Dear Horry County Board of Education,

You have failed us. It is your job to provide education for the students of Horry County about systemic racism and its effects on institutions and citizens throughout our country, and you did not.

Many of us did not know what white privilege was until we attended college, which is an opportunity afforded to us largely due to privilege. We did not learn about how systemic racism still pervades our society today during our school experiences in Horry County. We did not learn about micro-aggressions and how to stand up against them, even though they most certainly existed in the halls of our schools.

We have two demands for action:

1.   Publicly denounce racism today.

2.   Take steps toward creating an anti-racist curriculum for all Horry County Schools.

You need to do more. It’s not enough to only learn about Black history in the month of February. We need more People of Color on the school board and creating curricula for our schools. We need Black authors, artists, and scholars as primary sources of education in all subjects. We need to teach our K-12 students that racism and the lynching of Black bodies is not just a distant part of history, but a very prevalent part of our present. We need to teach students about redlining and why certain resources are harder to access for People of Color. We need to teach students about the disproportionate rate of incarceration for Black citizens, the disproportionate rate of Black women dying during childbirth, and the disproportionate rate of violence toward Black trans women.

Your job as an educational institution is to equip the county’s young people to contribute to society in a positive way, and that goal is impossible without acknowledging the systemic racial issues still present in school curricula. Racism is not about politics; it is about ethics. Please, take a public stand on racism today. Then, take further steps to ensure that the curriculum used in Horry County Schools is not just shallowly inclusive, but is blatantly anti-racist.

"In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist." -Angela Davis

Sincerely,

Melinda Custer

Carolina Forest High School ‘13