Topic: Textbooks

A report from Harvard University's Hutchins Center reveals a long history of white supremacy being taught in American public education textbooks. Authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman are cited as having used language that dismissed people of African descent. The segment explores how the royalist political model of Europe was adapted into a color-based hierarchy in the United States to maintain power.

Historian Donald Yakovon discusses his research into 3,000 historical textbooks, noting how the achievements of non-white Americans were systematically ignored. He highlights how 1940s high school textbooks portrayed enslaved people using offensive stereotypes and how these books remained in use for decades. The influence of Texas and California on the national textbook publishing industry is identified as a key factor in the persistence of these narratives.