Feb 20, 2008 3:32 PM

Staffer energizes teaching of black history

When Lisbeth Gant-Britton was in high school, her history textbook had just two pictures of black people. The images of scruffy-looking slaves sitting by a little shack did little to make her proud of her African-American heritage and even less to motivate her academically.

Years later, Gant-Britton, who is student affairs officer of the UCLA Afro-American Studies Program, was reminded of her school days when she heard of the appalling drop-out rates among African Americans and Latinos in high schools in Los Angeles and other parts of the nation.

"One of the things that happens frequently is that they don’t feel like they see themselves in a positive way in anything that’s going on in school," Gant-Britton said during a Feb. 1 discussion that marked the beginning of Black History Month. The event was held in Haines Hall and organized by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.

Gant-Britton has authored a textbook that is the antithesis of the books she grew up with. Titled "African American History" and brimming with colorful pictures, exercises, projects and information about Web sites, the 379-page book is currently being used in high schools nationwide.

"Hopefully, nobody's going to be able to fall asleep while they read it," joked Gant-Britton, whose first book, "African-American History: Heroes in Hardship," published in 1992, won the Los Angeles Mayor's Office Special Commendation for its contribution to racial understanding through education.

During her hour-long talk, Gant-Britton spoke about the situation in which African Americans and other people of color find themselves today.

Black History Month, she noted, has done much to educate the public about the tremendous contributions of African Americans. "One of the reasons we can have a Barack Obama leading a presidential campaign is because of all those years of Black History Month."

But the nation's racial landscape is still full of challenges, she noted. Manning Marable, a noted Columbia University historian, once wrote about the "deadly triangle" of racism against blacks, particularly youth, in the 21st century: mass unemployment, mass incarceration and mass disenfranchisement.

"Clearly, we have a new triangular (slave) trade," Gant-Britton said, explaining that the high number of school dropouts leads to unemployment or underemployment of youth. "And bingo, it's no accident then that the third leg ends up being the huge number of incarcerated African-American youth."

In today's growing global economy, minorities and the poor are victims of yet other forces. One of these is transnational human trafficking, caused by wars and diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Gant-Britton said, adding: "We have more people in slavery today than we did in the so-called historical slavery period."

To confront the enormous moral issues of our globalized world, she said, "one of the things that we can begin to think about is how to regenerate the kinds of civil rights activities that we studied in African-American history." The civil rights movement included important alliances among not just African Americans but progressive whites, Jews, Latinos and Native Americans. "Once again we can put those coalitions together," she urged.

1