“Every once in a while , there is a perfect word to describe a phenomenon. Here it is for the attempt to crush discussion of the history and reality of race in America, via a war on “critical race theory.” The word, of course, is whitewash.” Norman Ornstein
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Critical Race Theory seems to be the new Sharia Law. The loudest voices against it don’t truly understand it and they are trying to ban something that isn’t happening anyway.
Better analogies are Darwin’s theory and climatology. Critical Race Theory is not a religion or superstition.
The loudest voices against CRT are ignorant racist ideologues who seek to ban anything — CRT, Darwin’s theory, or climatology — that challenges their beliefs and superstitions.
Fair enough. What I was getting at was CRT being a bit of a bogeyman whereas Darwin’s theory is and should be taught in schools.
The actual critical race theory is a very specific and particular way of analyzing case law. It’s appropriate to teach it within that subcontext and we learned about in APUSH to analyze landmark Scotus cases and read the original Harvard Law Review article that proposed it. It’s no different from teaching about originalism or Marxism. As Gen. Milley eloquently put it in a recent hearing, learning about Lenin does not make one a communist. So Christopher is right that it is a right wing straw man, but Tom is right that the actual theory is worthy of fighting to include in classrooms where it is relevant to do so.
I think both proponents and opponents of CRT are actually using it as a proxy for “should we teach 1619” or “should we teach about racism/Jim Crow/slavery” more broadly. It’s also a debate that does not really affect us as much in Massachusetts where our new social studies standards are quite clear that we should teach about these topics, but give latitude to districts and teachers to develop their own curriculum.
I’m doing an Intro to Social Justice summer humanities course right now and I’m mixing and matching different resources. Some from a more progressive lens like the 13th documentary, but I’ll also cover the Washington vs. DuBois debate and it’s modern equivalents (McWhorter vs. Kendi or West v. TNC perhaps). This shows there is a range of opinion within the black community about how best to fight inequality.
I’m not telling students what side to pick, but I want them to hear all perspectives and pick a side with informed evidence. It’s just like when I teach economics. My goal is not to make capitalists or communists or socialists but to let kids know what those things are and make their own informed conclusions about what method they like best. CRT is the same thing. To my knowledge no school is imposing it, we are simply teaching it alongside other theories.
We were taught as kids that Europeans emigrated here to seek “freedom”…while the reality was many came here for higher wages. There was a serious lack of laborers in a world rich with resources in large part because we killed or exiled many of the existing human beings.
Some really did come for freedom, but then there was also a healthy dose of “freedom for me, but not for thee”.
The experience of European immigrants is irrelevant to the experience of slaves, former slaves, and their descendants. It is also irrelevant to the experience of Chinese immigrants imported as laborers for the first transcontinental railroads, and it is irrelevant to the experience of Native American indians who where the victims of massive genocide at the hands of the first European immigrants.
Much or most of what your generation and mine were taught as kids literally is whitewashed propaganda.
I interpreted JTM’s comment as just giving another example of how our history can sometimes be simplified and mythologized.
Good point.
Is slavery not being taught? I don’t recall a time when I didn’t know it once existed at least in the South. You certainly can’t teach the Civil War without slavery, and the absence of slavery would even leave a pretty big hole in teaching the formulation the our original Constitution. In my own education it would have been helpful if the unit on the Civil Rights Movement had concluded with at least a mention that there is still work to be done.
I’m curious about more specifics of the “slavery” curricula.
Do public school students in MA learn about the 3/5 compromise? Are they taught the specifics of the Dred Scott decision? How is reconstruction covered? Is the “lost cause” narrative described? Is the “great migration”, and its causes, described?
Are those students taught about the “rights” that slave owners had over their “property”? Do our students learn how those practices drive so many current stereotypes about black men and women?
How much do public school students learn about the explicit “husbandry” that was so influential in the market for slaves in the south? Do students today learn that male slaves were explicitly bred for their sexual prowess and female slaves for their fertility? Do today’s students learn how frequently male slave owners “visited” their female slaves, and how frequently female slave owners (or their daughters) privately welcomed those male slaves into intimate settings?
Are the resulting private terrors and passions of white culture explained — and the way that those terrors and passions were transformed into Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and deeply engrained racism nationwide?
There is a reason why those “true crime” TV shows so frequently feature large “threatening” black male perpetrators. That reason is rooted in the predominately white audience of those shows and in the plethora of cultural memes that originated with slavery.
I’ve always found it fascinating that I learned more ACTUAL history about slavery and its impact in my required reading of William Faulkner’s “Light in August” my high school English class (in my senior year) than in any of my several years of required history classes.
I sincerely doubt that the true nature of slavery in America has ever been taught — certainly not in “history” classes.
I can only speak for my school, but I’ve been showing the 13th documentary this week (it’s excellent, short, and I highly recommend it). Our post-segment discussions have turned into discussions on what history is and isn’t taught in schools. So while I know my colleagues at the high school teaching US cover reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement, it is unclear how much of this is done in the middle schools or how in depth they really go. Clearly not enough in Revere according to my incoming 9th grade summer school students.
To me, the failure of Reconstruction is one of the most important topics to teach and one there gets the least amount of coverage relative to its importance. As Barbara C Fields warned us at the end of Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”, the Civil War is still being fought and it can still be lost.
So while I do not favor teaching the 1619 project uncritically as truth, it is a particular narrative and framing that has been and should be challenged, it is also a welcome corrective to the woeful lack of knowledge many Americans have about slavery and the social construction of race used to justify it.
I am still learning the reality of what “Radical Reconstruction” was while unlearning what I got from my high school history class. I find it most interesting that literally the only thing that “stuck” from my 11th grade history class coverage of reconstruction was “Carpetbagger”.
Here’s my memory of what I was taught about the Reconstruction Era in a Montgomery County MD 11th grade history class in the 1968-1969 school year (my paraphrase):
It needs to be said that this recollection is almost surely intermingled with the opinions of my late mother and father. My mother, in particular, worked very had during her lifetime to overcome the racist culture she grew up in (her family was all from Shreveport LA and the surrounding area).
“Reconstruction” was a nasty slur, similar to “communist” and “Nazi” in my household as a child and young man.
@”the Civil War is still being fought and it can still be lost”
I think this is far and away the most important aspect of today’s political environment. Today’s GOP is doing all in its power to literally reignite the civil war.
It is no wonder that the GOP strives so mightily to block any investigation of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol — that attack is today’s counterpart to Fort Sumpter.
I absolutely believe that the January 6, 2021 attack was planned, organized, and orchestrated by the highest levels of the Trumpist GOP, including (of course) Donald Trump himself as well as essentially the entire GOP leadership. There is absolutely no way that the National Guard, Capitol police, and other security forces were somehow caught off-guard.
They were ordered to stand down, and those orders came from the top.
“In politics nothing happens by accident. If it happens you can bet it was planned that way.” FDR
Does that include red lining?
“Carpetbagger” was certainly a vocabulary word that went with the unit on Reconstruction for us, but that is quite the interesting spin you describe above. It’s only been recently that I’ve heard about Reconstruction being seen even in modern times as a negative. Of course contemporary Southern whites didn’t like it, but they weren’t supposed to. My experience was always that Reconstruction was an era of promising racial progress where for a few years the victorious Union wanted to make clear they meant it regarding the end of slavery and assisting those formerly held in bondage.
I’m older and remember being taught in elementary and Junior high that Reconstruction was not a good time. I came out of elementary school knowing the name of Robert E Lee’s horse.
But that was then, this is now. Why do we have an airport named for the creep who called African diplomats “monkeys.” and who campaigned against some “buck” using food stamps?
Not to mention the guy who destroyed the airport unions…
Touche!
And who was, by reliable and well-documented reporting, an informer for J. Edgar Hoover during the McCarthy era (which the same sources suggest should more aptly be named “the Truman era”).
Invasion of privacy has long been part of the stock-in-trade of the FBI.
I think it’s important to remember why it failed. Part of the reason is because reconciliation without reconstruction became normalized by Rutherfraud B Hayes and his corrupt bargain with the South. All for an inconsequential single term. The removal of federal troops leads directly to Jim Crow, the rise of the Klan, the Lost Cause, the disenfranchisement of blacks. The Wilmington Coup to destroy multiracial democracy, the rise of the Byrd machine in Virginia, the Tulsa riots. Thousands killed in lynchings.
Until this state elected Ed Brooke, there was not a single black member of the Senate after Reconstruction. Only a handful of blacks in the House before 1965. So I think it’s a real focal point where this country could have gone in a much different and much better direction.
Though Reconstruction might have ended either way. Being a Democrat and given the waning political will to sustain it I suspect President Tilden would have initiated a similar result.
To get into all those specifics you’d pretty much need a whole semester course on just the history of slavery which you certainly won’t get before college. My strongest recollections at this point are actually elementary schools due to my substitute teaching. Slavery is certainly referred to in the colonial units as it was a key part of both the domestic economy and the triangle trade. We actually don’t get close to the Civil War chronologically at that age so they don’t get the slavery compromises and causes of the war. We certainly don’t get into sexual aspects at that age. Slavery is always described as a horrible life where you can’t vote with your feet, get separated from your family, and sometimes get whipped.
What I do recall from high school is we used the American Pageant, a pretty standard text. Yes, we learned the slave trade, slavery’s impact on the Constitution, and it’s singular contribution to causing the Civil War. We learned about the Missouri Compromise, Compromise of 1850, and Dred Scott. We learned about Reconstruction, why it was important, what it set out to accomplish, what progress was made, the constitutional amendments, and why it ended prematurely. When we came back to the Civil Rights Movement we learned about Jim Crow, the post-Reconstruction backsliding, Black Codes, lynchings, and disenfranchisement. We learned what progress was also made during that time.
The pop culture influences you refer to are not taught, but that is your interpretation, the premise of which I’m not sure I accept.
I think slavery does deserve a semester before we get to college. I was shocked at how ignorant my U Chicago colleagues were about slavery, and these kids came from private schools and elite public schools and never encountered Malcolm X or James Baldwin. I really appreciated the Cambridge education I got after my time in Chicago. I was one of the few white students who knew anything about black culture or black history, it was very depressing.
Where are you going to fit that in? There’s been a lot of “let’s teach my agenda” advocacy lately regarding history (from both left and right), but honestly we’re lucky if we get all the way through chronologically from European Contact to within our lifetimes (and I think we should start by teaching pre-Contact Native culture on its own terms). Plus of course the high school day should include a period each of science, math, foreign language, English/literature, and the arts plus maybe phys ed, technology, and life skills. I’m more inclined to teach these things as they come up within the main narrative. As I recall my HS text balanced it well. There were sidebars at key points about a particular culture that didn’t have the feel of we interrupt this regular programming.
I like the idea of using a semester of required history combines with required English/Literature to cover slavery and its impact. My high school essentially did this by teaching William Faulkner in my senior-year English class (although I think that had more to do with my English teacher than the county curriculum).
Racism in modern (post-civil war) America demands FAR more than a sidebar in a “balanced” text.
It is intimately intertwined with wealth concentration, economics, sociology, politics, and virtually every other aspect of modern life.
There is no way to truly understand the dynamics driving America in 2021 without a deep understanding of American slavery and its consequences.
This gets into a broader discussion of popular vs. elite history and I personally have always been more interested in the latter. My blood flows much faster reading about the doings of kings than of peasants, those who were “in the room where it happened”. I still think what you are proposing works better for college. Before that the survey courses are just that – broad surveys to familiarize students with key names, dates, and events. I often label my approach to history “Great People, Great Events” – wars, politics, and the occasional cultural earthquake. There’s also the matter of the linear narrative. Sometimes episodes aren’t covered because frankly they don’t lead to anything. In a society as historically illiterate as ours I would focus on sticking to the basics. Unless you are offering a college course titled “The History of US Race Relations” you cannot and probably should not keep bringing that up when it is not relevant to the “A Plot” of the narrative. That said, there are plenty of times when even by my standard race/slavery is very relevant – the drafting of the Constitution, holding the country together in the first half of the 19th century, the Mexican War, Civil War and Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction backlash, and the postwar Civil Rights Movement. Other times it mostly happens in the background.
Ask any black family who wants to live in, say, Winchester about whether what we’re talking about is “relevant”.
Your argument strikes me as circular. You begin by denying the very existence of systemic racism. You construct circular arguments based on white privilege about why the actual reality of what happened is ignored in the public school curriculum. You at least have the candor to admit that it truly is an “elite” (which is, in America, a synonym for “white”) curriculum.
Then you claim that because society is “historically illiterate” (because we’ve been teaching about race this way for more than a century), the actual truth is not “relevant” to any except society’s elites (the mostly-white population that is able to attend college).
The ugly reality is that you object to my explicitly stating that black Americans are virtually never “in the room where it happened” — by explicit design, intent, and for much of history, law.
When an entire culture is denied access to “the room where it happened” because of the color of their skin — and because too many of those with white skin only care about the actions of other white elites — then violence and mayhem is the inevitable result. We force those who do not have white skin to hit white elites upside the head with a two by four in order to get their attention — then complain about “racial violence”.
It is not my intent to criticize or demean you personally in any of my commentary. It is, however, my hope that you will make some effort to appreciate that the argument you offer here is — nearly by construction — an argument of, by, and for white privilege.
There is no shortcut to a color-blind “post-racist” America. We MUST confront our racist past and present.
We will not succeed at that until we teach our young people the truth about the society we all share and that they inherit.
YES! Because of how our history has played out, the bulk of the dominant actors have been white men, unless of course they are cast on Broadway by Lin-Manuel Miranda 🙂
There’s not a whole lot I can do about that, though I am open to multiple voices speaking to us about how these events impacted them. If we were discussing the national histories of other nations I’m sure most of the actors would represent their racial majorities or ruling classes as well.
My only push on that analogy is that climate change and evolution are observable, testable, scientific phenomenon that have been proven to be true. CRT, like Marxism or originalism or Catholicism is an ideology that cannot be proven or disproven, but uses a particular frame of looking at reality to explain reality. CRT is not the only way to examine the impact of race on the law, but it’s a valid way and our students should be made aware of it. Just as they should know about all religions and all political ideologies. Teaching history is not indoctrination and never should be.
It has been whitewashed all along.
Only very recently have critiques of our traditional, sanitized approach to teaching American history finally reached down from the college level into the secondary schools of America.
Now we are getting the predictable backlash, which, ironically, confirms the accuracy of the need for the corrective lens of critical race theory.
Having experienced Russian media in a CIS country myself, it is striking how correct the recent analysis of Timothy Snyder pointing out just how similar the recent efforts by the nascent (but now-dominant) fascist wing of the contemporary Republican Party to re-sanitize history to protect the feelings of white people to the so-called ‘memory laws’ in Russia that criminalize any teaching of history that conflicts with the nationalist version of Russian imposed by the state really is.
I think what makes is painful is whiplash. If the whole truth were taught all along, people would not feel like they being attacked now that less sunny aspects are being discussed. There’s still plenty to be proud of, but America is about constantly striving for a “more perfect” union.
Whiplash is part of it, but there’s also identity outside of our own bodies, which is a common thing in American culture (in contrast to our “individualism”). Scott McCloud has a good example of this: if you are driving a car and another driver’s car hits yours, you don’t think or say “that guy’s car hit my car.” You say, “He hit me!” We train everyone from childhood to think “We are Americans” so we extend our identity to include the past and the Founding Fathers as if they were family… and nobody wants to talk about dad enslaving a woman, so they don’t want to talk about President George Washington trying to recapture Oney Judge, a woman who escaped his slave labor camp Mount Vernon when Washington brought her to Philadelphia. She lived in New Hampshire. Now, she illustrates “Live Free or Die.”
Which is why I’ve tried to move away from “we”, which from a grammar stickler standpoint is supposed to include the speaker. When I’m tempted to use the word historically I stop and remind myself, no, I wasn’t there, therefore “we” didn’t do anything. If this attitude were adopted more generally for example, no African-American could say “we” were slaves just as you aren’t likely to hear anyone say “we” were masters because nobody alive today was on either side of that peculiar institution.
As a public school teacher, I follow some history teachers online, and found this 1961 letter from leaders of Louisiana State University admitting they were using their power to stop integration despite judicial and legal requirements to integrate.
Troy Middleton, President of LSU, was writing the President of the University of Texas about integration. The sentiments (and policies) described in the letter are outright racist. Also, I want to add that I have read that about this time at UT, one of the old white math professors there, Robert Lee Moore, found himself lecturing a class with one Black student in the audience. Moore deliberately refused to lecture until the Black student left the room. Prior to UT, Moore had taught at University of Chicago and Princeton.