Till still whispering, six feet deep.

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If Black Lives Matter I sure can’t tell,

But 400 years in, Black lives still sell;

Black rage in cities got a smoky smell

And knees on necks still hurt like hell.

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Can’t concentrate with all the noise;

Got me tryna talk to Booker T. and Du Bois;

But we keep dying so we can’t grieve;

Eric and Floyd still can’t breathe.

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I’m hearing lots of sympathy now, that’s great—

But I know White guilt has a sell-by date.

Five weeks? Five months? Man, I don’t remember,

But we’ll see if this milk’s still good in November.

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I’ll spare you a line-by-line explanation of the rap/poem. But a year later, with the Chauvin trial finished and a cultural backlash against “wokeness” in full swing, two themes still resonate as I reflect on it:

Black rage and White guilt might be necessary responses to these atrocities, but they’re not sufficient to drive lasting change. At a societal level, both spoil quickly. Rage breeds destruction and cynicism; guilt breeds hopelessness and a hunger for absolution. Instead, we need a shared understanding of our past, and shared principles to shape our future.

That’s my hope for The Course: that it plays a role in helping us find a sustainable way forward.

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You can take portions of The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

Also, it’s now easy to purchase a lesson as a gift:

New: Buy a $5 lesson in The Course for someone else! Fully-paid access to an interactive lesson will go to the email address of your choice. This is a great option for introducing kids to the lessons.

The illustration at the top of this post is something I created for The Course. It’s made up of a map of Africa from 1790, overlaid with text from the Declaration of Independence, written 14 years earlier. Notice that the text runs right up to, but doesn’t cross into, the West African coast and the Bight of Benin. That area includes locations labeled Grain Coast, Ivory Coast, Gold Coast and Slave Coast.

Ida B. Wells, the Statue of Liberty, and the knee of Derek Chauvin on the neck of George Floyd. Photo illustration by Jon Fortt, for The Black Experience in America: The Course.

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The murder of George Floyd and the killing of Daunte Wright are tragedies. I have a feeling, though, that we process the tragedies differently depending on how much we identify with Floyd and Wright—or how likely we are to be treated the way they were in a random police encounter.

That’s certainly the case for me. I’ve found that navigating society as a Black man comes with unique challenges. Contradictions.

For example, there’s what I call the extreme of appearances: If I wear athleisure, strangers often make unflattering assumptions about my education level and figure I’m not a professional. But if I’m dressed sharply, my clothes make an uncommonly strong impression. A nice outfit becomes otherworldly.

Then there’s the paradox of vigilance: If I want to survive, I have to stay aware of the ways society treats me differently. But if I dwell on those things too much—if I view every interaction, advantage or slight as possibly influenced by race—it shuts down my ability to function.

Similar, and even more troubling now that I’m a parent, is the paradox of fear. I have a 12-year-old son whose three-inch growth spurt over the past year suddenly has him looking (and sounding) more like a 16-year-old. My son needs to understand fear. I need him to be aware that strangers will sometimes assume he is even larger and older than he appears. They will see him as a threat. He will have to deescalate situations and go out of his way to put people at ease. But even if he does all that, there’s a danger. If he’s too focused on the lens of fear through which some of society views him, he will adopt that lens. The fear will alter him. He either will become afraid, or deeply resentful and defiant. That fear can keep him alive. It can also eat him alive.

These complicated and sometimes contradictory forces are a big part of the reason why I designed The Black Experience in America: The Course. Understanding them, and the dynamics they create, can probably help us move forward.

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You can take portions of The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

Also, it’s now easy to purchase a lesson as a gift:

New: Buy a $5 lesson in The Course for someone else! Fully-paid access to an interactive lesson will go to the email address of your choice. This is a great option for introducing kids to the lessons.

The first topic we tackle in The Diversity Remix podcast: Charles Blow’s suggestion that Black people migrate back to the South. I argue it’s not that simple.

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Georgia makes both arguments.

In the most recent election cycle, Black voters in the state shifted the outcome of the presidential race and delivered a Senate majority to the Democrats, showing the impact a motivated subset of voters can have.

And then last week, lawmakers in the state passed new measures limiting vote by mail, ballot drop boxes and evening voting hours — measures that will make it harder for working-class, urban citizens to vote, and undermine the impact of Black voters there.

Last week I was the guest on a podcast, The Diversity Remix; (click here to listen), talking about one of the central ideas in his latest book, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto. The idea: That to focus political power, African Americans should move to a handful of strategic metropolitan areas in the South. I love the debate the book has sparked, but I have serious doubts.

I’ve spent a little time living in the South, and from my experience the culture shock many people would experience in moving might be significant. There’s the question of what kinds of jobs would be available to support a migration of tens of thousands of people, and how the school systems would cope. And then there’s the matter of legal maneuvers like the one Georgia lawmakers just executed, which dampen the impact of the Black voter population.

The debate reminds me of the tension between Black community leaders W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, more than 100 years ago.

Washington argued for Black people to focus on self determination, practical skills and economic progress first, and delay pushes for civil rights and legal protections. Du Bois argued that civil rights and legal protections couldn’t wait. I’m inclined to think that, while Charles Blow’s case for a reverse migration to the South makes sense on paper, economic and legal realities would trip things up.

You can explore those ideas from Du Bois and Washington, and how ideas have driven progress, in The Black Experience in America: The Course. Download an overview here, or take select lessons by following the links below:

Subscribe now

You can take portions of The Course online. Buy a lesson bundle, and send others the link:

Also, it’s now easy to purchase a lesson as a gift:

New: Buy a $5 lesson in The Course for someone else! Fully-paid access to an interactive lesson will go to the email address of your choice. This is a great option for introducing kids to the lessons.