The following statement was released by leading professional associations.
The statement says:
Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism and American History
We, the undersigned associations and organizations, state our firm opposition to a spate of legislative proposals being introduced across the country that target academic lessons, presentations, and discussions of racism and related issues in American history in schools, colleges and universities. These efforts have taken varied shape in at least 20 states; but often the legislation aims to prohibit or impede the teaching and education of students concerning what are termed “divisive concepts.” These divisive concepts as defined in numerous bills are a litany of vague and indefinite buzzwords and phrases including, for example, “that any individual should feel or be made to feel discomfort Ed, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological or emotional distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.” These legislative efforts are deeply troubling for numerous reasons.
First, these bills risk infringing on the right of faculty to teach and of students to learn. The clear goal of these efforts is to suppress teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United States. Purportedly, any examination of racism in this country’s classrooms might cause some students “discomfort” because it is an uncomfortable and complicated subject. But the ideal of informed citizenship necessitates an educated public. Educators must provide an accurate view of the past in order to better prepare students for community participation and robust civic engagement. Suppressing or watering down discussion of “divisive concepts” in educational institutions deprives students of opportunities to discuss and foster solutions to social division and injustice. Legislation cannot erase “concepts” or history; it can, however, diminish educators’ ability to help students address facts in an honest and open environment capable of nourishing intellectual exploration. Educators owe students a clear-eyed, nuanced, and frank delivery of history, so that they can learn, grow, and confront the issues of the day, not hew to some state-ordered ideology.
Second, these legislative efforts seek to substitute political mandates for the considered judgment of professional educators, hindering students’ ability to learn and engage in critical thinking across differences and disagreements. These regulations constitute an inappropriate attempt to transfer responsibility for the evaluation of a curriculum and subject matter from educators to elected officials. The purpose of education is to serve the common good by promoting open inquiry and advancing human knowledge. Politicians in a democratic society should not manipulate public school curricula to advance partisan or ideological aims. In higher education, under principles of academic freedom that have been widely endorsed, professors are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject. Educators, not politicians, should make decisions about teaching and learning.
Knowledge of the past exists to serve the needs of the living. In the current context, this includes an honest reckoning with all aspects of that past. Americans of all ages deserve nothing less than a free and open exchange about history and the forces that shape our world today, an exchange that should take place inside the classroom as well as in the public realm generally. To ban the tools that enable those discussions is to deprive us all of the tools necessary for citizenship in the twenty-first century. A white-washed view of history cannot change what happened in the past. A free and open society depends on the unrestricted pursuit and dissemination of knowledge.
Signed,
American Association of University Professors
American Historical Association
Association of American Colleges & Universities
PEN America
The statement has been signed by more than 130 additional associations, including the Network for Public Education.
Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges
ACPA-College Student Educators International
African American Intellectual History Society
African Studies Association
Agricultural History Society
Alcohol and Drugs History Society
American Academy of Religion
American Anthropological Association
American Association for State and Local History
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
American Association of Community Colleges
American Association of Geographers
American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education
American Catholic Historical Association
American Classical League
American Council of Learned Societies
American Counseling Association
American Educational Research Association
American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
American Folklore Society
American Library Association
American Philosophical Association
American Political Science Association
American Society for Environmental History
American Society for Theatre Research
American Society of Criminology Executive Board
American Sociological Association
American Studies Association
Anti-Defamation League
Association for Ancient Historians
Association for Asian American Studies
Association for Asian Studies
Association for Counselor Education and Supervision
Association for Documentary Editing
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
Association for the Study of Higher Education
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Association of African American Museums
Association of College and Research Libraries
Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges
Association of Research Libraries
Association of University Presses
Association of Writers & Writing Programs
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
Business History Conference
Center for Research Libraries
Central European History Society
Chinese Historians in the United States
Coalition of Urban & Metropolitan Universities (CUMU)
College Art Association
Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History
Comparative and International Education Society
Conference on Asian History
Conference on Faith and History
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes
Council on Social Work Education
Czechoslovak Studies Association
Dance Studies Association
Executive Committee of the American Comparative Literature Association
Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions
Freedom to Read Foundation
French Colonial Historical Society
German Studies Association
Higher Learning Commission
Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities
Historical Society of Twentieth Century China
Immigration Ethnic History Society
Italian American Studies Association
John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education
Keats-Shelley Association of America
Labor and Working-Class History Association
Middle East Studies Association
Middle States Commission on Higher Education
Midwestern History Association
Modern Language Association
NAFSA: Association of International Educators
NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education
National Association for College Admission Counseling
National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education
National Association of Dean and Directors Schools of Social Work
National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education
National Association of Graduate-Professional Students
National Association of Social Workers
National Coalition for History
National Council for the Social Studies
National Council of Teachers of English
National Council on Public History
National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives
National Women’s Studies Association
Network for Public Education
New England Commission of Higher Education
North American Conference on British Studies
Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
Ohio Academy of History
Organization of American Historians
Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association
Peace History Society
Phi Beta Kappa Society
Radical History Review
Rhetoric Society of America
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
Scholars at Risk
Shakespeare Association of America
Society for Austrian and Habsburg History
Society for Classical Studies
Society for Community Research and Action
Society for French Historical Studies
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender
Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Society for the Study of Social Problems
Society for US Intellectual History
Society of American Historians
Society of Architectural Historians
Society of Civil War Historians
Society of Transnational Academic Researchers (STAR Scholars Network)
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges
Southern Historical Association
United Faculty of Florida – University of Florida, NEA/AFT/FEA, AFL-CIO
Urban History Association
WASC Senior College and University Commission
Western History Association
Western Society for French History
World History Association
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is literally a manufactured issue.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory
The GOP is seizing on this strategy to prevent any discussion of race at all. This is gonna be their big issue of 2022 & 2024. The fact that most of their voters have no clue what it even is makes it ideal for exploiting their ignorance.
Christopher Rufalo, Georgetown grad.
Christopher Rufalo was in the 2017 class of Lincoln Fellows at Claremont Institute (no relation to Claremont College).
Also in that class, James O’Keefe of the controversial Project Veritas, April Lawson who works for David Brooks (NYT), a couple of people from Hillsdale College, one of whom focused her research on classical charter schools, an adjunct professor from Catholic University of America, …
Bio’s show Rufalo was a visiting fellow at the Koch’s Heritage Foundation and he is a senior fellow at the Koch-linked Manhattan Institute.
and there’s this context along with the right’s Playbook!
“Follow the Paper Trail”
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/561549-to-understand-the-history-wars-follow-the-paper-trail
Included is a link in the article that goes to citizensrenewingamerica.com and their “Tool Kit: Combatting Critical Race Theory in Your Community”
yes, manufactured exactly because it will have massive surface noise: they know that the masses will never look deeper
Censorship
Censorship is always bad
No matter who’s to blame
Democracy can not be had
When censorship’s the game
Does Prof. Wilentz, who is cloistered in the legacy-admission nest of Princeton, belong to any of the organizations listed?
Linda,
Are you capable of logical reasoning about Sean Wilentz without resorting to ad hominem? I’ve read much of his writing – admit it, you haven’t – and he has impeccably liberal opinions on current events. But unlike most of his fellow historians these days, he values careful scholarship: he is a genuine historian, not a polemicist who cuts intellectual corners to advance an agenda. He operates in good faith – he doesn’t reach a conclusion to fit a preferred narrative and then shape his writing to advance that narrative. Gordon Wood is the most esteemed historian of early America (you haven’t read him either) and he has the same criticisms of the 1619 Project. Race and gender have no bearing on their scholarly critiques.
So what to do when historians disagree. After all we do not have a time machine to go back and ask the participants . In physics where one can not see sub atomic particles or visit distant stars. We explain events by the behavior that can be observed
“We are not ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is?” NYT
“The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him” Wilentz et al.
It may be true that Lincoln opposed slavery . Although not quite enough to sacrifice the Union for as evidenced by the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation and its limits. But seriously racial equality :
“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he assured them.
…I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of
negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office…there is a physical
difference between the white and black races which I believe will for
ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and
political equality… ”
‘his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality” > You say “scholarly critiques” . Now that’s quite a stretch.
Anna Lanson,
Are you capable of logical reasoning about Sean Wilentz without resorting to ad hominem?
If so, please explain why Sean Wilentz has not tried to discredit Harvard historian Jill Lepore the way he tried to discredit Nikole Hannah-Jones, who incorporated Lepore’s scholarship into the 1619 project to inform the very opinions that Sean Wilentz denounced as unallowable and unsupportable views?
Why is it okay for Jill Lepore to have opinions that are different than Wilentz without Wilentz denouncing the entirety of Lepore’s scholarship and demanding that Lepore’s writings be censored for not adhering to Sean Wilentz’ view of what is important in history and what is not?
Historians have always had disagreements of what events are more or less important. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when nothing any woman did during the founding of our country was deemed important by male historians.
Wilentz didn’t treat Nikole Hannah-Jones’s opinion the way he treated his disagreement with Jill Lepore. Wilentz tried to totally discredit Hannah-Jones, treating her with a disdain and ugliness that reflects how he treats those who he deems unworthy of the privilege that he grants only to those who he deems worthy of it. You seem to believe that no old white man who claims to be liberal can ever be criticized if he calls himself a liberal. Why do you have that very odd view?
Limousine liberals craft their own game e.g. the staffs of PPI and CAP and, the four economics professors who signed the public letter opposing Bernie Sanders. Interestingly, not one of the four identified his/her corporate activities as credential for the opinion, preferring to limit his or her identified affiliations to university employment.
The type of person who positions him/herself to advance the goals of Christopher Rufalo and Ryan Girdusky and, those who defend them aren’t worth my or anyone else’s time.
Btw- The tuition at Gordon Wood’s Brown University is almost $60,000 a year.
A question for blog readers, do you think Brown or Harvard has more professors funded by billionaires?
Don’t criticize Wilentz.
He has impeccably liberal opinions…AND he is a genuine historian.
The double barrel credential, for sure.
Oh, and if that is not enough: he operates in good faith.*
He is the Abe Lincoln of historians — honest as the beard is long and above reproach or question.
*it’s important to point that out, you know, because there are some “genuine Historians” (TM) who operate in bad faith
I think Sean Wilentz must appalled by his new bedfellows, who are using his words to ban the honest and critical teaching about history.
Poet-
Evidently, “operating in good faith” doesn’t lead to successful outreach that would result in national acknowledgement that Robert E. Lee (advised putting salt in the wounds of lashed slaves) and, other confederate generals were America’s shame.
It’s too bad that Wilentz, over his long, long career, won’t be remembered in history as a man known by all, for exposing confederate generals and for toppling their statues in the 1990’s or, in the 2000’s.
Instead, his name is forever linked to Walter Hussman and to Christopher Rufalo and Rufalo’s employer, the Koch-linked Manhattan Institute.
It’s so unfair when historians at legacy-admission colleges are treated unfairly.
There are some who might say that Wilentz had actually hoped for a more pronounced pushback that the one he was able to muster
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/
Whatever the case, Wilentz is certainly bright enough to understand how his words might be construed.
SDP says: “Wilentz is certainly bright enough to understand how his words might be construed.”
Exactly. As I mentioned above, Wilentz certainly never made that kind of sweeping attack on Harvard professor Jill Lepore, who also gives weight to things the Wilentz believes are not important.
Wilentz did exactly what he wanted to do – he was given a huge bully pulpit to clarify his intent and he chose to let his letter be used to justify extreme attacks on NHJ — in fact, I suspect he knew very well his attack on NHJ was being used to deny her tenure but he waited until public opinion was clearly going to go against him to claim that wasn’t his intent (although he only said that in the context of implying the faculty should never have given tenure to such a terrible scholar like NHJ, which was so nasty in itself and was clearly designed to push the false right wing narrative that NHJ didn’t really “deserve” on merit what all the white Knight professors of journalism got.)
It reminds me of Emily Oster, the Brown economist who has used her bully pulpit to rabidly demand that during the height of pandemic, all public schools must reopen immediately and all children and teachers be forced back into overcrowded, poorly ventilated buildings and she didn’t care whether there was funding for masks or anything else because she kept demanding that what mattered was sending kids back to school because she insisted it was safe. At least, that’s how the right wingers who hate teachers’ unions described her work.
Of course, quietly Oster whined that it wasn’t her fault the COVID deniers used her desire to promote her so-called “research” (which was quite shoddy anyway) in a manner that left out context. But since Oster didn’t try at all to provide any context, that excuse doesn’t fly.
Wilentz doesn’t like the idea that preservation of slavery might have been an impetus for the Revolution.
But let’s face it, it was not a simple matter involving just one impetus.
There were a lot of different interests involved with many different motivations.
There were undoubtedly some involved in the founding of the country who actually believed ALL men are created equal. Thomas Paine is an example and there is actually reason to believe that he (rather than Jefferson) may actually have been the source of those words in the Declaration of Independence.
There are still others who quite obviously believed that the words did not apply to African Americans.
This is clear when you look at the “compromises” that went into the writing of the Constitution , particularly the “3/5ths compromise.”
That there was not just a single impetus would seem to be obvious and it is more than a little surprising that any historian would not entertain that idea.
Some founders did not consider slaves to be citizens so the Constitution was not meant to include them. After all, they were counted as only 3/5 of a person.
Remember, the free states wanted slaves to count as zero fifths of a person.
FLERP!,
What I remember (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that the slave states wanted the slaves to count as one person for the purposes of giving those states proportionately more power, but that “one person” had no right to vote – their master represented their view in the “democracy” that must be celebrated (according to the Republicans).
it’s pretty similar to the Republicans today. They love to count felons who live somewhere else but are imprisoned in their jails as part of their population. (See Pennsylvania). Republicans are happy to include as many as possible residents during their census. But they go to great lengths to disenfranchise them. Can you imagine a mostly white rural area with a prison getting to count all the mostly non-white inmates as part of their population with the mostly white folks who live there getting to represent them with their vote? That’s today, and that’s the slaveholding south.
The south wanted slaves to count as one person to give them a larger population and more electoral votes, but they did not want those slaves to actually vote. Actually, they didn’t want those slaves to do anything but obey them.
Your comment with no context seems like the type of thing that the far right Republicans want to demand that history teachers teach — those nasty liberals up north wanted slaves to be 3/5th of a person — don’t you dare teach anything else because we decide what is necessary and what is not.
Without context, that comment is misleading, teaching high school juniors that it was really the northerners who tried to keep slaves down, while their southern masters were looking out for their best interests.
The Republicans going to great lengths to disenfranchise voters also want to count the voters who are disenfranchised in their census. Just like the slave states did. They want to count each imprisoned felon as one person in the rural area that prison is, but not one of those felons will have the right to vote — the people in the mostly white rural area will “represent” them with their vote.
I wonder what would have happened if the northern states said “slaves don’t count as 3/5 of a person, they count as 0 persons”? That would have meant that southern states had significantly less power. That could very well have meant slavery ended decades earlier.
Of course, those who just want to teach students that the north didn’t want to value slaves as a whole person would post exactly as FLERP! did, because it leaves out the real story.
With regards to Wilentz:
It really is indisputable fact that the founders, regardless of whether they personally wanted slavery to continue, were perfectly content to leave slavery in place and continue to enslave children, as long as they got something they wanted.
Can you imagine trading off keeping people enslaved for some other goal? Wilentz knows this is true that the founders did that. So he can’t argue that fact.
Instead, he makes the ridiculous argument that even though they “sorryowfully” decided to allow slavery to contineu, they were really not supportive of slavery.
No doubt if Sean Wilentz lives long enough to write a history of Susan Collins, he will call her the most outspoken opponent of Trump ever and totally attack any African American historian who points out that Susan Collins didn’t care at all about stopping Trump and took her marching orders from Mitch McConnell. (Wilentz won’t attack any white Harvard historians who have that view).
“Not true” Wilentz would probably shout! “How dare you say that Susan Collins supported the Trump agenda when she expressed her “extreme concern” about Trump so many times as she voted to empower that agenda whenever her vote was needed. This person who criticizes Susan Collins must be cancelled!”
Poet
Thanks for the link.
“Much of the discussion Thursday focused on a national report released last month from the Fordham Institute that gave North Carolina a D- grade for its new civics standards and an F grade for its U.S. history standards. The conservative think tank called the standards inadequate and said they should be rewritten.”
Ed reform echo chamber issuing letter grades to civics standards.
Are public schools really going to accept directives from ed reformers again?
I don’t understand why public schools are policed and directed by people who all belong to this insular echo chamber.
Would it be at all possible to hear from people who actually value public schools and are not part of this anti-public school, charter/voucher promoting “movement”?
It seems really unfair to public school students to let people who lobby against public schools direct what happens IN public schools. These people all just finished a huge lobbying effort promoting and marketing private school vouchers. Why don’t they go police what is taught in private schools? We’ll find some new people who value our schools and ask THEM what civics standards should like look.
I hope the ACLU goes after the totally vague, subjective notion of “divisive concepts.” Almost anything could be labeled as such, and it may result in the persecution of teachers.
The local school superintendent has interpreted the Florida law to mean that teachers cannot voice their own opinion on a topic. However, the term “divisive concepts’ is even more limiting and potentially dangerous to the security of teachers trying to do their job. Red state teachers are on shaky ground with this restrictive, subjective law.
I never allow students to know my opinion of political matters. This cannot end well. When a student admires me, voicing my opinion gets that student to agree with me without really thinking. When a student dislikes me, voicing my opinion will result in his rejecting my opinion without thinking. There is no good outcome.
My first statement in class is that I will never tell my own opinion. I just describe facts. It is not my responsibility to make the facts fit neatly with a particular view of life. My responsibility is to introduce the narrative in a way that students will be reminded of it when they encounter it in public discourse.
I’m not sure whether this is parody or serious, Roy. If the latter, I vehemently disagree. So hoping it’s parody. Would that I were in the classroom now. I’d find time for this short song and discussion in the part about Japanese internment. Even the selection of material brings bias with it.
When I was teaching math and science, I never allowed students to know my real opinion about the space aliens who built the pyramids.
I agree with Roy about not stating your opinion as a teacher. When students ask me what I think, like whom I’m voting for, or who was the best president, or the worst, I usually try to respond with, “Well, shucks, I dunno, what do you think?” And I always say I don’t teach my students what to think or what I think, but I get them to think for themselves. I don’t state my opinion much, but I do chose what topics to cover, and will fight tooth and nail to keep that academic freedom. Hey by the way, those are two words I like to use to nudge Republicans to the Left: freedom and choice. They love those words! Academic freedom to choose!
When I taught history, I made sure I spent plenty of time covering all the details, both heroic and sordid, not opining about them, but teaching about them to be sure. The toughest thing is if you try to teach current events. I have mixed feelings about doing that.
GregB: I am completely serious. However, there is one caveat. Tragedy is tragedy in my classes. When the story is that one group of people slaughtered another, an all too often repeated story, I present this as tragedy instead of triumph. When Napoleon gained favor in the French Revolution by turning grapeshot on a royalist insurrection, I do not suggest this was a great victory. Rather, I raise the question: what conditions must exist before a bloody scene is considered a great win?
It is unfortunate that we cannot always get into the skin of people who participate in historical events. The first causality of WWII in our county was the son of my neighbor. This was an immigrant family from Poland. He died on the Yorktown, tending to the wounded on deck against orders (or so the story goes). I always tell the children that story. Like so many good stories, it has the elements of tragedy. I want the kids to feel the cathartic nature of history. Unfortunately, most surface treatment of historical events leaves people focused on the heroic instead of the tragic.
I, too, pretended not to be wiling to share my personal opinions while serving up platters full of the Mystic Massacre and the Fort Pillow Massacre and the “heroic” stand for slavery at the Alamo and Greenwood and the Native American boarding schools and the Tuskeegee syphilis study and the interment camps and redlining and Selma. LOL.
Just the facts, Ma’am.
Yeah, right.
I felt it necessary to offset the steady diet of Patriotic Noise/Patriotic Gore that my students, growing up in the South, had been subjected to prior to taking my American literature class.
I fail to see what Al Gore has to do with any of this.
Oh, yeah, Inconvenient Truth.
Never mind.
So many things, so little time, Roy. I could not disagree more with you or LCT about letting kids know about your opinions. With the benefit of rosy hindsight and just slightly more than 30 years since I last taught a class, while I never volunteered how I felt about an issue, I was not shy about making my views known if asked. For me, as a teacher, it was much more important for me that my students could justify their opinions, regardless of whether they agreed with me or not. I also used to occasionally teach issues with a point of view of an advocate–being wholeheartedly against the right of inheritance, for example–to force them to justify why they thought I was so wrong. Not sure I’d do that today, but it worked then, in a different era.
A couple of anecdotes. The first headmaster who hired me–one who was generally known at the time to somewhat left of Che Guevara–was much further to right of Reagan and he hired me and gave me wide latitude to teach knowing of my leftist certainty. He believed there was a time and place for his students to be exposed to differing ways of teaching and learning. I did not shy away from my support of, for example, Mondale. But then again, if I were in class today, I’m sure I could not have exhibited the decorum I did with discussions of Reagan as compared to potential showdowns with Idiotistas and perhaps my views would align more with yours if I were.
And interestingly, the students on the right of the political spectrum generally did better in my classes. They were provoked to learn more to undergird their views. In many cases they became more open-minded, but still convinced of their political and social views. As for students “who tell me what I want to hear,” that never flew. And if a student did that while doing a fine job of justifying their views, it’s great training for adult life. I’ve done that a lot, especially when working in the legislative process.
The national AFT announced a couple of days ago that they were setting up a $2.5 million legal defense fund and will defend ANY member that gets in trouble for teaching historical truths. I don’t know if non-teacher organizations will help us at all, but I wouldn’t count on the ACLU or anyone else. They haven’t helped us in the voucher fights, to my knowledge.
What about for teaching hysterical falsehoods? (Eg, Elvis is alive and well and living in a cave in Afghanistan)
Will they defend you for that?
This just in, SomeDAM: Unborn baby sings like Elvis!
That’s freaking awesome news, Threatened!
He ain’t nothing but a womb babe, cryin all the time
I don’t believe your view that Big Foot is real, but I will defend to the death your right to shoot video of him.
“Research backs up Mason’s positive experience. A handful of recent studies have found that students are more engaged in school after taking classes that frankly discuss racism and bigotry — just as some educators like Mason fear such discussions could be threatened by a wave of broad state laws designed to limit the teaching of what some are calling “critical race theory.”
“These experiences where [students] grapple head-on with issues of identity and race and racism … does something to their level of engagement,” said Emily Penner, a professor at University of California, Irvine who has studied courses that include discussions of racism. “That process is really useful to them in an academic sense, probably in a personal sense as well.”
Once again, public school students will be the big losers in this fight.
How long are public schools going to take direction from people who don’t offer anything that in any way benefits public school students? What if instead we hired or elected people who genuinely valued our schools and were committed to their success?
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2021/7/8/22569197/critical-race-theory-bans-racism-schools-research
NSBA? AASA? NASBO? NABSE? Council of Great City Schools? NSTE? NCTM? NASSP? NAESP?
Where are they? I hope in a similar and separate letter – – but if not,
– maybe NPE can send them a hint.
Or we all could!
p.s. Good to see NCTE and NCSS here – they don’t waver on censorship, inquiry, free thinking, and letting kids figure it out on controversial issues!
Bravo…
The discussion about CRT in K-12 would be better served if people stopped misrepresenting what the CRT criticism is about. I’ve read a lot of thoughtful criticism about CRT, and no one – NO ONE – is saying that America’s past and present racial sins should be whitewashed.
For a more informed view of this matter, step outside your ideological comfort zone and read a long, nuanced essay. That it was published in National Review does not negate or advance its major points (the ad hominem thing, you know).
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/ban-critical-race-theory-from-k-12-classrooms-a-response-to-the-new-york-times/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
Wait, what? (couldn’t resist)
You write: “I’ve read a lot of thoughtful criticism about CRT, and no one – NO ONE – is saying that America’s past and present racial sins should be whitewashed.”
That’s the point! You can’t whitewash something that is ALREADY WHITEWASHED?
Did your history books talk about the glorious years of exploring the new world for all those reasons in text books AND include that they took a detour to Africa on the way? Did your history books talk about as you state “racial sins” that now are being whitewashed? Or did they skip over that part – and definitely did not call them sins.
The only “washing” here is the ex-president’s BRAINWASHING that there’s “good on both sides” – even when one side honors David Duke, Hitler, and Fox “news”
I listened to the response. I agree with the analysis of rule,but as far as I can tell, no one is teaching CRT in K-12. Furthermore the writer misrepresents what CRT is. There is no intent to shame anyone; it is a theory that postulates that racism is systemic. Invoking MLK and his I Have a Dream speech is exactly the point. He had a DREAM that someday we would judge people by their character and not the color of their skin. Our society abounds with examples of inequity and always has. Ask anyone who is or has ever been a member of a minority group. It is easier for white immigrants to eventually melt into the wider society. It is not so easy for people of color. With advances in technology, they are the inequity is hard to ignore. The purpose in recognizing and studying the inequities in both the past and the present is so we can do better. You know the old saying that history is written by the victor. Well perhaps it is time to hear the stories of those who if they weren’t defeated certainly came in at least a distant second.
The author invites us to reject Enlightenment thinking and return to Aristotle’s views on the inevitability of “rule,” which he defines as “indoctrinate, enforce, and set the boundaries for acceptable beliefs and behavior in a given polity” as per the “throne-and-altar autocracies” pre-17th/18thC. (It should be noted that Aristotle felt the ideal governing body would be a friendly blend of democracy and oligarchy!)
Hilditch claims indoctrination is a daily and salutatory occurrence in every K12 classroom with this strawman: “Does any one of us believe that American children are not habitually instructed by their history teachers to believe that the Nazi Party was a force for unspeakable evil in the world?” Kids of an age to discuss the Third Reich are no doubt acquainted with our laws about pre-meditated murder, and do not need to be “instructed to believe” anything of the kind. An outline of the purposeful assembly-line massacre of millions at extermination camps will suffice.
He digs himself deeper with plain falsehood: “This is because the rulers of our society have decided, over a period of 70 years, to indoctrinate American children with implacably anti-Nazi ideas. And who could object? It has given birth to sound moral and political intuitions among the population.” Our country was founded on a set of such “moral and political intuitions” long before the Nazis: ‘indoctrination’ of ‘implacably anti-Nazi ideas’ not required. Hilditch sets his flag on that hill to proclaim that of course we’d promptly turn to legislation should some “fifth column” of Holocaust-denying history teachers were to hypothetically infiltrate American schools.” With this faulty logic he’s setting the table for Putin-like memory laws.
Here’s the key to this essay: “To take the path suggested by [writers of a 7/5 NYT piece] would not save the United States from the fact of rule; it would only give those on the progressive left who intend to rule an unopposed path of their own to uncontested hegemony.” The let’s-face-it-uncontroversial-to-all-but-thought-control-fans “path” suggested was simply to discuss competing theories of history. Hilditch is saying: all teaching is indoctrination; let them indoctrinate my concepts.
Anna makes an odd choice for readers of this blog to refer to.
Hilditch wrote, “But, the only real road to religious revival is the one that begins with each parent’s first step out of the public school’s door.”
Livingstone Knowles at BlackChristianNews.org disagrees. He wrote, “A Christian Parent’s Case for Public School Education.”
Maybe both men know that racist Georgia Gov. Talmadge first suggested privatization to avoid court mandated integration.
I’m reminded of the famous Richard Avedon photo of Charlie Chaplin when he was hounded out of the United States in 1952. Hmmm…..that moment is still relevant -on so many levels. (I’ll try to include a link below to the portrait.)
“I would not go back there even if Jesus Christ were the president,” Chaplin said of the United States.
And, now we’ve seen the likes of Donald J. Trump soil the White House and stain our nation! What would Chaplin think?
There was an older gentleman who befriended me when I was a young reporter working in Callicoon, NY. He had fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against the fascists in Franco’s Spain. Acquaintance of Picasso, rebel and free thinker, he riled up some of the locals with his new (but really age-old) ideas. Like, love thy neighbor. Really. (The nerve of that guy!)
One particular old biddy took especial offense to my friend, Mr. Jim Lincoln. He chuckled to me one time, and described her as a “200% American”. As in, for some people it’s not enough to be 100% American….there’s this fight to one up each other. At least that’s the way I took it.
The phrase has never left me. And, apparently, those sorts of people, too.
Mr, Lincoln, my Mr, Lincoln, is long gone now. He was very old back then. I can’t even find him on the internet. R.I.P.
Lots of good comments above, btw.
http://www.artnet.com/artists/richard-avedon/charlie-chaplin-leaving-america-new-york-fLrDWgGEk6ajMqekdRUn9g2
Fascinating character you met. thanks for telling us about him
He was.
Hope you’re enjoying July, Roy.
Bravo!
Submission pursuant to an application for the position of speechwriter for Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and Ron DeSantis.
Patriotic Noise 1
Murika, land of the tis of thee,
by jingo by golly by jingoism,
tweedle dumb, tweedle dee,,
all the livelong gem of the
Jim Dandy doodle dandy,
Onward!
Where our fathers fruited plain
Everybody sing!
NB: This could also double as the new 1776 History Project Curriculum! You’re welcome, Republicans. Don’t mention it.
Hey, I’m a member of a few of those groups. Cool! There are too many organizations on there to be a member of all of them, though. That list is loooooong. Looks like it’s every intelligent person in the world against a few ossified-boneheaded legislators.
As per my comment above, I’ve become quite enamored of the music and story of No-No Boy. Here’s a nice, short background. I encourage all of you to click the link at the top, “For Teachers”, as well as “Syllabus” and where it takes you. He’s the anti-Deformer in music.
https://www.nonoboyproject.com/about
Impressive. Will be sharing this.
Just got the novel with the title the name of act is based on. Will read this week on trip and let you know. What a great discovery so far!
Just shared the 3 videos at link with my two singer-songwriter/ instrument-teacher/ band-touring [except covid] sons. They very much liked them, & speculated on bands that have influenced him, innovations, tech aspects of videos etc!
My input (besides just loving his music): as a choral singer it’s easy to see he has choral training. Very few lead singers have that high quality of diction with every detail (like pegging the final consonant in the half-beat space right after the beat etc). As a teacher I loved reading through his course syllabus.
Found this in The NY Times: “Critical Race Theory, Comic Books and the Power of Public Schools”
And there is this to think about, at OpEd News by Scott Baker: :”As the origins of our current moral panic about “white supremacy” become more widely debated, we have an obvious problem: how to define the term “Critical Race Theory.” This was never going to be easy, since so much of the academic discourse behind the term is deliberately impenetrable, as it tries to disrupt and dismantle the Western concept of discourse itself. The sheer volume of jargon words, and their mutual relationships, along with the usual internal bitter controversies, all serve to sow confusion.”
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Removing-The-Bedrock-Of-Li-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Critical-Race-Theory_Liberalism_Race-210709-545.html
Thomas Hartmann says at his blog :Flipping the national conversation from CRT to the GOP’s 52-year racist election strategy history will be the only way to clean up all the “crap” Republicans are today using to “flood the zone”.Be Afraid of Black People” is the GOP’s main message to white voters these days, leveraged by lies about an obscure academic pursuit sometimes called Critical Race Theory (CRT). Many white voters, it turns out, are listening.
“The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that: “The term ‘critical race theory’ was mentioned just 132 times on Fox News shows in [all of] 2020. In 2021, it has been mentioned 1,860 times, according to a tally using the media monitoring service Critical Mention.”
“Daily Beast Contributing Editor Justin Baragona noted yesterday that on just that one single day of Tuesday, July 6th Fox “News” had mentioned Critical Race Theory (CRT) 123 times”by 2 PM! There’s a strategy here that Republicans intend to use to replicate the “shellacking” they gave Barack Obama in the 2010 midterm election, when the Tea Party was in full roar over America’s first Black president “ramming Obamacare down our throats.”
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-gops-flood-the-zone-with-sht
Thanks, Susan. Hartmann’s post is particularly good in its summary & link to Russia’s “fire-hose” method of disinformation/ lies/ propaganda as analyzed by Rand Corp. (The linked report has some ideas on how to counter it.) Readers will recognize the methods used by our own home-grown opposition [I’ve run out of words on how to describe them: Republicans? Conservatives? Cultists? QAnon?] in Big Lie #1 (stolen election) & now Big Lie #2 (CRT in our schools). Brings us right back to Timothy Snyder’s parallel of Stalinist disinformation/ Putin memory laws to anti-CRT laws. Clearly using the same playbook.
And that is the common thread in the US rw anti-CRT campaign. In every instance, a small number of very loud [or influential] actors are magnified in Fox/ OAN/ et al rw media coverage via multiple accounts (sometimes strategically varied) from multiple channels & [apparently] multiple sources, all hitting the news within a compressed time period. You can see that in the Loudon County & other anti-CRT Bd of Ed brouhahas across the nation– but just 50 at latest count [out of prox 12,000 locally-elected school boards… again, magnifying tiny group of loud voices… several of which have already proceeded to vote against the loudmouths].
Often we see that one or two folks are pulling multiple strings behind the scenes [e.g. Bannon, Rufo]. Apparently-authentic sources– individual parents of schoolchildren– are either already connected (like a couple of the elite privsch whistleblowers), or are quickly picked up by national string-pullers as soon as they assemble a local group.
When I say ‘influential’ I refer to a sufficient quorum of legislators from those red-run states where gerrymandering has given them a bullhorn for a minority viewpoint. Put that together with the ALEC version of this strategy, i.e., they all have draft legislation in their in-boxes before the issue is more than a speck in their constituents’ peripheral vision.
My fave of the Rand analysis’ suggestions: don’t bother to refute the lie/ lies, they’ll mutate and proliferate before you’re done talking. “It may be more productive to highlight the ways in which… propagandists attempt to manipulate audiences, rather than fighting the specific manipulations.” In other words, brand the message yet another “Big Lie.” I also like “focus instead on countering its objective.” The objective has already been made clear by its instigators: ’22 midterms & ’24 pres elections.
Something to think about relative to conservative wins-
Antonin Scalia, Leonard Leo (Federalist Society) and Mike Farris (ADF) found their way into the highest positions of influence and, each were “head” of households (as People of Praise would describe it) with more than 8 kids. It defies the odds. In 1980, less than 0.5% of all American households had eight or more kids. In 1990, the category included so few, it ceased to exist in the statistical charts.
A brand of religion that calls for men to avoid birth control is what we see in backward Middle East villages. In the U.S., households with 8 or more kids are outliers to the point that they aren’t even accounted for in the statistics so, why in a democracy, are the heads of those households positioned with the authority to threaten the rights that the majority want, whether it is for abortions, for gay rights, for common goods, for worker rights, for prohibition of taxes for the funding of churches, for public social safety nets, etc. ?
Revised
Patriotic Noise 1
Submission pursuant to an application for the position of speechwriter for Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, or Ron DeSantis
Murika, land of the tis of thee,
by jingo by golly by jingoism,
by the dawn’s early night
from above, by crackie,
another village saved by mission accomplished,
where ole black Joe stuck a feather in his
tweedle dumb, tweedle dee,
while these savings last, by Christmas,
see War On,, the business of America is
all the livelong gem of the dancing
in the sweet bye and buy,
dancing with the stars in your eyes,
Jim Dandy doodle dandy,
Onward!
Where our fathers fruited plain
Everybody sing!
NB: This could also double as the new Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Utah, Flor-uh-duh, or 1776 Project K-12 History certified CRT-free curriculum! You’re welcome, Republicans. Don’t mention it.
Prof. “accuracy is important” Sean Wilentz may want to elaborate on his June 8, 2006 claim that American “religion flourishes without the support of government or the state (except being freed of taxation)”. Charitable organizations attached to the Catholic Church are the 3rd largest U.S. employer. Catholic schools (tax-funded vouchers), Catholic social services funded by tax dollars, Catholic hospitals receiving payments from Medicare, Catholic universities getting government money attached to students, their veteran benefits and their government loans and grants, etc. would suggest religion gets a lot of government support.
Correction- The quote (New York Review 6, 8, 2006) is from Wilentz’ colleague, a historian at Brown University, Prof. Gordon Wood, who is identified in this thread in a comment by Anna Lanson.
“religion flourishes without the support of government or the state (except being freed of taxation)”
Let’s ignore all the other support that churches get and simply cancel the tax exemption.
I suspect “flourish” would turn to floorish” in many cases. Tax exemption is a huge factor and to simply mention it as it it were an unimportant aside is just a joke.
If we truly had separation of church and state, religion would get zero favoritism.
But favoritism has been baked into the bread from the get go.
Gordon Wood, group think or agenda?
It’s very funny in a way.
With their very vociferous attacks on CRT (of more accurately, their own perversion of it) Republicans are giving it waaaaaaaay more exposure than it would otherwise have had.
If they had simply kept quiet , it would undoubtedly have remained a backwater “theory” that the vast majority of the general populace had never even heard of — to say nothing of rarely (if ever) mentioned in the nation’s schools.
But , in case anyone has not noticed, keeping quiet is not the forte of these people.
SDP, Republicans are blowing up CRT as an issue to mobilize their white base. It is also helpful to the GOP to create a huge distraction from the January 6 insurrection.
Perhaps, but it is also possible that you might be assuming intelligence and an organized plan that they don’t possess.
Getting in bed with Charles Koch was a mistake for those who want to grow their religious
sects.
The National Review CRT article by Cameron Hilditch (cited by Anna Lanson in this thread) led me to his twitter feed. We can find tweets on Hilditch’s twitter feed from people like Christopher Rufalo. One of Hilditch’s apparent laments relates to the results found by two Singapore researchers, “The Paradoxes of Pluralism…”. Their international study found that the more power the churches have in a country, the faster the number of congregants leave. So, American evangelical and Catholic leaders may or may not gain personally from Koch’s power that he wins through religious voting for the GOP but, their sects are going to lose.
Hilditch speaking about America’s most important common good sounds a lot like the Koch’s Paul Weyrich, “But, the only real road to religious revival is the one that begins with each parent’s first step out of the public school’s door.”
“Getting in bed with Charles Koch was a mistake…”
Probably what his wife said as well
I saw an interview of Charles Koch and his wife. My take was he had manipulated her into playing a lopsided competitive game in their relationship while he anticipated and knew he would dominate every transaction.
After his death, we may learn chilling information from those in his inner circle.