He changed America by talking

So. I'm about to break my "no more talking about politics online" vow. But it's literally a holiday devoted to literally this so I'mma give myself a pass on this one.

Included in Stellan's schoolwork this week was a worksheet packet about MLK titled "He Changed America By Talking." It begins with a two page essay: Dr. Martin Luther King was "an important man" who "spoke to many people in many places," and "fought bad laws with words and hard work."

The closing paragraph I'll quote in full:

"Then in 1968 an angry man shot Dr. King. Dr. King died. People were afraid that Dr. King's dream would die with him. But people remembered his words. His talk changed America. His dream for his four children is coming true."

Literally the only mention of race in the entire packet was when it quoted the I Have A Dream speech ("...that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.") I guess if you were feeling charitable you could also count the clip-art image of a white hand and black hand shaking hands.

The packet talks about nonviolence, it talks about injustice, but it only tangentially refers to the actual reasons these things need talking about.

(To be clear I have zero complaints about Stellan's school or his teacher here -- when I asked him about MLK the first word out of his mouth was "racism", and clearly the actual lesson was a lot less oblique than the preprinted packet.)

I get that this is meant for younger kids, and that this stuff is not easy to talk about; there's almost certainly no way to do this that wouldn't lead to some group of parents getting ticked off. I don't think this is bad faith on the part of the corporation that produced the packet, even -- I'm not sure how I'd rewrite this in a way that'd still make it past e.g. the Texas Board of Education. There are at least a few bits where they clearly tried to talk about it without actually, y'know, talking about it.

But still. We can do better than this. Can't we do better than this?