I don't think that it is a good idea to characterize people on the basis of their race. If you had said that the average high school student has no concept of his/her heritage/history I would agree.
I think that the problem stems from two reason. First, a poor knowledge tree. Second, the concept of having classes where everyone is taught the same thing. At some point, we are going to have to acknowledge the need to to have IEP's (Individual Education Programs) for all students and not just special ed students.
I also think that schools tend to avoid delving deeply into history because it is sometimes embarrassing.
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I do not agree. Ask any black person about how institutionalized racism has affected their lives - this is their history. They KNOW their history.

I have talked about this on Mahalo before, but a friend of mine was a black orphan. Both of her parents died and she lived with her sister.

She worked hard and attended the #1 public magnet school in the US. When she graduated at the top of her class, she attended Princeton. After struggling to get her first job, she was working 60 hour weeks at a top NY law firm when she was let go to make room for a perpetually drunk buddy of a partner. She is currently working as a legal assistant for chump change after applying to 57 different places and moving to a different city to find a job. She even uses a different nickname because she is afraid her real name is too "ethnic" sounding. She was tormented for her skin color and her hair her entire life. She is still an outcast at any job she is at, where managers and partners are predominantly white. She is constantly turned down from jobs because her degree threatens the white managers with po-dunk community college degrees, and she overheard others say she is "uppity."

She is suffers from extreme depression at times because her white colleagues say, "Why are you here? You could be doing so much better. You need to apply yourself, you need to work hard" as if she magically stopped working hard after years of being an overachiever. Worse, they say,"You're so smart for a black girl" and they call her "Princeton Girl" because they find her black name too cumbersome.

The point is, they know their history. They battle it and celebrate it each day.

Black art (rap, hip hop, film, fine art) is inundated with cultural and historical references as well as stunning introspection. High school students are consumed with this type of art, as well as "Black History Month." And black life is consumed with daily reminders of the issues stemming from our dark past. I would suggest the average black student knows a hell of a lot about black history than the average white student does about "white" history, living in the shadow of legitimized racist policies that half the people in the US that are STILL ALIVE lived through. Think, for example, that the person 3rd in line for US Presidential Succession this very moment was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and said:

"I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

The average student glosses over facts like these, but black people are more than aware of who Robert Byrd is, or Strom Thurmond, who helped run the country for 56 years even thought he said an army couldn't force him to "admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

Obviously, race issues are not cut and dry, but black people deeply identify with their history, just perhaps not in the sense you are discussing (rote, academic memorization of purely historical facts). I challenge you to ask a typical black student to identify the following: Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, the Emancipation Proclamation, Segregation, Civil Rights, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama. Not to mention some of the artists that created jazz and blues and eventually hip hop, which has become the dominant commercial music of the world. Or the sports players that revolutionized the games.

I would bet that these students are proud of what their people have accomplished, and I bet they would surprise you.

I am also a bit puzzled as to why you put "leaders" in quotes, but I digress.
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