An olive branch grown from black soil: Teaching truth in the time of erasure

Abstract

When history is rewritten to comfort the powerful, classrooms become battlegrounds for justice and truth. This piece examines the political erasure of Black history in Florida, where teachers are directed to frame slavery as beneficial to the enslaved. It names the weight of the Black Tax, the exhaustion of racial battle fatigue, and the ease of white fatigue that too often excuses silence, while calling on ancestral memory as a guide for truth telling. Teaching, as bell hooks reminds us, remains an act of liberation even under constraint. Reclaiming the classroom as a site of resistance and protection, the author extends an Olive Branch Petition for our time, not of quiet compliance, but of peace rooted in justice and honesty. Without truth, there is no peace. Without peace, there is no justice.