I think one of the most harmful things I learned growing up was this notion that history exists in a different realm than the present; that the world is basically "fully formed" now and history was the world "still cooking." I think this kind of ideology makes it really easy to dismiss protests, because to people (especially those with privilege) who haven't critically examined the way they learned history, it seems like there is a fundamental divide between the righteous protests that brought us to where we are now and anything that happens in the present.
Through this lens things like:
"Slavery was 150 years ago, get over it!" Actually kind of make sense. I mean, if the world is fully formed now, doesn't that mean racism is over? So any further attempt to correct it would be the real problem in the present, Anti-white Racism!
So what do we do? Well, first of all, for my fellow educators, developing assignments where students think about how the events of today might look in a history book could be a good place to start (helping them draw the connection that the current moment in history is not somehow special or different from any other)
So that's a band-aid that would be easy to implement quickly, but what about deeper systemic change?
In a broader sense, I think we really need to restructure the way we teach history in a way that creates a focus on modern events and the historical context that leads up to them. Each unit could tackle a different social issue, tracing how that issue evolved over time. For example, if we wanted to talk about the George Floyd protests, we could have a whole unit about the history of anti-black racism in America. Or for a unit about climate change, you could start at the industrial revolution and talk about how environmental justice has changed over time.