AS A MATTER of fact, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is wrong.
In a leaked draft of the court’s majority opinion in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Alito writes that Roe v. Wade and its successor Planned Parenthood v. Casey must be overturned — an extraordinary move that would topple precedent in order to constrict, rather than expand, constitutional rights.
The missive is aggressive and self-righteous and reads like the greatest hits of those who disfavor the right to bodily autonomy. There’s the linking of abortion to eugenics, for example. “Some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” Alito writes. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect.” The ahistorical comparison misses the fact that an individual choosing to abort their own pregnancy is not analogous to forced sterilization by the state to alter the American gene pool.
And there’s the claim that because the word “abortion” isn’t found in the Constitution, the right to it doesn’t exist. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito writes. This completely ignores the historical significance of the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era addition meant to ensure individual liberty, including the right to decide whether and with whom to form a family. “Most Americans understand the plain truth reflected in these protections,” Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, said in a statement. “A person cannot truly be free, and is not truly an equal member of society, if they do not get to decide for themselves this most basic question of bodily autonomy.” Alito’s opinion, she said, “frighteningly bulldozes past the Constitution.”
Alito also dismisses the notion that there are any clearly identifiable reliance issues at stake in discarding abortion rights. In this context, the concept of reliance posits that when expectations have been built around the stability of a particular law or judicial pronouncement, those interests should be protected and the precedent underpinning them upheld. In addressing the issue, Alito comes off as if perplexed: The court knows how to evaluate “concrete” reliance issues like those implicated in “property and contract rights,” Alito writes, but assessing an “intangible” reliance is a whole other story. “That form of reliance depends on an empirical question that is hard for anyone — and in particular, for a court — to assess, namely, the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women.”
In an amicus brief filed in the Dobbs case, 154 economists and researchers took direct aim at the how-could-we-possibly-know-what-abortion-has-done-for-society nonsense. The brief details a substantial body of research demonstrating that access to legal abortion has had significant social and economic impacts, increasing education and job opportunities for women and reducing childhood poverty.
The expansion of abortion access after Roe reduced the overall birthrate by up to 11 percent. For teens, the drop was 34 percent; teen marriage was reduced 20 percent. Research has revealed that young women who used abortion to delay parenthood by just a year saw an 11 percent increase in hourly wages later in their careers. Access to abortion for young women increased the likelihood of finishing college by nearly 20 percentage points; the probability that they would go on to a professional career jumped by nearly 40 percentage points. All these effects, the economists noted, were even greater among Black women.
“Abortion legalization has shaped families and the circumstances into which children are born,” the economists wrote. Abortion legalization reduced the number of children living in poverty as well as the number of cases of child neglect and abuse. “Yet other studies have explored long-run downstream effects as the children of the Roe era grew into adulthood,” reads the brief. “One such study showed that as these children became adults, they had higher rates of college graduation, lower rates of single parenthood, and lower rates of welfare receipt.”
In other words, the effect of the abortion right on society is not remotely “intangible.” There is decades’ worth of evidence showing that abortion access has positively impacted women and their families. “But those changes are neither sufficient nor permanent: abortion access is still relevant and necessary to women’s equal and full participation in society,” the economists wrote, challenging Mississippi’s argument in the Dobbs case that contraception and employment policies like parental leave have essentially made abortion unnecessary. Indeed, nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended and nearly half of those pregnancies end in abortion. “These statistics alone lead to the inevitable (and obvious) conclusion that contraception and existing policies are not perfect substitutes for abortion access.”
Jordan goes on to write about her own experience. As a sophomore in college, she got pregnant. Her mother immediately sent the money for an abortion. This was the right decision for her, allowing her to finish college, go to graduate school, and pursue a career.
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott is in a competition with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to see who is meanest. He wants to relitigate a 1982 Supreme Court decision that requires the state to provide a free public education to all children, especially the children of undocumented persons.
In the wake of the leaked Roe decision, he assumes the Court might agree with him that children whose parents are not here legally have no right to be educated at public expense.
In a conversation with a conservative talk-show host, Abbott expressed his desire to stop funding the education of these children.
Here’s the exchange in full:
Talk show host:
“We’re talking about public tax dollars, public property tax dollars going to fund these schools to teach children who are 5, 6, 7, 10 years old, who don’t even have remedial English skills,” Pagliarulo said. “This is a real burden on communities. What can you do about that?”
Governor Abbott:
“The challenges put on our public systems is extraordinary,” Abbott said in reply. “Texas already long ago sued the federal government about having to incur the costs of the education program, in a case called Plyler versus Doe. And the Supreme Court ruled against us on the issue about denying, or let’s say Texas having to bear that burden. I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again, because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler versus Doe was issued many decades ago.”
Governor Abbott would like to have many thousands of children in the state who are illiterate. No doubt he would also like to deny them access to any healthcare or other public services.
It has been widely reported in the media that the Supreme Court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade. A draft decision written by Justice Samuel Alito claims that the 50-year-old decision was wrongly decided. The implications of this decision—if it stands as written—are profound. The Supreme Court decided in 1973 that women had a right to decide what happens to their bodies. This Court is poised to say they do not.
This is Donald Trump’s legacy. This most ignorant of presidents appointed three of the Court’s most conservative justices. All three are Catholics who are staunchly opposed to abortion. they will join with at least two other Catholic justices to overturn Roe. (Neil Gorsuch was born Catholic but apparently is or may be Anglican.) Justice Sonia Sotomayer, who is also Catholic, will not vote for this decision. President Biden, an observant Catholic, opposes this decision and supports women’s rights to control their own body. Nancy Pelosi, another strong Catholic, supports Roe.
As an American, I ask how it is possible that a Court dominated by members of one religion can impose their beliefs on the entire nation? I am beyond outraged by this potential decision. The same decision could also have been written if the Court had a majority of Orthodox Jews, who oppose abortion. That too would be abhorrent.
Women who are not Catholic will be required to bend to the hardcore doctrine of the most ardent Catholics. That includes Protestants, Jews, and moderate Catholics, as well as those of other faiths or none at all.
Several states, anticipating this decision, have passed laws banning abortion after six weeks, before a woman knows she is pregnant. These laws make no exception for women who are victims of incest or rape. The victim must give birth to her rapist’s child. The victim must give birth to the child of her father or brother.
Abortion is a painful decision for most women. It should be their decision, made in consultation with a qualified health-care specialist. The Supreme Court wants the decision made not by those it affects, but by state legislatures. Women who have the money will travel to the states where it is still legal to get an abortion.
Women without the means to travel will seek abortions from back-alley abortionists in unhygienic circumstances. Or they will try to self-abort with wire hangars or other methods that risk their lives. Women will die because of this decision, if it represents the final decision.
Some states are trying to outlaw receiving abortion pills by mail. It’s hard to know how they will enforce this. It’s easy to imagine that the reddest states would devote more resources to stopping abortion than to caring for children after they are born, with medical care, good schools, nutrition, and the other supports they need. The extremists love the unborn more than the born.
Justice Alito says in his draft decision that one reason to overturn Roe is that it is so divisive. If this is the Court’s standard, we can anticipate the rollback of civil rights law, including the Brown decision, gay marriage, and anything else that is too controversial for the “Originalist” majority. (If Amy Coney Barrett were really an Originalist, she would resign at once since the original Constitution said nothing about women having the right to vote or participate in public life).
My own view is that the decision about abortion is private and personal. It should be made by a woman and her doctor. It should occur in a safe and hygienic clinic.
Those who oppose abortion should not have the power to impose their views on women who don’t agree with them. If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one. If you need an abortion, that should be your decision, not the Red-state legislatures or the Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative majority.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes on her blog that Republicans want to remove federal protections on many issues and restore states’ control. Several Republican senators have spoken out against Supreme Court decisions that overturned state laws on abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, even interracial marriage. It was Senator Mike Braun of Indiana who said that the states should decide whether people of different races should be allowed to marry, but when the negative reactions poured in, he claimed he misunderstood the question. He was unusually clear for someone who “misunderstood the question.”
It’s sad that any Republican would question the right of people of different races to marry at the very moment that the Senate is questioning a Black woman judge who is married to a white man.
The Republicans who seek to revive a system of states’ rights and long-discredited laws reveal that they long to return to the 1950s, when segregation was legal in some states, women were not allowed to buy contraceptive devices or have an abortion, and gays were in the closet.
Leonard Pitts Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, opines that conservatives have always been on the wrong side of history. They fought the civil rights movement. They fought women’s rights. Now they’re fighting gay rights.
He writes:
They have never once been right.
Did you ever notice that? Do you ever think about it? Never once.
Oh, in matters of, say, foreign affairs or military strategy, one might contend that conservatives have had their moments, made arguments that, arguably, made sense. But on matters of social evolution, they’ve compiled a remarkable record: They’ve never been vindicated by history. Rather, they’ve always been repudiated by it, always been wrong…
Barry Goldwater once saying that he had nothing against a woman running for vice president, “just so she can cook and get home on time…”
Nor are the right’s wrongs limited to matters of human freedom. Every art form that ever dared deviate from status quo — music, film, books, comic books — has had to run a gauntlet of conservative opprobrium. As far back as the 1920s, they were up in arms over a new music called jazz.
It’s a history that provides a jaundiced context for the latest right wing crusade. Meaning the one against LGBTQ kids. Florida’s Legislature passed its obnoxious “Don’t Say Gay” bill last week. Gov. Ron DeSantis, evidently determined to leave no principle untrampled in his hoped-for march to the White House, is expected to sign it….
Which brings them into conflict with conservatism’s reflexive terror of anything that does not fit inside the white picket fence of its imagination. That tendency to look ever backward toward an imagined better past, that timorous inability to face the future — heck, to face the present — and the challenges of change, is what had conservatives at odds with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Martin Luther King to Gloria Steinem.
Now it has them standing between children and their teachers and doctors. It is cold comfort to know that these acts of invasive cruelty will one day stand condemned by history, but they will. We’ve seen this movie too many times to doubt it. You’d think that would matter to conservatives; you’d think they’d think about it. Then you remember that fear and thought are incompatible; it’s almost impossible for them to exist in the same space.
So LGBTQ kids and their allies can only put their heads down, work for change and take such satisfaction as they may find in the fact that, where social evolution is concerned, conservatives lost the 20th century.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a professor of law at Columbia and UCLA and one of the leading figures in the field of critical race studies. She wrote the following article for the Los Angeles Times, where she demonstrates that the new laws banning the study of systemic racism simultaneously ban Dr. King’s views of America’s racial problems, which were not solved by passing civil rights laws. The furor over CRT shows that racism remains a powerful force today. Critics of CRT maintain illogically that teaching the history of racism is racist, that uncomfortable facts must not be taught at all, and that history must be scrubbed clean of divisive realities. As Crenshaw points out, King would have fought the current effort to cleanse U.S. history; his own words and works cannot be taught.
For the first time, we’re observing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday under new laws in multiple states that ban the instruction of “divisive” interpretations of our racial past. The assaults have given new weapons to an enduring faction in American society that has long resisted the reckoning that his life’s work demanded.
In King’s day, this faction was known as the “Massive Resistance,” an effort to organize and frustrate the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and efforts to build multiracial classrooms. Today, this faction is known as the “anti-CRT” effort, which seeks to proscribe race-related curricula, books or trainings that offer a discomforting view of our past and its current implications.
Teachers, public officials and students are in a particularly unsustainable bind. They’re charged with honoring King as a figure while disavowing the ideas that he lived and died to advance. They’re being asked not merely to defer King’s dream of racial equality but to decommission it altogether.
King would likely take bitter note of the all-too-familiar dynamics behind today’s backlash. After the 2020 global movement for racial justice in the United States and beyond in the wake of the savage police killing of George Floyd, legislatures in 32 states have relied on what is patently a lie — that antiracism is antiwhite — to fuel the antidemocratic crusade against what they call “critical race theory.”
For more than 30 years, scholars have employed critical race theory as an analytical tool. The right has rebranded it as the new racism, as wokeness run amok, as a threat to innocent schoolchildren and as a stalking-horse for the demise of “Western civilization” itself. The theory has become the target of coordinated efforts to stigmatize and erase generations of antiracist knowledge, advocacy and history. The objective is both to disappear antiracism’s history and to deny its contemporary salience.
King himself is a prime casualty in this effort. Apostles of the McCarthyite crackdown on critical race theory have exploited him as a mouthpiece for their cause, reducing him to a solitary, decontextualized line from the “I Have a Dream” speech about a future in which his four children were to be judged not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Some use King’s words to erase his deeds and those of millions more who rose up to “make good the promises” since Reconstruction. In Tennessee, for example, the Moms for Liberty sought to ban Frances E. Ruffin’s children’s book “Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington” by framing its descriptions of segregation and the violence meted out against King and others as traumatizing and racist. The Moms argue that Ruffin’s portrayal of white racism against people of color “will sow the seeds of racial strife, neo-racism, neo-segregation, and is an affront” to King’s ideals. This reveals precisely what comes of a persistent and willful ignorance of King’s legacy.
The sheer power on display to turn King against himself — a process that has been underway since the first day this holiday was celebrated — is a grim reflection of the way opponents have long subjected antiracist thinking and activism to distortion, misappropriation and redefinition. The brazen casting of critical race theory as the contemporary villain following 2020’s racial reckoning is no surprise.
The King holiday and Black History Month are an excellent opportunity — perhaps the only opportunity — to course-correct, contest and redirect the misconceptions about King’s legacy and its interface with critical race theory. Recovering the real King begins by freeing his image from the clutches of those seeking to substitute truthful education with a saccharine narrative built on illusions, delusions and lies.
Dr. King was an “inconvenient truth teller.” His insistence on the urgency of racial justice put him at odds with moderate whites in the South, and his denunciation of imperialism put him at odds with allies more narrowly focused on the freedom struggle within U.S. borders.
For telling these truths, in life, King was often criticized rather than celebrated. At the time of his death, polls showed that most white people held an unfavorable view of him. The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, framed him as a national security threat. Some Black leaders were hardly convinced of his tactics — his civil disobedience was too radical for some, his nonviolence too accommodationist for others. But for King, the demands for racial justice were not to be won through a popularity contest or by painting a comforting picture of the U.S. social order. Nor was King’s an identity-obsessed demand for recognition. He offered a clear-eyed assessment of a would-be democracy in a state of disrepair. Confronting it at its source was the only way forward.
It’s no accident that the firestorm over critical race theory has singed King’s message: King was, in fact, a critical race theorist before there was a name for it. A core observation of the theory is the recognition that the promise of liberation extends beyond the elimination of formal segregation and individual-level prejudice. Critical race theory explores how racial inequality was historically structured into the fabric of the republic, reinforced by law, insulated by the founding Constitution and embedded into the infrastructure of American society. Similarly, King observed in 1967 that “the doctrine of white supremacy was embedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit,” entrenched as “a structural part of the culture.”
Accordingly, King’s appeal in the March on Washington in 1963 was grounded in the assertion that the promise of a fully inclusive American democracy — one that lived up to its oft-stated ideals — required creative confrontation with a republic out of step with its promises. He rebuffed those who found fault in the tensions created by placing our norms and our realities in sharp relief.
King famously wrote a letter rejecting the counsel of white moderate allies who argued for a gradualist accommodation to the prioritized sensibilities of those who didn’t experience the sting of segregation. As a father, he conveyed the anguish of his own children, who couldn’t understand why they weren’t allowed into the Funtown amusement park, which barred Black visitors, while the joy of white children was privileged. He argued elsewhere that “justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”
King centered the promise of equal access to the ballot — now under concerted assault — at the heart of his prophetic mission. He fought to win passage of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and he understood that the provisions of each law were part and parcel of the same struggle for true and lasting racial justice. While he hailed the landmark voting reform as “a great step forward in removing all of the remaining obstacles to the right to vote,” he also insisted that the vote be used to “rid the American body politic of racism.” King would instantly recognize the mutually reinforcing objectives of denying the ballot, an indispensable instrument of reform, while also silencing the substantive case for reform by whitewashing the country’s racial past.
Contrary to countless assertions from the right, King did not endorse colorblindness. It wasn’t the remedy for dismantling the ugly realities that white supremacy had produced. Like today’s critical race theorists, King understood that American racism was systemic and demanded systemic remedies. He was forthright in acknowledging that anti-Black racism “was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.” Throughout his career, King set his sights on institutional-level change, calling for solutions built on the race-conscious analysis of inequalities across our society.
King invoked a “bank of justice” to be mobilized against the many structures of racial oppression to ultimately realize “the security of justice” for all Americans. This commitment explicitly extended to the mode of race-conscious practice that now goes by the name of affirmative action.
When questioned whether he would support such outlays, King bluntly replied, “I do indeed,” and went on to explain: “Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved and robbed of any wages — potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.”
Much of King’s legacy may never be taught in public schools, if this manufactured panic that demands critical thinking about racism be expunged from curricula and libraries continues. In North Dakota, for example, King’s understanding of structural racism would contradict the state’s newly minted edict that racism cannot be taught as anything more than an individual’s prejudice and bias. His understanding of the historical debt created by centuries of uncompensated labor flies directly in the face of Oklahoma’s prohibition of material suggesting that current generations bear any responsibility for the actions of their ancestors.
Not only did King clearly recognize that antiracism must address built-in headwinds that unnecessarily disadvantage some groups over others, but so does, incidentally, the Supreme Court, as seen in its many rulings. Yet an instructor seeking to explain King’s expansive vision of justice or a professor highlighting legal cases about institutional discrimination will be in jeopardy if they teach these ideas in some states that have adopted such laws.
King’s ideas could also fall under efforts in states such as Oklahoma or Texas that forbid the use of classroom materials that might create guilt or discomfort in public school students. King’s description of a social order in need of repair would trigger complaints that current generations are made to feel responsible for the sins of our past. New Hampshire, meanwhile, has proposed legislation forbidding antiracist critiques of the nation’s founding and history.
Indeed, under most of these laws, King’s concrete work and documented analysis of racism’s enduring legacy in American society would be suspect. In his final speech, on the eve of his death, he said he might not get to the promised land with us. This prophecy would rest uneasily in curricula that sanction assumptions that we haven’t already become that society that King dreamed we would one day be.
This imposition of a fairy-tale account of America makes King’s sacrifice utterly illegible. It is a memory-holed vision of the past better suited to George Orwell’s dystopian reveries than to a nation seeking to redeem its promise of genuine, expansive and democratic self-rule.
Nationwide, lawmakers are legislating that our schools and workplaces turn away from King’s mandate to make good on the country’s broken promises, and wallow instead in the wages of this ignorance. It is an ignorance that grows out of an earlier effort to impose an approved orthodoxy about the American past. One of the enduring consequences of the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s textbook campaigns was the persistence of Confederate propaganda and Lost Cause mythology masquerading as the truth about the history of the Civil War and its aftermath. The United Daughters ensured that millions of children inherited a view of America’s past grossly warped by the whitewashing of slavery and the violent Redemption, when white Southerners called for a return to white supremacy, that followed Reconstruction. The democratic crisis we face today is an unrecognizable spasm from that past, illegible in part because our educational system and national myths have not overcome these past manipulations to embrace this history.
To truly honor King’s memory, then, we must defeat the faction that facilitated the U.S. Capitol riot, put democracy on life support, and continues to demand that critical interrogation of its past be censored by law. King implored that we put our bodies on the line to face the organized forces of white reaction in his day — and it’s clear that he’d be fighting in exactly the same way to preserve his prophetic legacy in our own day, when the right to equal education, to vote freely and to realize true cross-racial justice are once more under bitter attack.
Reclaiming his legacy is to realize that there is no daylight between a truly democratic society and a racially just one.
Stephen Sawchuk wrote in Education Week about the ways that public controversy about “critical race theory” is affecting the drafting and revision of state history standards. He looks closely at three states that revised their history standards in 2021: Louisiana, New Mexico, and South Dakota.
For months, GOP officials and FOX news kept up a steady and alarming drumbeat, falsely claiming that public schools were indoctrinating white students to hate America and to be ashamed of their race. This weird notion was suddenly discovered in the last year of the Trump regime, when beating up on public schools became a cultural wedge issue. The governor’s race in Virginia showed that the campaign against CRT was effective in rousing people’s fears.
As Sawchuk shows, the effort to twist U.S. history to leave out anything bad that happened in the past is working its way into state standards. Message from the GOP, FOX News, and Chris Rufo: Teach lies about U.S. history!
He writes:
Spiked drafts. Allegations of political interference. Confusing terminology. And thousands of angry comments: The volatile debate over how to teach about America’s racist past is wreaking havoc on states’ processes for deciding what students will learn about history and social studies.
In state after state, commentators and politicians contended that proposed expectations for social studies embedded “critical race theory”—even as the educators sitting on the panels writing the new standards defended them for providing an honest, if sometimes challenging, view of America.
Education Week reviewed hundreds of standards and thousands of pages of public comment relating to the standards-writing processes in South Dakota, Louisiana, and New Mexico, all of which took up revisions in 2021, and interviewed writers, educators, and state officials. Across the three states, we found:
None of the three states’ drafts mentioned the term critical race theory, but in written comments, people attacked dozens of standards in Louisiana’s and New Mexico’s drafts for purportedly embedding it.
In South Dakota, state officials removed about 20 references to Native Americans from the draft submitted by the standards-writing panel—then scotched the draft altogether.
The critiques about CRT in Louisiana led the writers to recast some standards and to delete others. And public comment protocols in Louisiana were changed out of fear for the writers’ physical safety.
The teaching method of having students take civic action to address classroom and local problems—an approach some conservatives contend is indoctrination—was mysteriously cut from both Louisiana’s and South Dakota’s drafts.
About 1 in 10 of some 2,900 pages of comments on the New Mexico standards referenced CRT, often citing language in the draft about “social justice,” “group identity,” and “critical consciousness.” Those terms also attracted confusion from district leaders wondering how those tenets should be taught.
The findings illustrate how the fallout from the confusing and often misleading debate about CRT stands to alter history education in U.S. schools through subtle—but material—changes to day-to-day teaching expectations.
“Standards provide teachers with cover to teach hard things—controversial things,” noted Lynn Walters-Rauenhorst, an instructor and student-teaching supervisor at the University of New Orleans, who was among the writers of Louisiana’s draft. “If we don’t have standards that support deep inquiry about things that may not be the easy topics to cover, then teachers aren’t going to do it.”
And the discord stands as another testament to how the country’s polarization has affected K-12 policymaking at large.
“The uncivil discourse centering around these issues is detrimental not only to the process, but really, it’s also detrimental to these embedded ideas in our constitutional democracy of compromise, of listening to each other, not always agreeing,” said Tammy Waller, the director for K-12 social studies at the Arizona education department.
Arizonans, she noted, faced some controversies over topics like civil rights and the LGBTQ movement when completing the state’s 2018 social studies revisions, but ultimately officials were able to complete a set everyone could live with. That is getting harder.
“In the past I feel like we could have disagreements, and even really intense disagreements, but in the end, it wasn’t a zero-sum game,” Waller said. “We felt like we had something bigger that we were responsible for.”
Those are important stories. But states’ revisions to history standards have attracted far less attention, even though they stand to affect millions more students.
That question is especially relevant for K-12 students, who are now 54 percent Asian, Black, Latino, and Native American. Where—and how—are these students reflected in this complex story? What does their inclusion or erasure mean for their understanding of who they are as Americans? To what extent should K-12 teaching reflect academic scholarship, which has produced increasingly rich insights over the past three decades about cultural history, especially the experiences of women, Black Americans, and immigrants?
States update teaching standards—the key guide for the content and skills that teachers must cover—about once every seven years. Teachers are legally and professionally obligated to cover these standards, which are usually drafted by panels of teachers, content experts, and lay people. The public also offers feedback before final versions are adopted by state boards of education. …Read more
To illustrate these complex issues, take one representative standard currently under debate in Louisiana in grade 7. The standard, a broad one, directs teachers to explain events and ideas in U.S. history between 1789 and 1877, “including, but not limited to, the Whiskey Rebellion, Indian Removal Act, Fugitive Slavery [sic] Act, Reconstruction amendments.”
As currently written, the standard highlights uneven progress towards true participation in the American democratic experiment. But several commentators in the state suggested replacing those examples with touchstones emphasizing expansion and enfranchisement, though mainly of white Americans: “Jacksonian democracy, Texan independence, Manifest Destiny, and Reconstruction,” they wrote.
“Teachers are not going to stick their neck out to teach something they think they ethically should talk about, but isn’t going to be assessed,” said Walters-Rauenhorst. “There’s no upside for them.”
EdWeek selected the three states—Louisiana, South Dakota, and New Mexico—for analysis because all three issued at least one draft set of standards in 2021, and received public feedback on that draft.
Other states in the beginning of rewriting their standards are already starting to see the same sort of contention. Minnesota, midway through its own process, has faced tensions over an ethnic-studies portion of its standards; in Mississippi, legislators filed a bill in November to outlaw critical race theory just weeks before the state education department posted a history draft for review….
LOUISIANA: A CRT Reckoning Awaits
One by one, the commentators stood up at a June public meeting, one of three that the standards-writing committee held to present updates. And one by one, they condemned the state’s draft history standards for purportedly including critical race theory or indoctrinating students.
A typical example: “There is no reason to make students feel guilty,” one speaker said. “We should teach the good things about this country.”
Another: “If you want to continue to talk about slavery, [you should] go to China now…”
Now it’s unclear what will happen to the draft, which is set to be taken up by the state board of education in March.
“I went to law school; I learned critical race theory in law school; I have a Ph.D. This is not something we use in K-12,” said Belinda Cambre, a social studies instructor at a lab school located at Louisiana State University who contributed to the draft. “Really the whole issue saddened me more than anything else, that it could be so weaponized to turn people against talk of diversity.”
The criticism took its toll. Even before the Louisiana department opened up an online public-comment portal, the writers had made significant changes in response to the bruising June feedback.
Some revisions reframed a standard in a more optimistic way: One in the high school civics course originally called for students to “examine issues of inequity in the United States with respect to traditionally marginalized groups.” In its rewritten form, it calls on them to “analyze the progression and expansion of civil rights, liberties, social and economic equality, and opportunities for groups experiencing discrimination.”
By far, the most substantive revision to the draft was the deletion of one of the overarching skills for students—meant to be embedded across the grade levels and courses—called “taking informed action.”
Louisiana’s board-appointed State Superintendent Cade Brumley, a former social studies teacher, wrote in a July op-ed that the standards should strike a balance between critique and patriotism, but should not include critical race theory, which he defined as “suggest[ing] America was intentionally founded on racism, oppression, supremacy.” By October, he said that he could not recommend the draft as written.
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote these words in the isolation of a Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned for defying a court injunction to protest the city’s segregation ordinance. In an open letter, initially scrawled in the margins of a newspaper, Dr. King addressed a group of fellow clergymen who claimed to support the Black freedom movement but criticized nonviolent civil disobedience as a tactic to confront the evils of segregation.
In the letter, King differentiated between just and unjust laws, citing measures that prevented Black Americans from voting as a form of legalized injustice. At the time, Alabama, like many states across the South, was governed by a kind of racial authoritarianism that denied Black people a say in how they were governed. The clergymen’s condemnation of King’s activism belied their stated commitment to racial justice and provided cover for the denial of basic citizenship rights, including the right to vote.
By blocking voting reform today, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the White moderates Dr. King warned us about.
On Thursday, Sinema said that while she backs the Democrats’ voting rights laws, she would not support an exception to the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to pass the legislation. Manchin later followed suit, saying he would not vote to “eliminate or weaken the filibuster.” By prioritizing an arcane Senate rule over the protection of voting rights, Manchin and Sinema have chosen “order” over justice.
They are more concerned about protecting a Senate procedure than ensuring the right to vote. Priorities?
Civil rights leader Jitu Brown wrote in an opinion article for The Chicago Tribune about the importance of using the schools to combat the school-to-prison pipeline. Brown is the national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, which connects youth- and parent-led organizations across the nation.
Brown points out studies showing that schools with strict disciplinary policies produce high suspension rates for students of color, which in turn affects test scores and graduation rates.
He writes that schools attended by predominantly nonwhite students have fewer curricular resources than schools where white students predominate.
These environments are punctuated by so-called school resource officers — police stationed in school buildings. More than 1.5 million Black, brown and Indigenous K-12 students are attending schools that have a resource officer but no counselor, guaranteeing that many of these students will be left behind. The violence inflicted upon Black and brown children by school resource officers nationwide must stop. They don’t make our schools safer, and their presence means schools lose precious resources that could be used for counseling and social services.
White-majority schools have always offered much more in core curricular classes, Advanced Placement opportunities, after-school programs, guidance counselors and student supports. Some examples from the Journey for Justice Alliance’s “Failing: Brown v. Board” report elucidate what equity would mean for students of color:
At Marshall High School in Milwaukee, nonwhite students make up 94% of the student body. The school has basic English courses for only freshmen and sophomores and only two other classes. Menomonee Falls High School in a nearby suburb has 21% nonwhite students. It offers 10 English classes.
In Dallas, 39% of Centennial High’s students are nonwhite, compared with 100% of the students at South Oak Cliff High. Yet Centennial offers twice as many language classes, has three times the number of Advanced Placement courses and 23 career path offerings, compared to three at South Oak Cliff.
In Denver, 96% of Manuel High students are minorities. They can choose from fiveart classes, seven AP classes and only one foreign language, Spanish. At Cherry Creek High, 33% of the students are Black or students of color. They have 27 AP classes, six foreign languages and 21 classes in the arts.
The report concludes: “This is racism in action.”
The Equity or Else campaign’s major goal is sustainable community schools. The 2022 federal budget would allocate $440 million to establish such schools, reversing the trend of privatizing public education through charter schools. The movement for equity in public education aims to make American schools more welcoming and truly safe spaces for all children where they can look forward to learning.
Culturally relevant and challenging curriculum, supports for high-quality teaching, wraparound supports for every child, a student-centered school climate, and meaningful parent and community engagement make for the types of schools all children deserve.
Steve Luxenberg, an editor at The Washington Post and the author of a 2019 book on racial separation and the Plessy case, Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation, wrote to correct important errors in my post about Homer Plessy.
Plessy, you may recall, was arrested in New Orleans for attempting to ride in an all-white train car, thus violating state law. His was a test case of a recently enacted segregation statute. When his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the racial segregation law, the Court issued a ruling in 1896 endorsing the law and the legality of “separate but equal.” This endorsement of de jure segregation remained intact until the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954.
Now, here are the facts about Homer Plessy, as documented by Luxenberg. I am grateful to him for correcting my version (and errors in the article I quoted):
1. Plessy was not found guilty after his arrest (in 1892), and as a result, his lawyers did not appeal that conviction. The case went to the Supreme Court on entirely different grounds. Cutting to the chase for now: Judge Ferguson held off on a trial, instead issuing a ruling on the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Separate Car Act. That was a gift to Plessy’s legal team, because it meant that they could appeal Ferguson’s ruling (he said the Act was constitutional) rather than pursuing a habeas corpus strategy as planned. The Citizens Committee (the group that planned and arranged for Plessy’s arrest as a test case) did not want Plessy in jail while the appeal was wending its way through the courts.
2. Judge Ferguson never found Plessy guilty, and he wasn’t convicted in 1890. In January 1897, nearly eight months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Plessy pleaded guilty, before a different judge, to close the case. The Citizens Committee paid his $25 fine.
That ruling—Plessy vs. Ferguson— okayed racial segregation statutes that locked millions of Black Americans into second-class status, since separate was never equal in a racist society. Separate but equal remained in place until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1954, a decision that was boldly resisted by the South for years.
Homer Plessy will be posthumously pardoned as a result of a sustained effort by his descendant Keith Plessy, and the descendant of Judge John Howard Ferguson.
Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson created a foundation to honor Homer Plessy and to advance the cause of racial reconciliation. Plessy and Ferguson and their allies worked for the past 11 years to get a pardon for Homer Plessy, and they have just succeeded.
Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson’s drive to right a terrible, devastating wrong came to full fruition last month, when they appeared before the Louisiana Pardon Board to ask the board to extend a pardon to Homer Plessy for his conviction in 1890 [this date is wrong]. The board swiftly agreed with the pair and voted unanimously on Nov. 12 to pardon Homer Plessy.
Keith Plessy said that his ancestor Homer was selected by a local group of activists to challenge the law.
Keith Plessy placed their crusade for justice in further historical context, pointing out that Homer Plessy was actually carefully selected by late-19th-century civil rights advocates to test the state’s segregation laws of that era.
The New Orleans organization called the Comite de Citoyens, or Committee of Citizens – a multi-ethnic group of activists dedicated to fighting the 1890 Separate Car Act – chose Plessy, a mixed-race Creole, to test the law by getting arrested and placing the matter in the courts.
Once in court, Plessy’s attorneys argued that the Separate Car Act, and as such Plessy’s arrest, violated his Constitutional rights under the 13th and 14th Amendments, an argument the court rejected with his conviction.
“I feel that working together, we have been trying to tell the whole story of the Citizens Committee and the Civil Rights Movement that continued after this case,” Keith Plessy said. “[The Plessy strategy] was the blueprint that was used over and over again [by Civil Rights advocates] in the 20th century.”
“New Orleans,” he added, “was the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Governor John Bel Edwards (a Democrat) declared that he would swiftly sign Plessy’s pardon.
I had the pleasure of meeting Phoebe Ferguson and Keith Plessy when I spoke at Dillard University, a historically Black university in New Orleans, in 2010. It was incredible to meet these two people who symbolized such an important and infamous event in American history. Thanks to these two persistent people for their fight to keep Homer Plessy’s legacy alive and to pursue Justice. We are still struggling to overcome the legacy of Jim Crow era legislation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 