Description

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Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone.

With Teaching Black History to White People, which is “part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to guide,” Moore delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the Black experience in America. He poses provocative questions, such as “Why is the teaching of Black history so controversial?” and “What came first: slavery or racism?” These questions don’t have easy answers, and Moore insists that embracing discomfort is necessary for engaging in open and honest conversations about race. Moore includes a syllabus and other tools for actionable steps that white people can take to move beyond performative justice and toward racial reparations, healing, and reconciliation.

About the Author

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Leonard Moore is the George Littlefield Professor of American History at the University of Texas at Austin and a graduate of Jackson State University. He is the author of three books on Black politics, the most recent being The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972.

Praise For…

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A trenchant survey of Black history—and an argument for why every American, of every ethnicity, needs to learn it...An important, sympathetic effort to elucidate matters of Black lives while expanding intellectual horizons.
— Kirkus

Engaging and thought-provoking for a wide range of readers...Moore sets forth provocative questions—for instance, 'What came first? Slavery or racism?'—while simultaneously providing complex, nuanced answers.
— Texas Highways

[A] timely book...Moore guides readers—many of whom Moore, who is Black, presumes will be white—through Black history and his own personal experience in academia.
— Texas Observer

Moore is a scholar and professor of history whose passion for teaching oozes off the page...Teaching Black History to White People illustrates his uniquely engaging pedagogy that has won awards and made Moore a highly respected and sought-after professor and speaker...What I like most about this book is that Moore explains how teaching Black history, something he’s done for three decades, was different during the 2020 racial uprisings, and he provides actionable insights for white people (or any non-Black person) to counteract anti-Blackness and racism in America.
— EdSurge

An important book that joins the ranks of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Henry Lewis Gates’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me in assuring that all of American history is preserved and taught.
— Southern Literary Review