The movement to ban concepts and ideas in schools is Déjà vu for me. For years Republicans have been trying to ban from classrooms ideas that make them think or don’t fit with their narrow meaning of life. In the 1970s I was a writer for a National Science Foundation science curriculum project at Florida State University. In short, during the summers of ‘74 & ‘75 20 writers met in Lexington and Tallahassee to develop science texts. The curriculum project produced a series of texts for teaching high school science. A congressional representative from Arizona objected to the content of the curriculum. He said some of the topics made him feel uncomfortable. Family values were being attacked, according to him. The project could no longer conduct teacher training workshops on the curriculum. Finally, the project soon disappeared.
In the 1980s, school boards, state departments of education and right-wing foundations worked endlessly. They were trying to sneak “creation science” and “intelligent design” into the high school science curriculum. Some school boards insisted that biology teachers give “equal” time to these fantasy theories and to evolution. Specifically, the then Georgia state superintendent of education tried to remove the word evolution from the state science curriculum. Creation science and intelligent design are not scientific theories. People on the right insisted these pet ideas be given equal time with evolution, the central idea in biology.
Now, we are in period when truth has new meaning in our society. Truth to right-wingers is fake news. Critical race theory is an honest investigation into the “intersection of race and law.” There is a movement to denigrate CRT. As a result, it has taken hold across the country, especially in school board meetings and legislative bodies. This is the latest of Republican attempts to control thinking and restrict what teachers know how to do to help students become inquirers of the world.
In recent years, there have been several documents and documentaries published that present a past that a lot of people want to forget or change. These people think history is set in stone. For example, in 1619, a year before Pilgrims dropped anchor in Plymouth, enslaved African people arrived on the shores of Jamestown on the ship White Lion. Urged by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an American investigative journalist, [1] the New York Times has documented this in its 1619 Project[2] and in the new origins story in Hannah-Jones’s book of the same name.[3] The project aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding it with the beginning of American slavery and exploring the consequences and contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story of America.
Donald Trump retaliated against the 1619 Project by promoting a “patriotic education” curriculum titled The 1776 Project.[4] According to many historians, Trump’s 1776 Commission “warps the history of racism and slavery.”[5] In fact, Trump had the audacity to release the report on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2021, just a few days before he was exiled to Florida. The 1776 Project rejects the claim that the true founding of America was in 1619. It remains steadfast that America was founded by the British who landed near Cape Cod.
Irking Republicans
The 1619 Project has irked Republicans. Around the country, many school districts banned the teaching of the project and related ideas. Many state legislatures are writing new bills to ban the teaching of not only the 1619 Project but Critical Race Theory,
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from the New York Times Magazine that that started in 2019, 400 years after the beginning of American slavery. The project was developed to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of America’s national narrative.[6]
Texas, and some other states, have passed critical race theory bills. Critical race theory (CRT), which started in law, spread to many other areas, such as political science, ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and philosophy, but especially scholarship in education.[7] As a science educator for more than forty years, which spanned the period of the civil rights and CRT movements, the present hysterics about critical race theory is an abomination to the crucial role that public education plays in teaching racial justice.
Although CRT is not taught as a course in K–12 schooling, teachers of all subject areas have incorporated issues that are central to CRT theorists. In my own writing, I have explored tracking, high-stakes testing, standardizing curriculum, multicultural education, and charter schools.[8] Science educators have embodied CRT into a framework called culturally responsive teaching (also CRT).[9] The curriculum of American public schools emphasizes teaching science, mathematics, social studies, or language arts, which builds bridges from school to communities.
Critical Race Theory
Critical race theory is not a new idea. The person that many consider the “father of CRT” is Derrick Bell (1930–2011).[10] Bell was an American lawyer, professor at Harvard University, and civil rights activist. As a scholar he wrote foundational papers and books about critical race theory. He was involved in several desegregation lawsuits that led to his formulation of CRT. One of the first cases was Hudson v. Leake County School Board (1963). The white school board voted to close the Harmony school, a Black school in the middle of Leake County, Mississippi. The school was built by Black citizens in the 1920s and was funded by the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who funded five thousand Black schools in the South.
In the case of the Harmony school, Winson Hudson (1916–2004), founder and vice president of the local NAACP, met with Derrick Bell, who was an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, New York City.[11] Hudson sought Bell’s assistance to help her and other Black citizens of Harmony sue the school board. The case led to the reopening and desegregation of Harmony school. However, Bell and Hudson began to question whether they did the right thing in forcing integration. In the South, the integration of schools led to the establishment of private “segregation academies” and white flight, leaving the schools essentially segregated.[12]
Bell realized that decisions in civil rights cases were of limited value. He concluded that racism is so deeply rooted in American society and its structures that it has been able to reassert itself after limited successes in court cases. Bell began to write and argue that racism is permanent. Accordingly, his ideas became the foundation for the critical race theory that emerged in the 1980s.[13]
CRT is based on the thinking and writing of scholars from all cultures, historical periods stretching back to the early nineteenth century, and the present work of thousands of CRT scholars at universities around the world. Diane Ravitch provides an early example of critical race theory when she quoted from a Frederick Douglass speech that was given on July 4, 1852.[14][KHG1]
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, in their important work about Critical Race Theory, insist that CRT “tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it. They believe that CRT can transform society for the better.[15] [KHG2]
It’s Like Banning Evolution in Schools
There is Republican movement amongst state legislatures and school boards to outlaw critical race theory. Republicans and conservative activists use CRT as a catch phrase for any examination of systemic racism. These critics of CRT include many ideas that have penetrated public education such as social justice as well as culturally responsive and critical thinking. They are disingenuous. A few years ago, they used the catch phrase “critical thinking and academic freedom” to disguise the intent of “intelligent design” being part of the science curriculum. Creationism and intelligent design made stealth appearances in some state science classrooms.[16]
Critical race theory rattled school board members and parents who think their children will be exposed to ideas about race and social justice. They complain that teaching about CRT will make white kids feel bad if they discuss slavery, segregation, and the KKK. This is simply deceitful. Most middle and high school students are quite able and interested in reading about and discussing cultural issues. Some of the literature that high school students read focuses on questions about immigration, poverty, environmental justice, and racial discrimination. As a science educator, I wrote books from 1970s that included the role of women in science, and how Black, Asian, and Hispanic/Latino science was integral to knowing science.[17].
Marisa Lati wrote in her Washington Post article that the movement to ban CRT from K–12 schools and colleges is an attempt in assuring that the history of many people of color are not taught in schools. She added that to ban CRT erases the legacy of discrimination and lived experiences of Black, Brown, and Native people.[18]
In a book offering a new narrative of the African role in creating the Americas, Christina Proenza-Cole pushes the history of Afro Americans back into the 1500s.[19] Indeed, she shows that there is only an illusion distinguishing American history from African American history. Like Hannah-Jones, Proenza-Cole states that Africans and their descendants preceded the English in settling what would become the United States. Indeed, in Georgia, 80 years before Jamestown, a settlement of Maroons, descendants of Africans in the Americas, established the first settlement in the state where I now live. She also points out that Africans outnumbered Europeans four to one until 1820. She also add that Africans were on every European exploratory and military campaign from “Canada to Chile.”[20]
The current narrative about CRT is steeped in ignorance of American history, and contemporary prejudices. Critical race theory is not taught in the public schools, but racial justice is.
*Partially Excerpted from. Jack Hassard, The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Damage to American Democracy, Human Rights, Science, and Public Health. Marietta: Northington-Hearn Publishing (forthcoming, Spring, 2022).
References
[1] It’s worth noting that her alma mater, the University of North Carolina offered her a professorship in 2021, but without tenure. After weeks of protest by faculty and students, the UNC trustees voted to offer her tenure. Hannah-Jones turned the job down.
[2] (2019, August 14). The 1619 Project, New York Times, August 14, 2019.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.
[3] Nikole Hannah-Jones; Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein, editors, The 1619 project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021).
[4] Derrick Clifton, “How the Trump Administration;s ‘1776 report’ Warps the History of Racism and Slavery,” NBCNews.com, January 20, 2021, retrieved November 19, 2021. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/how-trump-administration-s-1776-report-warps-history-racism-slavery-n1254926
[5] Clifton, “Trump Administration’s ‘1771 Report.’”
[6] The 1619 Project, The New York Times.
[7] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
[8] Jack Hassard, Science Education ebook series, Kindle edition.
[9] A. H. Mackenzie, A. H. “Why Culturally Relevant Science Teaching is Vital in Our Classrooms,” The Science Teacher, 89 2 (2021), 6–8.
[10] Jelani Cobb, “The Man behind Critical Race Theory, The New Yorker, September 10, 2021, retrieved November 13, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory.
[11] Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
[12] Cobb, “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory.”
[13] Cobb, “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory.”
[14] Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings,Philip S. Foner, editor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 188–206. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/c/1852%20Douglass%20July%204.pdf
[15] Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 10.
[16] Jack Hassard, “Creationism and Intelligent Design Make Stealth Appearances in Louisiana and Tennessee Science Classrooms,” Jackhassard.org, April 23, 2021, retrieved November 18, 2021, https://jackhassard.org/creationism-intelligent-design-stealth-appearances-louisiana-tennessee-science-classrooms/.
[17] Joseph Abruscatoand Jack Hassard, The Whole Cosmos of Science Activities for Kids of All Ages, 2nd edition (Menlo Park: Good Year Books, 1977).
[18] Marisa Iati “What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Do Republicans Want to Ban It in Schools?” The Washington Post, July 12, 2021, retrieved November 14, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/29/critical-race-theory-bans-schools/.
[19] Christina Proenza-Coles, American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World. (Montgomery, NewWorld Books.
[20] Ibid, p. ix.
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