I had an Aha! moment. It was October of 2001. I was speaking in my home town in Decatur.

It's tied to life expectancy. They make it sound as if it's a health measure.

There was a contagion of ordinances. Many small towns expelled the black population or decreed a policy of not allowing any blacks.

Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.

So long as our history textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look at Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach us both sides of the exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.

The worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus provided by most of our textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate to today's postcolonial era.