Growing up, I attended a small, private Catholic school in Camden, New Jersey. Although the school was different from the local public schools, what I did find to be similar was what was taught about history. Private school kids and public school kids always compared their experiences and the things they learned. I realized quickly that the history I learned wasn’t different from what my public school friends were learning.
The truth is that white children don’t suffer from attempts to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive school environments for BIPOC children.
We were taught that George Washington was heroic, that Abraham Lincoln was the ultimate leader, and that the U.S. Constitution was the most visionary document in the history of the modern world. We learned that Black history started with enslavement and ended with Martin Luther King Jr.
What we didn’t learn was that the United States was a white settler colonial project; that Washington enslaved African people, bringing them back and forth from Virginia to Pennsylvania to not compromise their bondage; or that Lincoln attempted to have Black people emigrate to other countries like Panama, which was an abject disaster.
We didn’t learn about the resistance of the enslaved. We didn’t learn about the Haitian Revolution. We didn’t learn about the bonds forged between Black revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States with those in Latin America and the Caribbean.
I eventually learned these things, but had I learned them as a kid, I imagine that my self image as a Black kid would have been different than it was. I don’t think that white kids would have fared worse for my sense of self being better for having learned the truth.
But sadly, some white adults seem to think so.
This past October, Mary Beeman, the campaign manager for a Republican school board candidate in Connecticut, opined that “helping kids of color to feel they belong has a negative effect on white, Christian, or conservative kids.” Beeman’s comments were made during a virtual forum on the subject of critical race theory, or CRT.
Beeman later admitted her statement was “poorly worded,” but claimed it had been taken “out of context.” What she actually meant to express, according to her reworded statement, was that children with “Judeo-Christian values” are being “bullied into submission” by liberal teachers and classmates.
Following the national conversation about racial injustice prompted by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, conservative and mainly white parents and politicians (like Beeman) are on a crusade to discredit the concepts of systemic racism and white supremacy.
They are opposing the use of teaching tools like the 1619 Project and the supposedly malicious influence of CRT. This has led to hostile school board meetings as well as a slate of state-level laws designed to make it so the only history that gets taught is the kind that makes white people comfortable.
For example, conservative politicians have worked feverishly to encourage audits of school libraries to ban books deemed a threat to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. A Texas lawmaker created a list of 850 books, the majority of which are centered around people of color and LGBTQ+ identities, to be banned in the state of Texas because they may make white students uneasy. One of those banned books is An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz, which I use to teach my Advanced Placement history students.
If I were teaching in Texas, I might be fired for using that text. However, I teach in New Jersey, whose public schools are required to include instruction on the “accomplishments and contributions” of Black Americans to U.S. society. Therefore, I can still use Ortiz’s book, at least for now.
I can also teach from Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen. It details how the British court case Somerset v. Stewart, which held that chattel slavery was not supported by British Common Law, led to the forging of a partnership between the Northern and Southern states to revolt against the British, so that slavery could continue.
I shared this with my teacher colleagues during a professional development workshop I led in November 2021. One teacher said she was flabbergasted to have never learned this history, and was eager to learn more. This teacher happened to be white, yet I doubt that learning it when she was in school would have had any sort of negative impact. Not learning it until she was an adult is what upset her.
The truth is that white children don’t suffer from attempts to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive school environments for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) children. On the contrary, children of color, particularly Black children, suffer when anti-racism isn’t made a priority by majority white educators.
The evidence bears this out.
According to the Civil Rights Data Collection, Black, Indigenous, and other children of color are harassed and bullied because of their race and ethnicity more often than white children are.
This past September, a U.S. Justice Department investigation into a Utah school district found “serious and widespread racial harassment” of Black and Asian American students and a persistent failure by school officials to respond.
According to the probe, Black children were called racial slurs by students and faculty, denied the ability to create student groups, and disciplined more often and more harshly compared to white students for similar behavior. Asian American students were also called racial slurs and were told to “Go back to China.”
The Utah district settled with the Justice Department, agreeing to hire a consultant to review race discrimination policies as well as to train staff on matters of responding to and investigating any claims of racism. “The district takes these findings very seriously,” the superintendent said. “The district is wholeheartedly committed to creating and maintaining a safe and welcoming environment for all students free from harassment and discrimination.”
These revelations of ramped-up racial animus in schools reflect the nationwide escalation of racial animosity that has occurred in recent years. According to a recent FBI report, hate crimes in 2020 reached their highest mark in twelve years, and roughly 62 percent of all victims were targeted because of their race or ethnicity. The report tallied 2,871 hate crimes targeting Black people that year, a 46 percent increase from the year before, while those targeting Asians rose 73 percent, to 279. More than half of all race hate crimes were motivated by anti-Black racism.
Meanwhile, white parents storm school board meetings to protest CRT, which is not actually being taught in elementary or high schools, as well as the use of masks, claiming fear of how their children will be negatively impacted. At a school board meeting in a Philadelphia suburb this past July, a white mother declared, “We do not want our children to be taught that they are oppressed or they are oppressors by virtue of their color. These are my babies. Not yours. If you are embarrassed or ashamed of your skin color, that’s your issue. Not mine or my children.”
But teaching about topics including systemic racism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism isn’t only rooted in a desire to make Black children and other children of color feel good about who they are. It is also an effort to prevent what happened in Utah from happening again.
These lessons are meant for all children, so they know the history of our nation’s formation and how it has contributed to modern-day circumstances. In other words, teaching about systemic racism and white supremacy can educate white people about how we can undo these forms of injustice.
As Paulo Freire noted in his classic 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves and their oppressors. Therefore, by bringing the work of authors like Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project) and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (Critical Race Theory and On Intersectionality) into schools, one can come to understand that their work is not simply to liberate Black people and other oppressed people—although it can and will—but to liberate us all through education.
Critical race theory “is a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country, ranging from health to wealth to segregation to policing,” as Crenshaw has explained it. “We believe in the promises of equality, and we know we can get there if we confront and talk honestly about inequality.”
Anti-racist work—ridding our schools of anti- Black bigotry, for example—will require that all children are taught historical truths to understand how racism impacts our society, and to become empowered with the tools to eradicate it. Liberation for our society means liberating all peoples.
Sadly, our nation has too many people unwilling to be liberated, because being white matters more to them than being whole.