Lindsey West
Lindsey West, a Minneapolis-based middle school teacher, often starts classroom discussions on race with questions rather than answers. What do her students really know, she wonders, about the history of racism in the United States, beyond platitudes that come to them through one-off events such as Black History Month?
West says that by age ten, many of her students have absorbed the idea that it is impolite to mention race. But West, who is Black, says she doesn’t have that option: “The very world I live in is not colorblind.”
And so she puts together resources and curriculum materials that help her students understand the ways that race impacts every aspect of U.S. society. She wants them to know it is “OK to ask and to wonder” about racism and racial identity.
Having an awareness of the racist underpinnings of U.S. society can help education policy experts understand why students of color are disproportionately suspended or pushed out of school.
West, who has taught fifth-graders in the Minneapolis Public Schools for the past nine years, will typically begin a social studies unit with a check-in of what students already know. Many are familiar with the history of slavery in the United States and its connection to the Civil War. They are also usually aware of some of the key figures of the civil rights movement, people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
She then prompts her students to think about why the civil rights movement was necessary after the Civil War ended slavery. “What happened in between?” she asks them.
Or, she might ask, why did Jackie Robinson have to integrate baseball if all Americans were, by that time, equal citizens?
West will guide her students through an age-appropriate poem, article, or piece of historical fiction, such as Christopher Paul Curtis’s novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, which examines life in Alabama during a pivotal time in the push for civil rights. It “provides a safe landing for most students,” West says, by allowing them to discuss characters and situations that are a step removed from their own lives.
West’s approach to teaching about race is grounded in building relationships with her students by helping them think critically about their world and about their own ideas. Her goal is to put students’ critical thinking skills into action, perhaps through a service project that raises money for people in need in their own communities. “This is an antidote to them feeling helpless,” she says.
What goes on in West’s classroom is a far cry from the indoctrination fears around race and public education being fanned by rightwing activists such as Christopher Rufo.
Rufo is a journalist-turned-failed-political candidate who once produced a conservative-funded documentary for PBS on poverty in the United States. These days, he has been credited with taking the relatively obscure academic approach known as critical race theory and turning it into the latest weapon in this country’s politically charged culture war.
In July 2020, a disgruntled Seattle city employee reportedly sent Rufo a trove of documents leaked from a workplace training session on anti-racism and implicit bias. While combing through materials connected to the training, Rufo stumbled upon the term “critical race theory.”
Rufo believed he’d struck gold, or at least “political kindling,” as writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells put it in a profile of Rufo in The New Yorker.
Before long, Rufo was all over Fox News, telling host Tucker Carlson in September 2020 that critical race theory had become the “default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.” It is being used, he alleged, to indoctrinate everyone into believing the United States is a “fundamentally white supremacist country.”
Rufo’s declaration took place just two months before the 2020 presidential election, when Donald Trump was doing his best to stoke white rage. Smelling blood in the water, rightwing provocateurs followed Rufo’s lead and pounced on the term “critical race theory.” Before long, it had become a constant target for their furor, alongside cancel culture and the perceived pressure to be “woke.”
Rufo soon had the ear of Trump, who in September 2020 signed an executive order banning the teaching of critical race theory in diversity-training sessions put on by federal agencies. (President Joe Biden promptly overturned this ban upon taking office in January.)
It didn’t take long for this new Red Scare to find its way into legislation targeting public schools and the teachers who work in them. As of late June, nearly two dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures have pushed bills designed to root out any whiff of critical race theory—or, more accurately, any curriculums that could be used to directly address racism or other forms of oppression.
Earlier this year, a Rhode Island state representative named Patricia Morgan proposed a bill that would forbid K-12 students from being taught that “the state of Rhode Island or the United States of America is fundamentally racist or sexist.”
But this represents a profound, if not intentional, misunderstanding of what critical race theory is and how it applies to public education, says education policy scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings.
Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spoke recently with reporter Audie Cornish on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. When asked how critical race theory might be used in the classroom, if at all, Ladson-Billings said she didn’t know, citing its origins as a graduate school–level construct. But she said it does make sense to use whatever tools are available to understand how racial injustice impacts schools.
Having an awareness of the racist underpinnings of U.S. society can help education policy experts understand why students of color are disproportionately suspended or pushed out of school, Ladson-Billings said.
Courtney Antone just wrapped up her second year as an English teacher at Minneapolis’s South High School, a 1970s-era concrete monolith that sits blocks from where George Floyd was murdered.
Antone’s students are not empty buckets, ready to fill with lectures on how racism and white privilege have shaped the United States, she says. Instead, many are living with the impact of these destructive systems every day.
South High School is very diverse, with nearly equal amounts of white and Black students, along with smaller percentages of students from other racial demographic backgrounds. Just over half of the 1,600 students who attend the school qualify for free or reduced lunch, according to federal criteria.
“They already come to school with so much,” says Antone, who sees her role as that of a guide to help students “identify what they are thinking about something and then help them articulate it.”
Like West, who works with middle school students, Antone begins her discussions on race with an inquiry-based framework.
“I pose questions, students pose questions, and then we come up with questions we want to answer together,” she says. The concept of abolition figured into their recent unit on police reform, and students were required to write an essay about it at the end of the school year. Antone says students came up with perspectives—including one essay that discussed police abolition through the lens of sexual violence—that surprised her.
“This leads to a richer classroom,” she argues.
Antone is well versed in critical race theory, thanks to her graduate school education, but says that, as a white teacher, she also has obvious blind spots.
The fear of talking about race “hurts us,” Antone says. “We don’t have the language or the vocabulary to do it.” While many students expressed a desire to discuss what happened to George Floyd, some students of color were triggered by it.
“Some moments were awful,” she acknowledges, saying that she uses the work of Minneapolis-based therapist Resmaa Menakem to help students understand the concept of racialized trauma and the way it might live on in our bodies.
Menakem wrote a book called My Grandmother’s Hands, based on his family’s own experiences. He argues that efforts to deal with racism must begin with our bodies, where trauma lingers for both people of color and white people.
On June 18, the conservative news site RealClearPolitics published an opinion piece by Donald Trump fanning the flames of white fear by invoking “the ridiculous leftwing dogma known as ‘critical race theory.’ ” The former President urged parents to rise up to “ensure that students are receiving a patriotic, pro-American education—not being taught that the United States is an evil nation.”
That’s not what’s being taught in U.S. schools. Trump might want to pop into a classroom and see for himself.