I get to see a lot of history teaching. There are a few things that make it painful to watch sometime, such as the state of Pennsylvania mandating that state rights have to be taught as a cause of the Civil War alongside slavery. The teachers are doing a good job with what they have, but politicians tend to mess around with things and mess them up. They still do, and can’t seem to stop.
A mural of Elizabeth Cotten at 111 North Merritt Mill Road in Carrboro, North Carolina on Feb. 11, 2021
Sometimes the curriculum needs revamping. Let’s start with this article out of North Carolina. “UNC junior Iyana Jones-Reese recalls sharing the light-hearted stories she learned about slavery in school with her grandfather. He was struck by how the nature of slavery was watered-down and sugarcoated by her teacher. ‘I remember when I was a kid my grandfather was talking to me about slavery and I was like, ‘No, no, no, there were some slave masters that treated their slaves nicely, we talked about it in class,’’ she said. ‘It’s one of those things where like you’re hearing all of these different sides.’ Her grandfather then encouraged Jones-Reese to learn the truth of her history. As many students are studying and celebrating Black historical figures and movements during Black History Month, they are continuously learning about historical elements that were not discussed in school. Mike Wax, a junior studying biology, said he had an idea of the erasure of Black history in high school, but it wasn’t until he got to college when he realized just how much of his history wasn’t taught to him. He felt it was a call to action to educate himself. ‘I was shocked that I had missed so much of my history, of Black history, and I wanted to learn more,’ Wax said. ‘I tried to put myself in these classes and any spaces where I could learn about more Black history, and I took it upon myself to do like my own readings about it.’ He said this exclusion of Black history in school lesson plans could lead to the erasure of this history altogether. ‘There’s so much Black history that they don’t teach in schools, and I think that as time progresses smaller amounts of people are going to know about this history, and it’s possible that it could get erased,’ Wax said.”
As the article tells us, “Recently, a charter school in Utah attempted to do just that. Maria Montessori Academy made the decision to allow parents to opt their children out of a Black History Month curriculum. Although this decision was reversed, the initial proposal reflected how quickly this history could be erased. Wax believes that the academic curriculum is to blame for this lack of Black representation in history lessons. ‘I think the problem is in the infrastructure of the curriculum in school,’ Wax said. ‘They focus too much on the construction of America and not on the histories and cultures of its people.’ Glenn Hinson, an anthropology professor at UNC, said that to determine why Black history is being selectively taught, people have to figure out who is attempting to control the narrative. ‘The question that I always ask is who is invested in the public, not knowing the other stories,’ Hinson said. ‘When I think about the way that African American history is cramped and restricted to a few figures and those figures, in turn, are often sanitized, they’re reduced to a few selected stories to represent their lives.’ Hinson said when Black history is taught, it is often sugarcoated and one-sided. ‘Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered for the speech on the National Mall, but he’s not remembered for his strident opposition to the Vietnamese war and he’s not remembered for a lot of the organizing that he did,’ Hinson said. Hinson said this is done to avoid facing the truth about the systems in America. ‘I think it’s easier to compress and to tell the simple single story, rather than the complicated story that demands that we look at bigger systemic structures,’ he said.”
This article contains an interview with Professor Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, a history education expert. According to Professor Wineburg, “Think of it as a Venn diagram. So hopefully in 1991, you were taught to not decouple information from its source, and to think of the motivation and intention behind a particular document, that it wasn’t self-evident information presenting itself de novo, but it came with a purpose and it was written down or said to achieve a particular aim. And that had to be taken into account when evaluating that information. And that’s what I learned when I took AP history and had to wrestle with a DBQ [document-based question] for the first time. A good history teacher takes away your innocence about information. But you didn’t learn about SEO, which is not a skill, it’s an awareness and an orientation—[the idea] that Google is not a being of celestial intelligence that cannot be gamed. You find naïveté about Google in a lot of different venues. Most recently a researcher at Data & Society [Francesca Tripodi] did a report about evangelicals that found that they think Google is a neutral source. They think Wikipedia is biased against conservatives, but Google is just straight information. Without realizing that, you know, Google is in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with the people who try to game it. So that’s a piece of knowledge that’s important for people using the internet to fact-check or to think about the quality of information. … Fact-checkers know that in a digital medium, the web is a web. It’s not just a metaphor. You understand a particular node by its relationship in a web. So the smartest thing to do is to consult the web to understand any particular node. That is very different from reading Thucydides, where you look at internal criticism and consistency because there really isn’t a documentary record beyond Thucydides.”
Professor Wineburg also tells us, “When we asked [some historians] to find out if the Employment Policies Institute is a trustworthy source, they would engage in a close explication de texte on the site.* They’ll look at its About page. If an organization can game what they are, they can certainly game their About page! A fact-checker … will understand this organization by putting the organization in quotes, and use a smart keyword—but don’t put too much stock in that keyword. It could be credibility or bias or criticism or funding. If one of the keywords doesn’t work, then they don’t take too much stock, they try another. An example that comes to mind is a fact-checker who opened up seven tabs in 30 seconds. And it was SourceWatch, Charity Navigator, and then finding the organization in the New York Times, and following the links on that, all in less than 30 seconds. All of a sudden there is literally a network there, that you can situate that one node in the network in half a minute. All this while the historian is engaging in a close read. … When you are trying to figure out ‘Is this a quality source?,’ that kind of close read before you even know where the money is coming from or who’s saying it doesn’t make sense.”
Basically, Professor Wineburg wants history teachers to teach critical thinking and how to evaluate sources, especially web sources, like fact checkers evaluate them to keep from being fooled by misinformation and fake history sites.
This article discusses Advanced Placement US History. The author calls APUSH “bland, boring boosterish bilge.” He writes, “With all the fuss Republicans have been making about the need for more patriotism in the classroom, you might believe that U.S. high school history courses today are bastions of antiracism that dwell only on America’s flaws. But unfortunately, my daughter’s history course is as white, and as whitewashed, as Donald Trump could ever hope. When I was in high school my AP history course was based on Thomas Bailey’s ‘The American Pageant,’ a doorstopper originally written in the 1950s whose purple prose seemed calculated to distract from the vast swaths of the U.S. story it ignored or obscured. Bailey did not teach me, for example, that Christopher Columbus cut off the hands of Hispaniola’s Taino people when they did not bring him enough gold. That was 30 years ago. I hoped that my daughter’s distance-learning high school course, administered through a leading university, would be better. My heart sank when I found out she was reading ‘The American Pageant,’ now with new writers and in its 17th edition (though my daughter used the 16th). It’s still a doorstopper and, my daughter informs me, still teaching Black history, Indigenous history, labor history and a lot more very, very badly. In February, CBS News asked Ibram X. Kendi to review four U.S. history textbooks, including ‘The American Pageant.’ For starters, Kendi pointed out ‘Pageant’s’ unabashed use of ‘mulatto,’ from a root word meaning ‘mule’ and considered a slur regarding biracial people. The textbook also refers to enslaved Africans in America in 1775 as ‘immigrants.’ The soft-pedaling of Columbus’ genocidal treatment of the Taino people hasn’t changed: ‘Enslavement and armed aggression took their toll , but the deadliest killers were microbes, not muskets,’ ‘Pageant’ assures the reader blithely. ‘Throughout pretty much the entire book, Indigenous populations aren’t much more than an afterthought,’ my daughter says.”
The article continues, “Nor is there much discussion of how Black people freed themselves by abandoning Confederate plantations and fleeing behind Union lines. Instead, according to the textbook, ‘blacks found themselves emancipated and then re-enslaved’ by Union troop movements, as if they had no agency themselves. It also emphasizes that some ‘initially responded to news of their emancipation with suspicion and uncertainty.’ ‘‘Pageant,’’ my daughter says, ‘very much takes the view that the Emancipation Proclamation caused the slaves to rise up rather than the other way around.’ In line with discredited racist Jim Crow-era historiography, the textbook also emphasizes that John Brown, who dedicated his life to trying to free enslaved people, was ‘probably of unsound mind’; his attack on Harper’s Ferry is described as a ‘crackbrained scheme.’ In contrast, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, who temporized and waffled on the morality of slavery, are celebrated. ‘The book just loves this idea of compromise,’ says my daughter. ‘It champions these men who thought the correct response to slavery was ‘only some states should have slaves.’ ‘ School texts have long glorified the status quo and encouraged blind patriotism and obedience to authority. James W. Loewen’s book ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’ examined a range of popular history textbooks including ‘The American Pageant’ in 1995. He concluded that most of them apologized for racism, ignored poor people and women and presented the past in a way that ‘renders many Americans incapable of thinking about our present and future.’ Teaching history this way, as Loewen noted, causes students to tune out. My daughter’s AP history course is very test-focused. The emphasis is on getting students to regurgitate facts and interpretations, not grappling with gray areas, or connecting then and now.”
In concluding, the author writes, “Because she cares about the world, my daughter would be interested in a rundown on American imperialism that isn’t an apologia. Because she is trans, she deserves to know how the current deluge of anti-trans laws in state legislatures is connected to a U.S. legacy of homophobia. But her AP history class isn’t much interested in such issues. In fact, my daughter’s course dead-ended in the 1990s, so the last 20 years — 9/11, the Iraq war, Obamacare, Trump — weren’t discussed. Are textbooks and teachers deliberately trying to strip the past of relevance? The answer has to be yes. ‘Relevance’ is another way of saying ‘controversial.’ Teaching history in the context of current political events is likely to generate strong opinions from students, and worse, from their parents. So is teaching about queer history, or Black history, or colonialism from the perspective of the colonized. So is teaching about Columbus cutting off people’s hands. Any honest retelling of American history will make us question many of this country’s choices. But those in power, whether textbook authors, school districts or politicians, don’t want to be questioned. My daughter’s AP history class is less about informing her than it is about keeping her ignorant and docile. In that it has failed. But, as retribution, it has bored her unrelentingly for a solid year.”
I think the author has some good points about the textbook, but I also think it’s unfair to blame the teachers, who usually have no choice on the textbook and are mandated to teach certain items within a finite time period. My problem with APUSH is that students come out of it with knowledge that is a mile wide but an inch deep. I would rather they still had to take a US History survey course at the university level, but I can see how getting the credit for a course in high school is a money-saver and thus popular with both students and parents.
This article also looks at APUSH. It says, “The college-level course known as Advanced Placement U.S. History, or APUSH, occupies a strange space within U.S. history education. Any effort to tell the history of the United States to the public must wrestle with two competing impulses: first, to understand our past in all its complexity, warts and all; and second, to find within our past a source of inspiration and a shared identity. K-12 curricula, especially those mandated by state governments, tend to favor the latter impulse and embrace U.S. history as a means of instilling national identity and pride. But APUSH, because of its peculiar history, embodies both impulses. The resultant tension is something that teachers, students, and parents have long had to navigate. The origins of APUSH can be traced back to a series of talks in the late 19th century between members of the American Historical Association and the National Education Association. The focus of these talks was reconciling the history curriculum requirements of high schools and universities. While college and university instructors urged that high-school curricula reflect history as taught at the university level, secondary educators pushed for a curriculum that more directly met the needs of high-school students and prepared them for responsible citizenship. Out of these talks was born the College Entrance Examinations Board (CEEB, or simply ‘College Board’) in 1899. For its first half-century, College Board was primarily focused on testing high-school students for college admissions. With the onset of the Cold War, however, education became a matter of national security. U.S. policymakers were especially interested in math and science education, so that America’s future scientists and engineers could compete with the Soviet Union; there was also, however, pressure on history curricula to build a patriotic bulwark against communism. In 1952, the Ford Foundation consulted with representatives from select universities and high schools on how to foster the development of the country’s brightest students. Participants in the study proposed what became the Advanced Placement program, which would allow students who proved subject-matter mastery to enter college with course credits. College Board took on implementation of the program, including APUSH, in 1955.”
Continuing, we learn, “Through conferences and other events, APUSH brought together secondary and higher-education teachers and forged a new ecosystem. Exams were (and still are) scored at annual readings which possessed a ‘camp-like quality… a happy combination of dogged labor, special friends, and intellectual discourse.’ High-school teachers sat alongside college professors and discussed U.S. history as fellow scholars, an attribute of the annual readings which College Board still uses to promote them to potential teacher applicants. Until recently, APUSH teachers were invited to submit questions for consideration by the test development committee, giving teachers a real sense of ownership in the course. The course’s design inspired a similar collaboration between AP teachers and their students. In 1973, APUSH added the Document-Based Question, requiring students to analyze primary-source documents under pressure during the exam; as a result, primary-source analysis became a hallmark of the class. For students, the intensity of the course inspired a sort of camaraderie with each other and with their teachers, many of whom did not have a strong background in historical research and were learning alongside them. This intensity increased the sense among APUSH students that they were truly ‘doing’ history. In addition, the camaraderie of preparing for the exam often formed a long-time connection between teachers and former students. Students reported back to teachers what they were learning in their college classrooms, offering another form of collaboration between secondary and higher education through APUSH. Straddling both educational worlds, APUSH reflected paradigm shifts in both social studies reform movements and unfolding academic historiographies. In textbooks and course outlines, the earlier periods of U.S. history often remained rooted in older historiography, while more recent content drew on newer scholarship that tended to challenge consensus narratives and provide a greater focus on social history and underrepresented minorities. APUSH increasingly drew on that newer scholarship, urged on by the ‘New Social Studies’ movement. But this coincided with a conservative backlash and a move toward more rigorous state content standards, especially with the publication of the 1983 report A Nation at Risk. APUSH, which already had one foot in the secondary classroom and the other in the college lecture hall, was now in the awkward position of trying to keep up to date with two increasingly oppositional views of U.S. history education. Stakeholders could credibly frame APUSH as a training program for patriotic citizenship or disruptive historical thinking, and in either case they could point to APUSH’s reputation for being a course where students learned ‘real’ history.”
According to the author, “The contradiction at the heart of APUSH was most apparent in the battle over the 2014 course redesign. In an effort directed by College Board president David Coleman to introduce Common Core–style assessment, College Board revealed a new course framework in February 2014. Controversy immediately erupted. The conservative surgeon Ben Carson (who was about to launch a presidential campaign) took to Fox News, declaring, ‘I think most people when they finish that course, they’d be ready to sign up for ISIS.’ The new framework earned official condemnation from the Republican National Committee, a targeted opposition campaign from the Concerned Women of America, and several bills to defund public school APUSH programs in states including Colorado, Georgia, and Oklahoma. All the fuss aside, the new framework was not substantially different from its predecessor. Where the old framework included vague references to diverse histories, the new framework divided the course into specific historical periods and added extensive detail, specifying the contributions of lesser-known figures like Little Turtle. The new framework also diversified the list of possible source documents that would appear on the exam, leaving the more familiar choices up to teachers but specifying the inclusion of others. But the course was still primarily a political history of the United States, and a triumphalist one at that. Moreover, in the face of nearly a year of partisan pressure, College Board capitulated to many of its critics’ demands and softened the wording in the framework. It also expanded the curriculum’s discussion of such topics as ‘American national identity and unity’; America’s ‘founding political leaders’ and ‘Founding Documents’; America’s ‘role in victories of WWI and WWII’ and ‘leadership in ending the Cold War’; and the ‘productive role of free enterprise, entrepreneurship, and innovation.’ But College Board’s capitulation was not total. As politicians were decrying College Board’s ‘radically revisionist view of American history,’ high-school students literally took to the streets, insisting, ‘We have a right to know history.’ Students, teachers, and parents successfully shut down state GOP efforts to defund their APUSH programs or hold them hostage for major revisions. News media heralded their success as ‘little rebels,’ even though the course still owed more to decades-old state content standards than the latest university-driven research. And yet it was that popular understanding of APUSH as cutting-edge university teaching that enabled parents to fend off GOP efforts to rehaul the course. The tension inherent in APUSH both protected the course from partisan tinkering and allowed it to remain firmly rooted in deeply conservative notions of didactic, great-man history.”
The article concludes, “U.S. history education has always been a contested ideological battleground, and conservative efforts usually prevail. In his landmark study Dare the School Create a New Social Order?, the sociologist George S. Counts even argued that by its structure as a preserver and deliverer of consensus knowledge, education is inherently unable to enact structural reform. The 2014–15 fight over the APUSH redesign highlighted the ways in which the unusual collaborative climate of APUSH can deviate from that pattern. Limited by its own origins to promote a triumphalist national narrative, the course also manages to maintain space for questioning that impulse. Tying the two rival views of U.S. history education to each other, APUSH presents teachers and students with the opportunity to examine and interrogate both. Educators’ best course of action may simply be to offer that contradiction to our students when they ask us ‘teach us the truth.’ “
This article is about teaching media awareness at the University of Washington. “[Jevin] West, an associate professor, and Professor Carl Bergstrom teach ‘Calling BS: Data Reasoning in a Digital World’ (although the actual course listing uses the more colorful language). Their course covers everything from interpreting data visualizations to understanding publication bias in academic literature to identifying fake news. They’ve never had a shortage of material to work with. ‘Almost every day there were things we could put in,’ West, an associate professor at the University of Washington, said of the fall. ‘You have infinite material to pull from in real time.’ Launched in 2017, Calling BS became an instant hit at the University of Washington; it fills its 150-student capacity quickly each year. The curriculum – including YouTube videos of the lectures – is also available for free to any teacher who wants to use it. To date, faculty at more than 100 colleges, including foreign schools, community colleges and Ivy League universities, have reached out about adopting the course in what West describes as a ‘BS movement.’ ‘It’s difficult to learn and to trust information if we’re not aware of some of these ways information is manipulated,’ West said. As conspiracy theories spread across social media and misleading news stories are shared in internet echo chambers, educators across the country – and the world – are trying to battle misinformation by teaching students to be better consumers of news, media and data. Some universities, like UW, offer individual courses with this focus. Others have developed media literacy minors or even graduate certificates focused on the topic. At the K-12 level, states have begun incorporating media literacy into their standards and programs have begun cropping up aimed at training students to be better consumers of news. Whether focused on media literacy or data literacy, research suggests a need for this type of education in general. A 2016 study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that significant numbers of middle schoolers, high schoolers and college students could not adequately judge the credibility of online information. ‘Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,’ the study’s authors wrote. College students were easily duped by biased websites with ‘high production values,’ including links to news organizations and ‘polished ‘About’ pages.’ More than 80 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between sponsored content and actual news stories. … A follow up report in 2019 found similarly dismal results. Nearly all high schools students surveyed had ‘difficulty discerning fact from fiction online’ and 96 percent of students failed to question the credibility of an unreliable website. What’s needed, according to experts, is a focus on media literacy education in classrooms—starting as early as third or fourth grade. ‘We have an obligation as educators to do this,’ Peter Adams, senior vice president of education at the News Literacy Project, said. ‘Today’s information environment is tremendously exciting and there’s all kinds of access, but there are really some enormous challenges and pitfalls and hazards out there.’ More than one third of middle school students report rarely or never having learned how to judge the reliability of information sources, which is ‘really the fundamental of what media literacy is,’ said Helen Lee Bouygues, president of the Reboot Foundation, who is an expert on misinformation and critical thinking.”
The article continues, “There’s limited research on how best to teach students to interpret information they come across online, however, said Wineburg. He’s critical of programs that he says encourage student to ‘play 20 questions’ by carefully examining all facets of a website. ‘We’re teaching web credibility as if it’s 2002,’ he said. ‘It’s exactly the opposite of what professional fact-checkers do.’ Fact-checkers, Wineburg’s research has found, don’t dig deep into a website to determine its credibility, but search components of it in new browser tabs, to gain an outside perspective. Teaching students these strategies has yielded positive results in recent studies. Some believe that partnering with journalists to address media literacy could also help. A recent Pew Research Center study found that a majority of Americans believe news media have the ‘most responsibility’ in reducing fake news and misinformation. Two of the News Literacy Project’s most popular programs do just that. Checkology, a free e-learning platform, is designed for students in grades 6-12 and provides interactive lessons from journalists and media experts on how to apply critical thinking skills and interpret and consume information. The NewsLitCamp, which is designed for educators, also relies on journalists. For one day, a school partners with a local newsroom to bring teachers, school librarians and media specialists together with journalists to learn about issues such as journalism standards and practices, news judgment and bias and the role of social media.”
Any teachers looking for some primary source sets for the classroom can see this site from the Library of Congress.
We next go to the “stupid, racist politicians” section of this post, beginning with this post regarding a dumb racist politician in Louisiana. “Martha Huckabay, the president of the Women’s Republican Club of New Orleans, came up with an interesting take on U.S. history this weekend. Huckabay shared a clip of a segment in which a Louisiana state representative was interviewing with CNN’s John Berman about comments made by a Republican counterpart, Rep. Ray Garofalo, that students in his state’s schools should learn ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ of slavery. Rep. Stephanie Hilferty reminded her colleague there was no ‘good’ to slavery. Garofalo has since said that he misspoke. ‘What is Stephanie Hilferty doing here? Why is she trying to trap a Republican and twist his words?’ Huckabay wrote on Facebook. ‘How does she 100% know there is ‘no good to slavery’ if none of us were around during slavery? Weren’t some slaves treated really well?’ she noted. ‘I know in the Bible they were.’ The public post has little interaction. Some comments and several laughing reactions were shared. One user quickly reminded Huckabay we weren’t around to see what happened during slavery in the Bible either. Last month, Garofalo, who is the head of the state’s education committee, made his controversial remarks during a debate on a bill to ban critical race theory from public schools in Louisiana. The state’s Black Caucus has moved to have him removed from the post.”
This post looks at Mr. Garofalo’s dumb comments. “When a Louisiana lawmaker questioned stateRep. Ray Garofalo Jr. (R) during a House committee meeting on Tuesday over his bill that would ban schools and colleges from teaching ‘divisive concepts’ about race and sex, Garofalo Jr. mentioned he didn’t ‘want to say anything I shouldn’t say.’ Moments later, though, the room erupted when the GOP lawmaker tried to give examples of how he would like to see the state’s teachers discuss slavery. ‘If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly,’ Garofalo Jr. said. ‘There is no good to slavery though,’ Rep. Stephanie Hilferty (R) swiftly replied before the House burst into laughter. Garofalo Jr. quickly walked back the comment, saying, ‘I didn’t mean to imply that. I don’t believe that and I know that’s not the case,’ but that didn’t stop his statement from going viral on social media— and possibly helping to doom his bill. The incident is the latest firestorm over GOP efforts across the country to push similar legislation that would ban critical race theory, which examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism. Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said he intended to create civics curriculums without ‘unsanctioned narratives like critical race theory.’ Similarly, last week, the Idaho House passed a bill looking to prevent schools and universities from teaching critical race theory, the Associated Press reported. Garofalo Jr., a commercial developer and nonpracticing attorney, was elected in 2011 to represent St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans. His bill, which seeks to bar schools from teaching that the United States or Louisiana is ‘systematically racist or sexist,’ was modeled after legislation in Idaho and Florida, he said. It includes an extensive list of requirements on how teachers would have to handle discussions of race, sex and national origin in the classroom and would have prohibited giving students, teachers or employees information that ‘teaches, advocates, acts upon or promotes divisive concepts.’ In a hearing Tuesday in the House Education Committee, Garofalo Jr., who chairs the committee, defended the bill as a way to take the ‘politics out of the classroom’ and ensure ‘a learning environment free of discrimination.’ ” Apparently he thinks lying is okay.
The article tells us, “But he faced intense criticism from both Republicans and Democrats who argued that telling schools what to teach could violate the First Amendment. Critics also claimed the bill’s language was too vague and could scare teachers and professors away from thoughtful and difficult discussions. Pressed by Hilferty to explain the motivation behind the bill, Garofalo Jr. claimed instructors were teaching ‘theories’ instead of facts, and alleged parents had complained about teaching materials ‘saying the United States is a racist country.’ ‘You can teach the good, the bad, the ugly,’ he said. ‘But you cannot say that the theories are facts. You can teach facts as facts. You can teach theories as theories.’ Hilferty, though, noted that some historical events — such as the Holocaust and slavery — do not have two sides to discuss.”
Speaking of critical race theory, we have this article discussing the Republican obsession with it. “On January 12, Keith Ammon, a Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar schools as well as organizations that have entered into a contract or subcontract with the state from endorsing ‘divisive concepts.’ Specifically, the measure would forbid ‘race or sex scapegoating,’ questioning the value of meritocracy, and suggesting that New Hampshire—or the United States—is ‘fundamentally racist.’ Ammon’s bill is one of a dozen that Republicans have recently introduced in state legislatures and the United States Congress that contain similar prohibitions. In Arkansas, lawmakers have approved a measure that would ban state contractors from offering training that promotes ‘division between, resentment of, or social justice for’ groups based on race, gender, or political affiliation. The Idaho legislature just passed a bill that would bar institutions of public education from compelling ‘students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere’ to specific beliefs about race, sex, or religion. The Louisiana legislature is weighing a nearly identical measure. The language of these bills is anodyne and fuzzy—compel, for instance, is never defined in the Idaho legislation—and that ambiguity appears to be deliberate. According to Ammon, ‘using taxpayer funds to promote ideas such as ‘one race is inherently superior to another race or sex’ … only exacerbates our differences.’ But critics of these efforts warn that the bills would effectively prevent public schools and universities from holding discussions about racism; the New Hampshire measure in particular would ban companies that do business with government entities from conducting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. ‘The vagueness of the language is really the point,’ Leah Cohen, an organizer with Granite State Progress, a liberal nonprofit based in Concord, told me. ‘With this really broad brushstroke, we anticipate that that will be used more to censor conversations about race and equity.’ Most legal scholars say that these bills impinge on the right to free speech and will likely be dismissed in court. ‘Of the legislative language so far, none of the bills are fully constitutional,’ Joe Cohn, the legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told me, ‘and if it isn’t fully constitutional, there’s a word for that: It means it’s unconstitutional.’ This does not appear to concern the bills’ sponsors, though. The larger purpose, it seems, is to rally the Republican base—to push back against the recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses. The shorthand for the Republicans’ bogeyman is an idea that has until now mostly lived in academia: critical race theory.”
The article gives a short explanation of critical race theory: “The theory’s proponents argue that the nation’s sordid history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is embedded in our laws, and continues to play a central role in preventing Black Americans and other marginalized groups from living lives untouched by racism. For some, the theory was a revelatory way to understand inequality. Take housing, for example. Researchers have now accumulated ample evidence that racial covenants in property deeds and redlining by the Federal Housing Authority—banned more than 60 years ago—remain a major contributor to the gulf in homeownership, and thus wealth, between Black and white people. Others, perhaps most prominently Randall Kennedy, who joined the Harvard Law faculty a few years after Bell left, questioned how widely the theory could be applied. In a paper titled ‘Racial Critiques of Legal Academia,’ Kennedy argued that white racism was not the only reason so few ‘minority scholars’ were members of law-school faculties. Conservative scholars argued that critical race theory is reductive—that it treats race as the only factor in social identity. As with other academic frameworks before it, the nuances of critical race theory—and the debate around it—were obscured when it escaped the ivory tower. It first entered public discourse in the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton nominated the University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Lani Guinier to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Republicans mounted an aggressive and ultimately successful campaign to prevent her appointment, tagging her the ‘Quota Queen.’ Among the many reasons her adversaries said she was wrong for the job was that she had been ‘championing a radical school of thought called ‘critical race theory.’’ The theory soon stood in for anything resembling an examination of America’s history with race. Conservatives would boil it down further: Critical race theory taught Americans to hate America. Today, across the country, school curricula and workplace trainings include materials that defenders and opponents alike insist are inspired by critical race theory but that academic critical race theorists do not characterize as such.”
The article continues, “If a single person bears the most responsibility for the surge in conservative interest in critical race theory, it is probably Christopher Rufo. Last summer, Rufo, a 36-year-old senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a libertarian think tank, received a tip from a municipal employee in Seattle. (Rufo had lived in the city and, in 2018, ran unsuccessfully for city council.) According to the whistleblower, the city was conducting ‘internalized racial superiority’ training sessions for its employees. Rufo submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and wrote about his findings for the institute’s public-policy magazine.” Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s phony news show to spout his racist claims. Predictably, Failed President Donald Trump saw this show. “In early September, Tucker Carlson invited him on his Fox News show during which Rufo warned viewers that critical race theory had pervaded every institution of the federal government and was being ‘weaponized’ against Americans. He called on President Donald Trump to ban such training in all federal departments. ‘Luckily, the president was watching the show and instructed his Chief of Staff to contact me the next morning,’ Rufo wrote to me. (He would agree to be interviewed only by email.) Within three weeks, Trump had signed an executive order banning the use of critical race theory by federal departments and contractors in diversity training. ‘And thus,’ he wrote to me, ‘the real fight against critical race theory began.’ Trump’s executive order was immediately challenged in court. Nonprofit organizations that provide these training sessions argued that the order violated their free-speech rights and hampered their ability to conduct their business. In December, a federal judge agreed; President Joe Biden rescinded the order the day he took office. But by then, critical race theory was already a part of the conservative lexicon. Since Trump’s executive order, Rufo told me, he has provided his analysis ‘to a half-dozen state legislatures, the United States House of Representatives, and the United States Senate.’ One such state legislature was New Hampshire’s; on February 18, the lower chamber held a hearing to discuss Keith Ammon’s bill. Rufo was among those who testified in support of it. Concerned that the measure might fail on its own, Republicans have now included its language in a must-pass budget bill. In March, Republican Governor Chris Sununu signaled that he would object to ‘divisive concepts’ legislation because he believes it is unconstitutional, but he has since tempered his stand. ‘The ideas of critical race theory and all of this stuff—I personally don’t think there’s any place for that in schools,’ he said in early April. But, he added, ‘when you start turning down the path of the government banning things, I think that’s a very slippery slope.’ Almost everyone I spoke with for this article assumed that Sununu would sign the budget bill, and that the divisive-concepts ban would become law.”
The article concludes, “For Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years. What’s less clear is whether average voters care much about the debate. In a recent Atlantic/Leger poll, 52 percent of respondents who identified as Republicans said that states should pass laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory, but just 30 percent of self-identified independents were willing to say the same. Meanwhile, a strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of critical race theory or were unsure whether they had. Last week, after President Biden’s first joint address to Congress—and as Idaho was preparing to pass its bill—Senator Tim Scott stood in front of United States and South Carolina flags to deliver the Republican response. ‘From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress,’ Scott said. ‘You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.’ Rufo immediately knew what he meant. ‘Senator Tim Scott denounces critical race theory in his response to Biden’s speech tonight,’ he tweeted. ‘We have turned critical race theory into a national issue and conservative political leaders are starting to fight.’ “
This article also discusses the racist backlash against Critical Race Theory. “The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about. Instead, CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘wokeism,’ ‘anti-racism,’ and ‘identity politics’—or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society. They are simply against any talk, discussion, mention, analysis, or intimation of race—except to say we shouldn’t talk about it. Among CRT’s critics little distinction is drawn, in particular, between the academic disciplines of critical race theory and critical race studies. Critical race theory refers to a body of legal scholarship developed in the 1970s and ’80s, largely out of Harvard Law School, by the likes of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, III, among others. Though varied in their views, what unites the work of these scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument, given the perpetuation of racial and other hierarchies through the structure of colorblind law instituted after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The framework has since been taken up, expanded, and applied more generally to social discourse and practice. As a jurisprudential and social theory it is open to critique and revision, even rejection with compelling counterargument—all notably absent from the current attacks. Critical race studies, by contrast, encompass a broader, more loosely affiliated array of academic work. Some far more compelling than others, these accounts have been taken up, debated, and indeed sometimes dismissed in the expansive analysis of race and racism in and beyond the academy today. Very little holds all of these accounts together beyond taking race and racism as objects of analysis. Two radically divergent books, for example—Isabel Wilkerson’s latest bestseller, Caste, and Oliver Cromwell Cox’s classic, Caste, Class, and Race (1948)—share little in common, though both would be recognized as works in critical race studies.”
According to the article, “In conservative accounts, the two authors most commonly cited as CRT’s principal exemplars are Ibram X. Kendi, who trained not in law but in African American Studies (he is CRT’s ‘New Age guru,’ according to the Heritage Foundation), and Robin DiAngelo, a professor of education. Neither is a critical race theorist in the traditional legal sense, and Kendi’s popularizing of some work on race shares little with DiAngelo’s reductive account of what she calls ‘white fragility.’ Other screeds also dismiss philosophers Angela Davis and Achille Mbembe as ‘scholar-activists’ (as if there is something damning about the title). Of course, there is no evidence anywhere of either ever claiming anything resembling that ‘everyone and everything White is complicit’ in racial oppression, or that ‘all unequal outcomes by race . . . is the result of racial oppression,’ as the CACAGNY documents put it. According to the CACAGNY screed, CRT claims that ‘you are only your race‘ and that ‘by your race alone you will be judged.’ The theory of intersectionality—first elaborated by Crenshaw—belies the point, of course, arguing that race operates along with other key determinants of social positioning such as class, gender, disability, and so on. Nor do I know of any serious CRT scholar who would endorse the CACAGNY qualification that, in intersection ‘with other victimization categories’ like gender, ‘race is always primary.’ The point of intersectional analysis is that conditions and context dictate what the primary and exacerbating determinants of inequality and victimization are in specific circumstances. Indeed, one of Crenshaw’s seminal contributions to CRT scholarship specifically criticized the limitations of a ‘single-axis framework,’ including those that focus on race to the exclusion of a supplementary ‘analysis of sexism.’ Another measure of the ideological dishonesty can be found in the cheapness of these screeds’ intellectual genealogies. According to CACAGNY, CRT simply substitutes ‘race struggle’ for ‘class struggle’ in the work of ‘such hate promoters as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Schmitt, Marcuse, Foucault, and Freire.’ Apparently critics cannot be bothered to imagine sources other than white men. For them there was no Frederick Douglass, no W. E. B. Du Bois, no Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer, or Frantz Fanon, no Aimé Césaire, Alain Locke, or Charles Hamilton Houston, no Stokely Carmichael, Charles Hamilton, or Audre Lorde—and on and on. Their list of progenitors is instead plainly meant to conjure ‘neo-Marxist‘ bogeymen, the association with Marxism or socialism the surefire means to parodic conservative dismissal. Needless to say, I have not seen any mention, let alone analysis, of the substantive body of literature on racial capitalism and racial neoliberalism.”
We also have this article commenting on the racist backlash against CRT. “One of the pioneers of critical race theory has accused Republicans of creating a ‘phantom threat’ to justify ‘jaw-dropping’ attacks on racial justice, freedom of speech and a society’s understanding of its history. Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw made the comments to Newsweek after GOP lawmakers in Idaho moved to ban the theory from being taught in the state’s schools and universities. The academic theory ‘maps the nature and workings of ‘institutional racism” in America, according to Kendall Thomas, co-editor along with Crenshaw of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The theory dates back to the mid-1970s, but has become a politically charged topic in recent months. In April, President Joe Biden‘s Department of Education issued proposals to update the teaching of American history and civics in schools, incorporating anti-racist works such as The 1619 Project and books by the historian Ibram X. Kendi.”
The article also says, “Asked about the Idaho legislation and attempts by other states to remove critical race theory from the curriculum, Crenshaw said: ‘The attacks on critical race theory in Idaho and across the country are evidence of a frightening truth: Republican legislators are using a phantom threat to justify jaw-dropping attacks on racial justice, freedom of speech and a society’s understanding of its history.’ She continued: ‘Democracy itself rests on the idea that our laws and social practices are engaged with real issues. However, in much the same way that attacks on voting rights are justified by non-existent voter fraud, attacks on critical race theory are grounded in reactionary concern about racial progress and the leveling of the playing field. And even though the hollowness of their partisan rhetoric can be easily marked as nostalgia for a racist and sexist social order, the effects of government intervention in discussions of this country’s history are horrifyingly real.’ … Quinn Perry, policy and government affairs director of the [Idaho School Boards Association], said: ‘It [Idaho GOP’s proposed anti-CRT legislation] has come on the tails of a wild misinformation campaign, where a radical lobbying group made broad claims that our members, administrators and teachers are ‘indoctrinating’ students—a claim we vehemently reject. Instead, the move delayed our public schools’ ability to enter into professional negotiations, issue contracts, set budgets and prepare for learning loss programs for the upcoming school year. This also came at a time when teacher burnout and turn-over remain at an all-time high. When the [lobbying] group realized that bashing teachers, locally elected school boards and school administrators wasn’t a well-received message, it appears they switched their rhetoric and started blaming our state agencies,’ Perry added.”
The article concludes, “Fred Cornforth, chairman of the Idaho Democrats, said in an emailed statement to Newsweek that 2021 was arguably the worst legislative session in the state’s history. ‘Instead of supporting families, teachers, students and hard-working Idahoans, radical legislators hope to inflame their base with conspiracy-backed legislation,’ he said. ‘Within days of the initial claim of critical race theory being taught in Idaho schools [the] Republican-appointed State Board of Education has found zero evidence of these claims. Radical legislators continue their attack on public education—something they have underfunded for decades—to where our state is dead last in support per student, nationwide. Their claims are baseless and their actions, unconstitutional. A day of reckoning is coming at the ballot box.’ “
Now we have this article out of Texas. “Three years ago, a video went viral of a group of teenage students chanting the n-word at a private party in Southlake, Texas. Now, as the school district tries to incorporate cultural awareness into the curriculum, a group of parents is fighting back. Southlake is not a racist community — that was the consensus among many parents at a school board meeting for the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake on Monday. The meeting took place after the city’s elections over the weekend, which saw huge wins for candidates opposing the district’s plans. Two candidates for school board, two for city council and the mayoral candidate all won with about 70% of the vote. They were all endorsed by the Southlake Families PAC, a group whose main issue is Carroll ISD’s new Cultural Competence Action Plan, which was formed in response to that 2018 viral video. The plan, which was set to be presented for adoption last August before being postponed, aims to address racism in the district by emphasizing ‘cultural awareness’ among students through anti-bullying programs and assembly speakers, according to a draft. It also requires things like diversity training for the staff. All of that is opposed by the Southlake Families PAC. On its website, the political action committee calls the plan ‘some of the most extreme liberal positions in the history of Texas public education,’ saying the plan is ‘overreaching’ and will ‘indoctrinate children according to extremely liberal beliefs.’ The PAC’s website acknowledges that racism is a problem but says the plan is not a solution: ‘We affirm that real racism remains an issue across the globe, and while rare in Southlake, we stand against it. We deny the current CCAP is a solution to any racist issues and, in fact, creates more racism, not less.’ “
It may or may not be a racist community, but the parents sure are mischaracterizing things and hitting all the racist backlash talking points. The article continues, “At Monday’s school board meeting, many parents and community members echoed those positions while referencing the winning results from the weekend’s election. ‘Seventy percent of our community disagreed with critical race theory,’ one person stated. ‘Seventy percent deny there is systemic racism at Carroll ISD.’ Though the plan does not mention critical race theory specifically, the area of study has become a catch-all for any type of education involving race. The actual plan, however, is focused on cultural awareness, referencing the ‘increasingly diverse student population’ in the district. ‘Indoctrination of children is over,’ said another speaker. Southlake is a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth. The city is 79% White, and the median income is about $240,000, according to the US Census Bureau. Following the election over the weekend, the Southlake Families PAC wrote on Twitter, ‘Critical Race Theory ain’t coming here. This is what happens when good people stand up and say, not in my town, not on my watch.’ A few days later, the group expanded on that position. ‘CRT is a theoretical framework which views society as dominated by white supremacy and categorizes people as ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressed’ based on their skin color,’ the group wrote Monday. ‘It also teaches kids to hate America. Ask yourself who in their right mind would want this taught in public schools?’ CNN emailed the group for further comment, but did not receive a response. The entire situation — the finger-pointing at critical race theory, the emphasis on indoctrination and the general vilifying of racial education — is part of a larger trend currently playing out across the United States. Just last week, Idaho moved to ban ‘critical race theory’ or any racial education in its public schools, including public universities. Though the bill phrased the move as a ban against teaching that ‘any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior,’ supporters of the bill called out critical race theory specifically, and also claimed students were being indoctrinated — just like in Southlake. Tuesday, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wrote on Twitter, ‘Critical race theory is harmful to a child’s education,’ posted above a short video with a graphic reading, ‘Schools need to stop teaching kids that they’re racist.’ Critical race theory, according to those that study it, actually refers to an area of study dedicated to understanding systemic inequality and racism in the United States, arguing that historical systems such as slavery still play a role in society today. ‘It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past,’ Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor at UCLA and Columbia University, told CNN in October.”
In this article, the Trump cultist governor of South Dakota shows her ignorance of actual history and her desire to propagandize instead of seeing schools teach history. “The biggest cultural challenge of this lifetime is ‘defeating anti-American indoctrination,’ Gov. Kristi Noem said in a Fox News opinion piece co-signed by Dr. Ben Carson and published Monday morning. The politicians shared they’ve signed on to the ‘1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools,’ which commits that K-12 public education will restore ‘honest, patriotic education that cultivates in our children a profound love for our country.’ Noem is widely considered a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate. Her signature comes as she proclaims Monday through Friday is Teacher Appreciation Week in South Dakota. Carson was the 17th U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and a member of President Trump’s advisory 1776 Commission. In the column, Noem and Carson criticize President Joe Biden for canceling and disbanding President Trump’s 1776 Commission, which released a controversial 1776 Report two days before the end of Trump’s term, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and attempted to end a ‘radicalized view of American history.’ The pledge also promotes curriculum that teaches all children are created equal, prohibits curriculum that ‘pits students against one another on the basis of race or sex,’ and prohibits any curriculum that requires students to protest and lobby during or after school. In the column, Noem shares concerns about giving up and abandoning altogether ‘the teaching of our children the true and inspiring story of America,’ and that children should be taught about the country’s values, history and heroes. Noem and Carson also said it’s ‘alarming’ that students are ‘being subjected to the radical concept known as critical race theory, which pits them against one another on the basis of race and gender under the guise of achieving ‘equity.’’ Critical race theory sows division and cripples the nation from within, ‘one brainwashed and resentful student at a time,’ the pair argue. America’s most defining principle, the pair argue, is that as individuals, ‘we are all created equal by God.’ Noem has shared similar concerns about the concept of indoctrination in the past. She’s written a column for the Federalist with worries about the nation’s failure ‘to educate generations of our children about what makes America unique,’ and for the ‘left’s indoctrination’ of students. At the time, local educators like Tim Eckart, president of the Sioux Falls Education Association, were not happy. Eckart said the suggestion that educators were indoctrinating students was ‘incredibly insulting.’ “
Showing she is committed to propagandizing in schools, the article continues, “The conservative governor also successfully pushed for $900,000 in state funding to create new civics curriculum to meet her goal of educating why the ‘U.S. is the most special nation in the history of the world,’ while efforts to mandate instruction on the state’s tribal history, culture and government failed in the legislative session this spring. A new state-specific curriculum has yet to be seen months after Noem pushed for it, but the South Dakota Department of Education has a two-year project to develop and prepare it for schools to use if they wish to do so.”
In this article on Noem’s lying and propagandizing, we learn, “South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has joined the chorus of state and federal Republicans calling for an end to ‘anti-American indoctrination’ in public schools, emphasizing the need to restore a ‘patriotic education’ for children across the country. In a spate of tweets on Monday, Noem revealed that she had joined the ‘1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools,’ an informal vow taken by several politicians – including former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson – who have committed to bringing back an ‘honest, patriotic education that cultivates in our children a profound love for our country,’ according to The Hill. ‘Young people should be taught to view one another not according to race or gender,’ the pledge states, ‘but as individuals made in the image of God.’ Noem tweeted: ‘Teaching our children & grandchildren to hate their own country & pitting them against one another on the basis of race or sex is shameful & must be stopped. I’m proud to be the 1st candidate in America to sign ‘The 1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools.’ ‘ On Monday, Noem and Carson penned a joint op-ed, spelling out the need for educators to specifically resist incorporating critical race theory into their curriculums. ‘Not only is this extreme ideology deeply divisive and harmful,’ they wrote. ‘but it rejects America’s most defining principle – that as individuals we are all created equal by God.’ The two added: ‘Critical race theory is a deliberate means to sow division and cripple our nation from within – one brainwashed and resentful student at a time. And while foreign adversaries like China and Russia surely work to inflame our divisions, we are doing this to ourselves.’ Noem and Carson also called the challenge to defeat ‘ascendant anti-Americanism…perhaps the most important cultural challenge of our lifetime.’ ” I don’t know why people who claim to follow God and Jesus tend to lie so much–other than they’re phonies who only claim to follow God and Jesus cynically to gain power by fooling people.
The article continues, “Noem’s pledge is just the latest in her quest to imbue South Dakota’s education system with a sense of blind patriotism. Back in January, Noem proposed a $900,000 fund to help civics and history teachers better explain ‘why the United States of America is the most special nation in the history of the world.’ Noem also wrote an op-ed in The Federalist that month, claiming that the country ‘has failed to educate generations of our children about what makes America unique.’ ‘Few, if any of them, have been taught the history of our decades-long fight to defeat communism,’ she wrote. ‘Meanwhile, the left’s indoctrination takes place every day with kids all across America from the time they walk into a school at age 5 to the time they graduate college at 22.’ The South Dakota governor’s move is part of a broader nationwide push led by Republican state and federal lawmakers to eradicate ‘wokeism’ from the public sphere.” “Woke,” of course, is a term that means one is aware of, concerned about, and against racial oppression. Those who campaign against so-called “wokeism” are saying they are in favor of racism and racial oppression. Remember that.
According to the article, “As Salon reported on Tuesday, myriad other states have led efforts to crack down on critical race theory and leftist ideology in the classroom, including Idaho, Missouri, Florida, Oklahoma, and others. In the past several weeks, the GOP push has put on display the party’s glaring lack of historical literacy, specifically with respect to slavery. In one instance, Louisiana state Rep. Ray Garofalo argued in a floor speech that teachers should be encouraged to teach the ‘good’ of slavery. In another, senators from Colorado and Tennessee recently attempted to frame the Three-Fifths Compromise as a pro-abolition effort. On Thursday, in an interview with Newsweek, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading proponent of critical race theory, clapped back at the GOP’s affinity for revisionist history. ‘The attacks on critical race theory in Idaho and across the country are evidence of a frightening truth: Republican legislators are using a phantom threat to justify jaw-dropping attacks on racial justice, freedom of speech and a society’s understanding of its history,’ Crenshaw declared. She added: ‘Democracy itself rests on the idea that our laws and social practices are engaged with real issues. However, in much the same way that attacks on voting rights are justified by non-existent voter fraud, attacks on critical race theory are grounded in reactionary concern about racial progress and the leveling of the playing field.’ “
With this article we learn, “American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten accused opponents of the New York Times‘s 1619 Project of trying to ban a ‘factual version of oppression in America,’ in Thursday comments on Prime with Charles Blow on BNC. ‘All of a sudden you’re hearing people talk about critical race theory, people who have no idea what that term means, who are trying to ban the 1619 Project, because it is trying to…actually teach a factual version of oppression in America,’ Weingarten said. The comments come amid controversy surrounding the U.S. Department of Education push to adopt curriculum based on certain parts of the 1619 Project, unveiled by the Times in 2019. The project initially claimed that the importation of the first slaves to American shores in 1619 constituted the nation’s ‘true founding,’ although the phrase disappeared from later iterations of the project. The Times developed curricula based on the project that has been adopted in various schools, including the Chicago public school district. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) wrote a letter to Education Secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona last week, calling not to adopt nationwide curricula based on the project. ‘Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,’ McConnell wrote. ‘If your Administration had proposed actual legislation instead of trying to do this quietly through the Federal Register, that legislation would not pass Congress.’ A number of states have advanced legislation to ban 1619 Project curricula from being taught at public schools. Idaho governor Brad Little signed a bill last week banning schools from teaching ‘critical race theory.’ “
Speaking of Moscow Mitch’s racist lying, there’s this article, which tells us, “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is facing backlash from his alma mater over comments he made this week rejecting the idea that 1619, when the first enslaved people arrived in America, was one of the most important points in U.S. history. ‘[McConnell’s comments] are quite troubling for American descendants of slaves, our allies and those who support us,’ V. Faye Jones, the University of Louisville’s interim senior associate vice president for diversity and equity, said in a campus-wide email on Thursday, according to the Courier-Journal. ‘To imply that slavery is not an important part of United States history not only fails to provide a true representation of the facts, but also denies the heritage, culture, resilience and survival of Black people in America,’ Jones continued. ‘It also fails to give context to the history of systemic racial discrimination, the United States’ ‘original sin’ as Sen. McConnell called it, which still plagues us today,’ Jones said. Republicans including McConnell have been growing more vocal in their opposition to critical race theory and The New York Times’s 1619 Project. ‘I think this is about American history and the most important dates in American history. And my view – and I think most Americans think – dates like 1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1787, the Constitution; 1861-1865, the Civil War, are sort of the basic tenets of American history,’ McConnell said during a speech at the university on Monday. ‘There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that the year 1619 was one of those years,’ he continued. The 1619 Project seeks to trace American history through systemic racism and the aftermath of the slave trade, pointing out the racist origins of multiple U.S. institutions. ‘What we know to be true is that slavery and the date the first enslaved Africans arrived and were sold on U.S. soil are more than an ‘exotic notion,’ ‘ Jones wrote in Thursday’s email. ‘If the Civil War is a significant part of history, should not the basis for it also be viewed as significant?‘ “
In this article we read of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s response to Moscow Mitch’s racist lies. “The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones on Tuesday responded to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s push to remove the project, which was launched on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves to what would become the United States, from federal grant programs. The project, which was published by The New York Times Magazine in 2019, examines the legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans throughout the nation’s history, drawing the ire of conservatives who have sought to ban the body of work from being taught in schools. In a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, the Kentucky Republican and 38 members of his Senate GOP caucus outlined their opposition to the Department of Education developing updated history curricula, alleging that the content is ‘divisive.’ ‘This is a time to strengthen the teaching of civics and American history in our schools,’ the letter says. ‘Instead, your Proposed Priorities double down on divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda.’ The letter added: ‘Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us.’ ” He’s made because it divides racists from nonracists.
The article continues, “During an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘The Reid Out’ with host Joy Reid, Hannah-Jones rebuts McConnell’s argument that the project perpetuates ‘a drumbeat of revisionism and negativity,’ while also responding to his claim that 1619 was not one of the most important years in US history. ‘I don’t know how you teach about 1865 without acknowledging that 1619 was an important year being that 1865 occurs began we began slavery in 1619,’ she said, referring to the end of the Civil War in her dialogue. ‘So when you hear people like him saying that teaching the actual facts of American history are divisive, maybe that’s because we have a divisive history in this country.’ She added: ‘He’s not arguing that we shouldn’t teach the truth. He’s just saying that the truth is too difficult for apparently our nation to bear and that we’re far too fragile to be able to withstand the scrutiny of the truth.’ Hannah-Jones said that the legacy of slavery has been an enduring part of the nation’s history, which can’t simply be dismissed. ‘The entire argument of the 1619 Project is that slavery pre-dates almost every other American institution,’ she said. ‘That means that it is foundational and embedded in our culture.’ “
According to the article, “During a CNN appearance earlier this week, Hannah-Jones argued that the national GOP push to ban the 1619 Project in public schools ‘is fundamentally a free speech issue.’ ‘It’s not about the facts of history – it’s about trying to prohibit the teaching of ideas they don’t like,’ she said. Former President Donald Trump, who implemented a ‘1776 Commission’ to promote ‘patriotic education’ last year, sought to whip up conservative opposition to the 1619 Project. Trump’s commission was quickly disbanded by President Joe Biden upon taking office, but not before they released a report saying that the history of slavery in America had been distorted. Despite the GOP criticism, patriotism is a core theme of the opening 1619 Project essay, written by Hannah-Jones, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for the project in 2020. In her essay, ‘America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One,’ Hannah-Jones argued that Black Americans have been some of the most valiant fighters for American ideals. ‘Despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed,’ she wrote. ‘Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.’ She added: ‘Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different – it might not be a democracy at all.’ ” Her essay would have been much stronger had it not been for the historical errors we’ve identified here in the past.
Now we come to perhaps the stupidest of stupid politician remarks. We have this article, which tells us, “A Tennessee Republican lawmaker wrongly suggested on Tuesday that the infamous three-fifths compromise was an effort by Northern states to curtail the power of Southern slave-owning states with the ultimate aim of ending slavery, when in fact historians say it was the opposite, a dehumanizing concession that had the impact of giving more power to slave-owning states. In remarks on the Tennessee House floor, state Rep. Justin Lafferty claimed that ‘the three-fifths compromise was a direct effort to ensure that Southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country.’ ‘By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slaveholding states and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery,’ he argued. He also suggested that by the Northern states allying with the Southern states, in order to ‘defeat the British,’ America ‘ended up biting a bitter, bitter pill that haunts us today. And we did it to lay the foundation for all this that we enjoy in this country,’ seemingly referring to slavery.” The 3/5 Clause did not have the ultimate aim of ending slavery. That’s rubbish. It was a compromise that facilitated getting the Southern states to ratify the US Constitution. It did limit their political power slightly compared with what they wanted, but it still ended up increasing their political power–just not as much as they wanted.
The article also says, “Lafferty’s speech, which ended with an exaltation of American exceptionalism and a call for legislators to rise above partisanship and ‘start talking to one another,’ earned applause from his fellow House Republicans. Democrats, however, were incredulous over the slavery remarks, and historians with whom CNN spoke said his references were factually incorrect. The three-fifths compromise was an agreement adopted in 1787 between Northern and Southern states that three-fifths, or 60%, of slave populations would be counted to determine representation in the House of Representatives and government finances. The clause was included in the Constitution. According to Jack Rakove, a constitutional historian and Stanford professor, the compromise originated in 1783 and was proposed by James Madison as a formula for apportioning expenses among the states on the basis of population. ‘The 3/5 clause was always seen as a concession to the slave states, not some kind of punishment or restriction. Slaves were not citizens or legal persons in any sense of the term; they would never enjoy political representation in any form,’ Rakove said. Joanne Freeman, a professor of history and early American studies at Yale, said the three-fifths compromise ‘had nothing to do with ending slavery’ but ‘quite the opposite,’ and that it gave the slave-holding South ‘an outsized representation in Congress, and enabled them to dominate the national government for decades.’ It enabled Southern slaveholding-states to count enslaved people who they considered to be ‘property’ — people excluded from their polity — in their count for representation, according to Freeman. ‘It embedded slavery into the Constitution, enabling Southerners to count their ‘property’ for representation — and thereby to dominate the government to preserve slavery and their hold on power. Yes, Southerners wanted to count the entirety of their enslaved population — their ‘property’ — in their count for representation. The fact that they got only 3/5 of that count hardly counts as a blow against slavery,’ she said. Rakove also told CNN that Lafferty’s two claims that abolitionist movements long existed in the Northern states and Europe and that the alliance between the two regions necessary to oppose the British in the war for independence was somehow tied to providing some protection for slavery were incorrect. CNN presidential historian Timothy Naftali, meanwhile, said Lafferty ‘managed to stand history on its head’ with his speech and that the 3/5ths compromise was ‘an accommodation to the institution of slavery, not an attack.’ Lafferty’s speech came during House debate on a state education bill that would withhold funds to school systems that include concepts like critical race theory or systemic racism in their curriculums. As the nation reckons with race, some Republican lawmakers have pushed for critical race theory, which explores how the history of inequality and racism in the US impacts American society today, to be restricted from being taught in schools, arguing that it’s divisive and un-American. Democratic state Rep. Sam McKenzie said it was a ‘sad feeling’ hearing Lafferty’s speech and that there was ‘nothing right about his conclusions.’ ‘And to hear the round of applause just spoke to the lack of knowledge of the people who are elected to write laws for our state,’ McKenzie told CNN’s ‘New Day’ on Wednesday, adding, ‘It’s unfortunate that we don’t, as a legislature, don’t want to teach our kids an accurate and full display of what the history is that made this country a great country but with a lot, a lot of dark, dark days.’ McKenzie said he and Lafferty, whose districts both sit in Knox County, had a ‘very collegial conversation’ about his remarks. ‘We stand on two different sides of his conclusion, but his facts were correct. The South … did compromise at three-fifths, but that’s a horrible thing and it had nothing to do with ending slavery,’ McKenzie said.”
The article concludes, “State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, the chair of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators, said Lafferty’s comments were ‘alarming but the real insult was when the House Republicans clapped for him when he finished his diatribe.’ ‘What I appreciate about his soliloquy is the fact that he gave us his truth, his rationale as to why he was supporting the amendment to force teachers through law to whitewash historical events,’ Parkinson said on Twitter.”
According to this article, “Lafferty added: ‘By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slaveholding states, and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery — well before Abraham Lincoln, well before Civil War. Do we talk about that? I don’t hear that anywhere in this conversation across the country.’ In fact, if he looked closely, he would have seen a version of his claim during a similar debate in Colorado a few weeks ago. In that one, state Rep. Ron Hanks (R) claimed that ‘the Three-Fifths Compromise was an effort by non-slave states to reduce the amount of representation the slave states had. It was not impugning anybody’s humanity.’ Or in 2019, when Oregon state Sen. Dennis Linthicum (R) claimed that ‘the three-fifths vote was actually to eliminate the overwhelming influence the slave states would have in representative government.’ “
The article explains, “The Three-Fifths Compromise, reached during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, is a complex topic. It put states that permitted slavery in the position of arguing that enslaved people should count for more than three-fifths, because they wanted the representation that came with that (albeit without letting enslaved people be free or actually vote for that representation). States that did not permit slavery argued for less, because they feared such representation would make the South too powerful. The compromise eventually landed upon three-fifths. But generally speaking, historians don’t count this as anything amounting to anti-slavery. Indeed, the historian Staughton Lynd wrote that the compromise ‘sanctioned slavery more decidedly than any previous action at a national level‘ because, while not technically codifying slavery into law, it acknowledged a difference between free people and ‘other Persons.’ In addition, while the result of a compromise, historians generally agree it was a good one for the South and the institution of slavery. Historians including Lynd and others have posited that the South got more from the Three-Fifths Compromise, while Northern states that did not permit slavery got a prohibition on slavery in what was then the Northwestern Territory during separate debates. Was it everything the South wanted? Of course not. The South wanted enslaved people to count the same as other people for population purposes, even as it regarded them as property. But just because it wanted more doesn’t mean the compromise wasn’t favorable for it. Indeed, contemporary writings from northern founders suggested they were worried that the Southern states might abandon the process without favorable terms on slavery in the existing states. This is hardly a new claim, particularly in conservative circles. Glenn Beck promoted the idea in 2010, and it has cropped up from time to time over the years. Given the Three-Fifths Compromise is frequently cited as the original constitutional sin when it comes to institutionalized or systemic racism, it would make sense that it’s something opponents of teaching that would seek to call into question. It was quite literally something that was built into our system of government from its founding.”
We see in this article, “It’s a claim that has surfaced and been debunked before, but Republican lawmakers in recent days have given it new voice: the notion that the clause in the Constitution counting slaves as three-fifths of a person actually was a step toward ending slavery. The most recent example came from Tennessee state Rep. Justin Lafferty as part of a debate over whether educators should be restricted in how they teach about systemic racism in American history. His remarks sparked applause from the GOP-controlled House while shocking many Black lawmakers and activists. … It was part of a provision of the original Constitution that dealt with how to allot seats in the House of Representatives and dole out taxes based on population. State populations would be determined by ‘the whole Number of free Persons’ and ‘three fifths of all other Persons.’ The compromise was the product of negotiations at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Because the size of a state’s delegation in the House of Representatives and a state’s electoral votes depended on its population, Southern states pushed for counting slaves fully, historian Gordon Wood of Brown University wrote in an email. ‘The Northern states wanted the slaves not counted at all,’ Wood said. But for taxation, the roles were reversed, says Kevin R.C. Gutzman, a history professor at Western Connecticut State University. The compromise helped build support for ratification of the Constitution in 1789. Southerners might never have supported a document that gave no weight to slave populations. Northerners might have opposed ratification if slaves were fully counted for representation.”
The article also explains, “Historians widely consider that counting slaves at all for representation significantly enhanced Southern political power. Perhaps the most striking example was the presidential election of 1800. ‘Without the Three-Fifths Compromise, John Adams wins the election of 1800 against Thomas Jefferson,’ [Yale University Constitutional Law Professor Akhil Reed] Amar says, because of the extra electoral votes Southern states held based on their slave populations. Eight of the first nine presidential elections were won by slave-owning Virginians, says Amar, who deals with the topic in his new book, ‘The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840.’ After the 1800 election, when the nation adopted a constitutional amendment to fix problems with the Electoral College, New Englanders who proposed getting rid of the three-fifths language were ignored, according to Amar. Only with the adoption of post-Civil War amendments that abolished slavery and extended political rights to Black Americans did the Three-Fifths Compromise end. The taxation that would have been a financial blow to slaveowners never happened. Says Gutzman: ‘There never was a direct tax under the U.S. Constitution that needed to be apportioned by population.’ “
Finally, lest you think history wars are uniquely American, we have this article from Australia looking at controversies in teaching history in that country. ” ‘We can’t prepare the kids for 1962, we’ve got to prepare them for 30, 40, 50 years down the track because the world is going to be different,’ said Mark Rose, chair of curriculum authority ACARA’s Indigenous advisory committee. ‘What we’re doing is really exposing kids to the reality of what is Australia: it is multicultural; it is Indigenous; it is located with Asia all around us and it has a rich colonial history in which Aboriginal people have participated.’ Professor Rose, a Deakin University Pro-Vice Chancellor who is also of Gunditjmara heritage, led a 12-month review that found the current curriculum was outdated and did not reflect Australia’s First Nations Peoples’ calls for truth-telling. ‘Our people have claimed that we’ve been invisible and mute in the curriculum for a very long time and we’re just turning up the amplifier,’ he said. Ms Baron, who is also principal of Lakeland Senior High School in Western Australia, said the suggested changes to history content in the draft curriculum were relatively minor, despite the intense interest they had generated. ‘There’s been some tweaking but there hasn’t been massive change. No one will look at it and go, ‘Oh my God my whole program has to get thrown out the window’.’ For example, year 7 students would study one history strand on ancient Indigenous society and one on an ancient Mediterranean society, instead of two strands on ancient Mediterranean society. ‘Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, they’re all great but this is something I think Australian kids should know,’ Ms Baron said. ‘There was an ancient culture here.’ Jeremy Stowe-Lindner is principal of Bialik College in Hawthorn, an independent school that uses both the Australian and Victorian curriculums. Also a history teacher, he said it was ultimately teachers and not the curriculum that would most influence the tone and direction of content in Australian classrooms. ‘Educators are not slaves to a document, they are Masters-qualified professionals who put thought into what and how things are delivered,’ he said. Steven Kolber, a humanities teacher at Brunswick Secondary College, said in any teaching from the curriculum – on First Nations history or any other historical subject – students were best served by an inquiry approach, not through imparting facts or assertions. ‘You might have a question: was [European arrival] an invasion or was it a settlement? And then you’re exploring that as an inquiry, rather than just teaching it as a closed loop.’ “
We’ve argued about teaching history for about as long as we’ve been a country, and it’s a safe bet people have been arguing about teaching history for about as long as history has been taught. What we usually see is history being used as part of culture wars to gain or maintain political power. It’s a shame.
Student of the American Civil War 
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