At 7:50 a.m. the bell rings as twenty-five or more seventh-graders pour through the door of Mr. Pennix's classroom. For 15 minutes, I had been wandering about the classroom observing the American History posters on the walls around me. In vain, I scanned the posters upon which the faces of white American heroes were proudly displayed for faces of color. As time drew near for classes to begin, I noticed the presence of inquisitive brown eyes peering through the window of Mr. Pennix's locked door. Before I knew it, a mob of middle schoolers had swarmed like flies around the classroom door, waiting impatiently for Mr. Pennix's indication that it was time to come in. Whether their eagerness to enter the classroom stemmed from a fascination with my presence or from the sheer excitement at the prospect of learning about mixed numbers and improper fractions, I shall never know.

Calvin Pennix, a 25-year-old black man, teaches both mathematics and history at View Park Middle School in South Central Los Angeles. During my observation of Mr. Pennix's eighth grade U.S. history course, I was simultaneously amazed and disturbed by what I noticed. Mr. Pennix stood at the front of the classroom and proceeded to read off a list of questions that quizzed students on their knowledge of individuals like Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin. Staring at the backs of 70 or more kinky heads of hair that were braided, waved, twisted, permed and weaved I began to reflect upon my own educational experience. The subjectivity of my middle school and high school curricula was something that I attributed to the fact that my schools, my classmates and my teachers were predominantly white. As such, I was quite shocked by the Euro-centric nature of the curriculums at schools, where the students and staff were individuals who looked just like me.

After class, Mr. Pennix commented, "The state of California gives us a list of things that our students need to know by the end of the school year, and I have to find the material to teach it. The history that we're required to teach is definitely biased. We start at the Scientific Revolution and end at the Civil War which is the only place that black people show up. I try to parallel everything that we do to black history because there's absolutely nothing about the contributions of blacks. The worksheet that I handed out at the end of class that talked about blacks in the Revolution was mine. It wasn't part of the curriculum. If the head of the department were to come into my class and see me handing out that worksheet, I could get into a lot of trouble. But I don't care." When I asked Mr. Pennix why he feels obligated to incorporate blacks into his curriculum, he answered, "I try to incorporate black history where I can because I think it's important to open my students' eyes even if it's in some small way."

My brother and I spent the month of January in Los Angeles with our sister Sarah Bass. Sarah is a 2006 Amherst College graduate who, after earning her B.A. in both English and Black Studies, assumed a position through Teach for America as a sixth grade teacher in South Central L.A. During our time in California we had the opportunity to teach several classes at one of the many all-black elementary schools in the Los Angeles area. My brother talked about blacks in science, the various gene inhibitions of viral proteins and HIV, while I taught on the contributions of blacks as Africans and African Americans. Throughout our presentations, the students stared in awe as Andrew took them on a step by step journey through the cell and as I introduced them to individuals like W.E.B. DuBois, who was the father of sociology; Granville T. Woods, who was the black Thomas Edison; Medgar Evars, who for a season, was the civil rights movement in Mississippi; and Langston Hughes, who challenged America with a question yet unanswered, "What happens to a dream deferred?"

Evidence of new found pride was made plain upon their faces when they discovered that Dr. Daniel Hale Williams was the first to perform an open heart surgery; Charles Drew saved millions of lives through the invention of the blood bank; Lewis Howard Latimer, not Thomas Edison, invented the carbon filament in light bulbs, and that yes, American history belongs to them too.

For centuries, blacks have accepted a position of marginalization as majority white society parades biased and misconstrued models of Americanism. Assumptions about white entitlement are affirmed by the society in which we live; a society that functions on a distorted image of democracy yet is sustained by inequality. Curricula glaze over, exclude or completely must the systemic oppression intermingled with the ideology of American liberty, and as a result a race of children continue to struggle in classrooms without a history to tell them that America belongs to them as well. Reality proves that today's black children are left without an image of blackness of which they can be proud; without knowing who they are, they have no means of conceptualizing what they can become.

Later that day one of the boys came up to me smiling and said, "Miss Bass, without black people, we'd still be in the dark!" His laughter as he picked up his backpack and ran down the stairs from the second story classroom is a sound that will forever resound in my ears.

Amanda is a first-year living in North Dormitory, and intends to double major in mathematics and black studies. She is the third oldest of seven children (six girls and one boy) and was home-schooled full-time until eighth grade. She is a bibliophile and a chocoholic. She loves to sing and makes a mean brownie swirl cheesecake but is terrified of spiders and of things that crawl.