One of the sins of the antebellum South was that it made it illegal to educate slaves. The idea behind this policy was that educated blacks might rebel against the system that oppressed them. After all, while slavery was normative in Africa, educating them in the Western canon might show them that it didn’t have to be this way. I thought of that when Oregon’s Department of Education announced that it was racist to require minorities to have basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic upon graduation. What better way to keep blacks from understanding that there is something better than what leftism offers?
