Creative Commons
James Loewen posing with a copy of "Lies My Teacher Told Me"
In my many decades of teaching, writing, and making public presentations across the United States and the world, I have often paid tribute to the towering intellectual figures who have profoundly influenced my own journey. Among the very many, a few stand out because of their enduring value to my personal and professional life.
Loewen understood well what systemic racism was all about. This was at the core of his writing, teaching, and public life.
C. Wright Mills provided me with a sharp view of the “sociological imagination,” as well as a profound critique of U.S. politics and capitalism. Herbert Marcuse gave me a philosophical foundation for my critical theory, as well as a deeper critique of capitalism and its predatory manipulation of consumerism. Derrick Bell taught me the magnificent critical race theory that I have used as a teacher of classes on racism and the law. And Albert Boime bestowed on me a comprehensive social history of art that has been fundamental to my intellectual work.
James Loewen, who died on August 19, 2021, is among this group. His books are modern-day classics that I have used in classes for thousands of students over the years. Loewen was also a tremendously decent and friendly human being—an attribute worthy of notice in an increasingly indifferent and even hostile world.
Loewen, born and raised in Decatur, Illinois, was a sociologist and historian. He taught initially at the historically Black institution Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Later, he taught at the University of Vermont, where he focussed substantially on racism in its many forms. His books received numerous awards and he was widely acclaimed for his groundbreaking work. But he is best known for Lies My Teacher Told Me, a scathing critique of the teaching of history in the U.S. educational system. Loewen sized up the twelve U.S. history textbooks used in high schools as “an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation.”
In the book, he used the example of Helen Keller. “Over the past ten years,” he wrote, “I have asked dozens of college students who Helen Keller was and what she did. They all knew that she was blind and deaf and was assisted by her teacher, Anne Sullivan. But just about no one knew she was a radical socialist in her adult life, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and outspoken against class oppression in the United States.
That experience mirrors my own at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I have used Lies My Teacher Told Me to do a brief exercise in my history of social protest class. I identify some major U.S. agitators and ask my students if they have ever heard of them. Examples include Emma Goldman, Joe Hill, Paul Robeson, Mother Jones, Stokely Carmichael, Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Dolores Huerta, among many others.
The results have been strikingly similar each time. Hardly anyone in a class of 150 can identify all of these figures. Most have no clue.
This lack of knowledge about the United States’ radical past severely hinders today’s students by failing to inform them of the long historical tradition of resistance to injustice, racism, homophobia, sexism, and capitalism itself.
Loewen also wrote the groundbreaking book Sundown Towns, in which he showed how U.S. racism was more pervasive, more systemic, more geographically widespread, and therefore more horrific than most people, even most progressives, could comprehend. In his Preface to the 2018 edition, he makes the point directly: “For decades, sundown towns have kept out African Americans. Some excluded other groups such as Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Jews, even Catholics and Mormons.”
This book chronicled the existence of second generation “sundown towns”—a term for the grotesque system that kept far too many people out of thousands of U.S. cities and communities. This was accomplished initially by law (signs explicitly banning people of color from staying in white communities past sundown) and, later, in more subtle ways such as real estate practices and local custom.
Sundown Towns compels its readers to contemplate how housing discrimination persists, despite legal advances like the 1948 U.S. Supreme court ruling in Shelly v. Kramer that restrictive racial covenants could not be enforced.
Loewen understood well what systemic racism was all about. This was at the core of his writing, teaching, and public life. He would have been horrified at the current assault on critical race theory that is being pushed by the same people who are seeking to curtail voting rights and return to Trumpist repression.
Whether recognized or not, this is part of the final rage against the changing demographics of the United States. Critical race theory is an analytic model designed to help students and scholars work toward a more humane, just, and non-racist social order. His life would be honored by our efforts to seek the same objectives.
At the end of Sundown Towns, Loewen expressed his personal view eloquently: “Integrated towns and suburbs are a necessary first step to integrated hearts and minds. Until we solve the problem of sundown neighborhoods and towns, we do not have a chance of solving America’s race problem.”