Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Other Scholars Respond as Ron DeSantis Whitewashs African American Studies

In a powerful NY Times column, the director of the Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. places Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at the center the resurgent welling up of racism in America.

Dr. Gates explains that DeSantis’s intervention in the adoption of a College Board AP Curriculum in African American Studies, “falls squarely in line with a long tradition of bitter, politically suspect battles over the interpretation of three seminal periods in the history of American racial relations:  the Civil War;  the 12 years following the war, known as Reconstruction;  and Reconstruction’s brutal rollback, characterized by its adherents as the former Confederacy’s ‘Redemption,’ which saw the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, the reimposition of white supremacy and their justification through a masterfully executed propaganda effort.”

DeSantis’s attempts to eliminate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from Florida’s colleges and universities and his efforts to intimidate the College Board to revise its proposed Advanced Placement class in African American Studies according to the racist demands made by himself and his staff are blatant examples of DeSantis’s appeal to white supremacy as a political strategy.

It is telling that after negotiations with DeSantis’s staff, the College Board removed the word “systemic” as a descriptor for racism in America. The Washington Post’s Nick Anderson explains what happened to the word “systemic” as the College Board developed its new curriculum for an AP African American Studies class: “The College Board, which oversees the AP program denies that it diluted the African American studies course in response to complaints from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) or his allies. But a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how ‘systemic’ and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places. ‘All of those terms were going to be challenging,’ said Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development.”

To say that racism is systemic is a way to point out that racism is more serious and more pervasively detrimental than mere personal prejudice. For example, in The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein documents a history of systemic housing discrimination—insurance redlining and the denial of FHA loans, for example—policies which have historically reduced housing opportunity for African American families. And constitutional scholar and education historian Derek Black points out that school funding is systemically unequal: “Achievement, segregation, and funding data all indicate that poor and minority students are receiving vastly unequal educational opportunities. For instance, predominantly minority schools receive about $2,000 less per student than predominantly white schools.”

Anderson reports: “The February 2022 version (of the College Board’s proposed curriculum) declared that students should learn how African American communities combat effects of ‘systemic marginalization.’ An April update paired ‘systemic’ with discrimination, oppression, inequality, disempowerment and racism. A December version said it was essential to know links between Black Panther activism and ‘systemic inequality that disproportionately affected African Americans.’ Then the word vanished. ‘Systemic,’ a crucial term for many scholars and civil rights advocates, appears nowhere in the official version released Feb. 1. This late deletion and others reflect the extraordinary political friction that often shadows efforts in the nation’s schools to teach about history, culture, and race.”

In his column last week, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. compares Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s efforts to whitewash history to the efforts of Mildred Lewis Rutherford, “a descendant of a long line of slave owners.” Rutherford published a pamphlet in 1920, “A Measuring Rod to Test Textbooks, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges, and Libraries,” to help educators ban any books “which do not accord full justice to the South.” She wanted students to learn that slavery itself “was an education that taught the negro self-control, obedience, and perseverance.”

Dr. Gates concludes: “Is it fair to see Governor DeSantis’s attempts to police the contents of the College Board’s AP curriculum in African American Studies in classrooms in Florida solely as little more than a contemporary version of Mildred Rutherford’s Lost Cause textbook campaign? No. But the governor would do well to consider the company that he is keeping… While most certainly not embracing her cause, Mr. DeSantis is complicitous in perpetuating her agenda.”

Dr. Gates is not the only scholar who has expressed outrage and concern about Governor DeSantis’s apparent determination to omit part of our history from his state’s public schools. Last week, in a letter to David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board, more than 1000 faculty “who teach, write, research and lead in the areas of African American and Black Studies” protested the changes made during this year to the new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies.  Here is some of what these academics wrote:

“The College Board has now acknowledged that the Florida Department of Education… sought to influence the course not because of scholarly concerns or pedagogical standards but because that body was acting as a ‘political apparatus.’ The College Board’s admission that it removed the mention of concepts like ‘systemic marginalization’ and ‘intersectionality’ because they had become ‘politicized’ only serves to reward that same political apparatus… African American Studies is the study of the persistence of anti-Blackness and the connections between historical and contemporary efforts to resist structural racism… Finally, the censorship of foundational content was not limited to course concepts, themes and scholars alone. Course goals and learning outcomes were also revised to suggest that the course was not intended for students to assess ‘real world problems,’ ‘systemic marginalization,’ or to evaluate the ‘past, present, and future implications’ of major social movements…”

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How Is Far-Right Propaganda about Critical Race Theory Undermining Society and Our Children’s Education?

The news is flooded with hysteria about something called “critical race theory.” I am being told that the anti-bias and anti-racism programs I participated in at work were terrifying experiences that threatened who I am and undermined my patriotism—even though I don’t remember those workshops as threatening my identity at all. Legislatures across the country are passing laws to punish educators who teach honestly about slavery, the abuses of Jim Crow, and boarding schools that tried to force American Indian children to deny their culture. This post will address three simple and related questions: What did the term “critical race theory” mean in the past? What is it that fear-mongering extremists have folded together to change the original meaning of “critical race theory” into something supposedly terrifying? How is today’s hysteria about critical race theory undermining our children’s education?

What did “critical race theory” used to mean before extremists manipulated it this year in the right-wing press? 

Many people have thought about racism basically as personal bias or prejudice. But critical race theory is an academic concept that addresses much more systemic institutional and structural racism. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss explains: “Critical race theory is a decades-old academic framework that holds that racism is systemic, embedded in government policies and laws that are evident in any serious examination of American history. Critics say that racism is the work of individual bad actors, and, they say, teachers are improperly injecting race in the classroom.”

National Education Policy Center Fellow Shaun Harper at the University of Southern California provides a more technical definition of “critical race theory”: “Individual actions (both intentional and unconscious) that engender marginalization and inflict varying degrees of harm on minoritized persons; structures that determine and cyclically remanufacture racial inequity; and institutional norms that sustain white privilege and permit the ongoing subordination of minoritized persons.”

In  Education Week, Janel George adds: “Like many academic theories, Critical Race Theory is complex and constantly evolving. However, it can be characterized by a few tenets which challenge many traditional understandings of race and racial inequality. The Human Genome Project found that humans share 99.9 percent of the same genetic makeup, despite our different appearances. Critical race theory recognizes that our ideas of racial difference—which run counter to this scientific evidence—have been socially constructed. It acknowledges how that social construction of race has shaped America and how systems and institutions can do the bulk of replicating racial inequality.”

Emeritus education professor at the University of Wisconsin, former president of the American Educational Research Association, and author of the widely respected textbook, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, Gloria Ladson-Billings, responds to the current hysteria by emphasizing the importance of addressing institutional racism that affects children at school: “Curricula that largely exclude the history and lived experiences of Americans of color are the norm. Deficit-oriented instruction often characterizes students of color as failures if a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for them. Standardized-test scores from assessments detached from what students learn in the classroom are widely used to confirm narratives about the ineducability of children of color.”

Here are just two examples of structural racism.  In his book, The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein traces government policies and laws that have perpetuated racially segregated housing—zoning for segregation, the choice of sites for public housing, legally protected mortgage and insurance redlining, and racial bias in the approval of Veterans Administration and FHA loans. In Schoolhouse Burning, Derek Black examines the explicit efforts of the post-Reconstruction state legislatures across the former Confederacy to segregate and underfund schools for Black children.  Later he describes the decades of legal work by the NAACP’s Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall to undo structural school segregation by race. What then followed after Brown v. Board of Education were efforts to stop school integration in court cases like Milliken v. Bradley that blocked school busing across suburban jurisdictional boundaries.

How Have Extremists Transformed and Politicized the Meaning of “Critical Race Theory”?

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey identify Christopher Rufo, a 36-year-old documentary filmmaker and media opportunist from Seattle: “Rufo has played a key role in the national debate, defining diversity trainings and other programs as critical race theory, putting out examples that legislators and others then cite…. He continues to appear regularly on Fox News to discuss the issue and often offers strategic advice over how to win the political fight. In March, he wrote on Twitter that his goal was to conflate any number of topics into a new bucket called critical race theory. ‘We have successfully frozen their brand—critical race theory—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.'”

The New Yorker‘s Benjamin Wallace-Wells describes Rufo’s strategy to redefine critical race theory:  “He thought that the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon.”  Wallace-Wells quotes Rufo: “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’  Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.”

Finally NBC News has identified No Right Turn in Education, a radical-right parents group whose mission is to undermine honest teaching about American history at school: “When the Gladwyne Elementary School in the suburbs of Philadelphia decided to teach students about the concepts of racism, privilege and justice during the last week of classes, Elana Yaron Fishbein, a mother of two students in the school, sprang into action. Fishbein, a former social worker, sent a letter to the superintendent calling the lessons a ‘plan to indoctrinate the children into the ‘woke’ culture’  She said the superintendent never responded, though the district later said that the lesson plans were age-appropriate and did not shame students and that parents were allowed to opt out. Fishbein said other white parents in the district attacked her on Facebook when she shared the letter. So Fishbein moved her children to private school and started a group to advocate against anti-racist teaching. She called it No Left Turn in Education… Fishbein’s endeavor received a significant boost in September, when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show. By the next day, No Left Turn‘s Facebook page had shot up from fewer than 200 followers to over 30,000. The group now has 30 chapters in 23 states, a rapid expansion Fishbein credits to Carlson’s show.”

How Have America’s Educators Been Responding to the Current Hysteria?

The editors of Rethinking Schools magazine worry about the rash of laws coming from far-right state legislatures, laws intended to prevent teaching about today’s injustices and their history beginning in slavery and threading through American history: “Lawmakers in a growing number of states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the past and present… To put it another way, in 2021, when children look around at the vast inequalities apparent in every corner of their daily lives—where the wealth of a typical white family is 10 times that of a typical Black family, where a Black person is three times as likely to die in childbirth as a white person, and where African Americans are five times as likely to be in prison as their white counterparts—and ask, ‘Why? Why is it like this?’ that child’s teacher would be prohibited from answering their student’s earnest and urgent question. These laws peddle in bait-and-switch tactics, using the language of anti-discrimination to mask their perpetuation of a discriminatory and unjust status quo… By banning educators from teaching about these realities, lawmakers seek to deny young people the right to understand—and so effectively act upon—the world they’ve been bequeathed.”

David Blight, the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, looks for hard work to focus on teaching the truth without blaming: “Once again, Americans find themselves at war over their history—what it is, who owns it, how it should be interpreted and taught… History wars follow patterns. The subjects at their core usually carry visceral meaning for large swaths of the public. The disputes quickly invoke curricula, creeping into school boards and state legislatures with increasing stakes… History is politics by other means, and we who care about it have to fight this war better and more strategically ourselves… We need to teach the history of slavery and racism every day, but not through a forest of white guilt or by thrusting the idea of ‘white privilege’ onto working-class people who have very little privilege. Instead, we need to tell more precise stories, stories that do not feed right-wing conspiracists a language that they are waiting to seize, remix and inject back into the body politic as a poison… Historians must write and speak up in the clearest language, in prose our grandmothers can read. We need history that can get us marching but also render us awed by how much there is to learn. Slavery, as personal experience and national trial, is a harrowing human tragedy, and like all great tragedies it leaves us chastened by knowledge, not locked within sin or redemption alone.”

This post intentionally quotes current coverage of this issue from several sources and perspectives.  I hope you will follow the links and read some of the source material.