Educators craft, promote Black studies as other states limit how it’s taught

The 15 students in Damien Ford’s class at the Baltimore School for the Arts were glued to the clip of the late Toni Morrison artfully discussing the “white gaze” — the assumption that a reader is white and writing from a Black perspective. None of the teens had been born when the 1998 interview with broadcast journalist Charlie Rose aired, but the author’s words still resonated with them .“I think she ate him up,” said Sydney Tugnor, a 15-year-old sophomore in the African American Literature class. “She wasn’t aggressive or rude. She said what she had to say and he didn’t say anything back.”