In The Progressive, I’ve documented the importance of teaching Black history, whether it involves learning about the origins of our nation, Juneteenth, the Reconstruction era, or the history that informs critical race theory. A result of the discomfort that can come from learning history and experiences that run counter to popular American mythology is backlash, and there has been backlash: the crescendo being an Executive Order meant to restore “truth and sanity to American history.”
The discomfort is due in part to the belief that Black history is for Black people, that it is an exaggeration of Black victimization at the hands of the world’s first modern democracy as well as an embellishment of Black achievement. Therefore, Black history is for Black people only. However, educator and author Brian Jones disagrees in his new book, Black History Is for Everyone.
Black History Is for Everyone
By Brian Jones
Haymarket Books, 208 pages
Publication date: September 30, 2025
For Jones, learning Black history allows us to actually be a more perfect union. “Black history is for everyone precisely because it is not about promoting a new kind of superiority,” Jones writes. “Instead, by seeing the past in a new way, Black history offers an opportunity to begin to see ourselves (whether you identify as Black or not) in a new way, too.”
Jones’s story of learning is like mine and like that of most students who learn U.S. history in American schools, where they are “fed superiority-infused stories of race, of nation, stories of heroic revolution in 1776, and ever-expanding rights and freedoms.” But history isn’t cute and convenient; stories are. Stories often leave out the details. History is meant to reveal a full picture.
Jones’s text seeks to correct the fables of history classes nationwide by encouraging teachers to embrace a history they have little understanding of—a history that, no matter how tough it may be to swallow, is entirely digestible.
Jones begins making his case by sharing a story of a childhood friend who is white and declares his skin color to be peach while Jones’s is brown, in order to explore the matter of racial consciousness. Reading this made me reflect on the first time I became conscious of being Black. It’s an experience that most, if not all, Black people experience—even characters like Carlton Banks.
Imagine navigating such an introduction absent a nuanced understanding and explanation that race is not biological but social, and having to learn this lesson through interactions over the course of growing up—interactions shaped by laws, court precedent, and racial pseudoscience. It’s a lot. Now imagine an educator who can help children navigate those waters within a learning environment where it is safe to question, answer, and explore. It’s a lot easier to understand for all students, regardless of age.
Haymarket Books
Jones continues introducing how a nation is forged amid race classifications, and what this has meant for Black people who have experienced violence at the hands of what Black studies scholar and author Charisse Burden-Stelly rightly calls “the U.S. capitalist-racist state” in the form of surveillance, disruption, and murder. Jones doesn’t shy away from the hypocrisy of a nation founded on the freedom to keep African people in bondage. Nor does he shy away from the comparison of the revolution of settler colonialists to that of enslaved people in Haiti and the meaning of the nation-state.
Jones explains that understanding race and nation are central to understanding our collective identities, which help us make sense of revolution, “when everyday life and relationships are transformed, and what seemed impossible suddenly becomes possible.” That’s the power of Black history; it is instructive for moments that call for revolution, such as the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc., which allowed the Trump Administration to proceed with Executive Order 14160, a challenge to birthright citizenship, but I digress.
In fewer than 160 pages, Jones undertakes a most crucial endeavor of our time: spreading the gospel of why Black history is for all of us to learn. Black history is about Black people demanding, following the Civil War, that education be free and accessible to all, and that people have access to education everywhere, taught by anyone. Jones builds on that history here, advocating for the teaching of Black history to all.
The question is, are we wise enough to learn Black history or doomed to a cycle of insanity for failing to learn from it?