Humble students push for diverse studies
Monica Rhor says she knows seven girls who could fill in educators on what’s missing in lessons.
The seven high school girls are razor sharp, poised, passionate — and on a mission.
Martha Nyemb is the daughter of African immigrants. Maia Richard’s parents graduated from a historically Black college. Cheyenne Simon is Black, Asian and white. Madison Davila is white and Hispanic.
Together with Anaya Baxter, Jayln White and Zanyla Marshall, they reflect the diversity of the schools they attend in Humble ISD: Atascocita High School and Summer Creek High School, where students of color make up the majority of the enrollment.
You wouldn’t know it by the books they read in school.
Textbooks gloss over slavery, segregation and systemic racism. The whole of African American history is condensed to Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King
Jr., and the contributions of Latinos and Asian Americans are barely acknowledged at all. Reading lists are heavy on the white European canon.
The girls are tired of it.
So they joined #DiversifyOurNarrative, an initiative started by two Stanford students, and began a campaign to push Humble ISD to incorporate more voices of color and anti-racist teaching into the high school curriculum. The local petition currently has more than 430 signatures.
The campaign comes at a time when a movement to educate students about the enduring role of slavery and racism in America’s past, and present, is under attack. President Donald Trump has called such efforts “left-wing indoctrination” and proposed a national commission to promote a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.”
That kind of whitewashed spin skips over the nation’s failings and paints dissenting voices as unpatriotic. It’s propaganda, not education. If truth is what we are after, then diversifying the narrative is the way to get there.
I first heard of the campaign when some of the girls spoke at a Humble ISD board meeting via Zoom. Everyone’s focus that August night was on virtual versus face-to-face learning, but the girls were undeterred.
“We urge you to diversify our education,” Nyemb, 14, an Atascocita High School freshman whose parents immigrated from Cameroon, told the board. “Even simply widening the umbrella of the civil rights movement beyond MLK and Rosa Parks and learning about the Asian American and Mexican American civil rights movements would help us grow as students.”
“It is extremely important that the students who sit in your classrooms and at your desks are properly educated about race issues and history,” said Baxter, 16, a junior at Atascocita High.
Students of color, Baxter added, often feel like neglected children, their “struggles and authentic stories” dismissed.
I wanted to high-five them through my laptop monitor. For speaking out and being a voice for kids of color. For raising questions of inequity and pointing out gaps in the curriculum.
I also heaved a heavy sigh. In the midst of the racial reckoning sweeping across the country, why does it take teenagers to call for the changes adults should long ago have made?
An inclusive curriculum that doesn’t flinch from teaching the hard parts of our country’s history shouldn’t be up for debate. It should just be.
Yet, the girls told me later over Zoom that too many schools still fall short. They said they learn little to nothing about the achievements of Black scientists and inventors or Black writers and artists. Little to nothing about Latino, Asian and Native American writers or history.
The message, the girls told me, is that the stories of people like themselves don’t matter.
“It makes you question what you can do and how great you can be,” Baxter said.
No child should walk away from school feeling like that. The goal of education is to lift up, not diminish.
Texas high school students can now take an “Ethnic Studies: Mexican American Studies” course, passed by the state board of education in 2018 after years of heated debate, and starting this fall, an African American studies course that was approved in the spring.
But such elective courses still treat the stories of non-white communities as marginal or optional — not as integral parts of American history.
White, a 16-year-old Atascocita High junior who remembers getting “The Talk” about racism from her parents when she was 8, learned about Black history at home long before the first mention in school — in her sophomore year when her class read a piece by Frederick Douglass.
“I’d read Frederick Douglass before and I’ve heard of him before because I’m Black,” she said. “But for these other kids, it may be their first time hearing of those things. It’s sad.”
That doesn’t just fail students of color who don’t see their own stories valued and elevated. It fails white students who graduate with an incomplete education and a lack of understanding of the challenges, and achievements, of people of color.
The girls say many of their teachers have been supportive of expanding the curriculum. In the past week, they also finally got an answer from Humble school board members, who want to schedule a meeting.
That’s a good first step. District leaders, in Humble and anywhere the curriculum is incomplete, need to do better. Until the curriculum reflects the diversity of our schools and country, every student is shortchanged.
If the educators need to learn more about what is missing, I know seven girls who would be great teachers.