A person I’ve known for a long time was talking with me recently about COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, particularly among Black people.

“I knew Native Americans were subjected to medical experiments, but when did that happen to Black people?” this person asked.

My initial response, “You’ll need to Google that before you repeat what you just said to anyone else.”

We started talking about the Tuskegee experiment, as well as other times in our country’s less than stellar history with performing medical experiments on members of subjugated demographics.

There was no malice in this person’s query. Although an adult, she had never heard of any of these things before then, not in school, in public — nowhere. I have no doubt she Googled it later.

Of course, an individual’s decision not to get a vaccine can’t be summed up so simply. But that conversation got me thinking: When did I first hear of the Tuskegee experiment? I’m sure I was an adult. It’s quite possible I was living in Mississippi, which is to say sometime in the last nine years. I am 38 years old.

Then I came across another tidbit on Sunday afternoon, first through an “info meme” I saw on Facebook but then through looking it up independently. I’ve eaten hushpuppies all my life, including a couple Sunday for lunch. I never knew how they got their name.

Apparently, escaping slaves would throw out balls of fried corn meal to distract the hounds that were tracking them and get the dogs to quit barking.

Growing up in Arkansas, we were definitely taught about the Little Rock Nine, but I knew nothing about the Elaine massacre until I went to college. We learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but I only learned a few years ago — from “Drunk History” on Comedy Central, of all things — that a teenager who knew Parks was actually the first to refuse her seat to a white person on a Birmingham bus.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I met a man in Starkville nine years ago who said he was a Freedom Rider, and I had to ask what that was. It was maybe a year before that when I first read about the Tulsa riots.

My exposure to Black history in my Arkansas schools was limited to how Martin Luther King had a dream, George Washington Carver was the GOAT when it came to peanuts and some dribbles and drops about Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson. The nod to Blacks in history started around Jan. 15 each year and abruptly ended March 1.

Slavery was acknowledged as a bad thing, though not the premise for the Civil War. The Civil Rights movement was largely acknowledged as a good thing, depending on the teacher. Evidently, according to our curriculum, Black folks quietly lived a segregated American dream between 1865 and about 1950. We didn’t learn much about that era of Black history and nothing really about lynchings.

All this got me thinking about the ongoing debate over Critical Race Theory, of which I, like so many, know almost nothing. I’ve heard about the fear of “Our Turn” tactics from CRT where the teaching of this history might be skewed in such a way where racial identity is inextricably linked to human quality. You know, the scenario where a white child is cowering in a bathroom stall, crying, wishing he wasn’t white so he could be fully accepted at school.

Of course, those tactics are wrong no matter who’s doing it, but I think it takes a lot of nerve for the white establishment, especially in the South, to suddenly be alarmed about this particular point.

What’s the real harm in knowing about how hushpuppies got their name? What’s the threat of a sixth-grade social studies class studying a unit on the rise and infamous destruction of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street? How many white children would suffer from deep-dive lessons on the realities of slavery or how lynchings were used to maintain the Jim Crow caste system before the Civil Rights movement?

Acknowledging, discussing and learning from the truth is no threat to any just cause, and if education isn’t meant to be a just cause then there can really be no others. The warts in our history are part of our story, and they often produce the impetus for our growth as a free society. That’s to say nothing of how crucial it is to normalize Black people hearing their own history taught more completely and honestly in integrated public spaces.

This scenario creates empathy, mutual understanding, common ground and a continued march against present-day barriers to equality. If that sounds dangerous to you, then what exactly are you protecting?

Zack Plair is managing editor of The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.