Recently, Christina Cross, a Black woman sociologist at Harvard, found her work at the crosshairs of the same person who brought us the bastardization of critical race theory. (Yes, it was.) Many scholars, from her sociology department to the primary investigators of the original study, defended her against his claims of plagiarism, but people jumped regardless. As I observed scholar after acclaimed scholar defending her work, it gave me hope that perhaps we had learned lessons from the last three years of ideological malpractice.
Yet, it also made me reticent to uplift this newfound courage cloaked in social science norms. I’m asking us to think more societally.
In using inaccurate forms of plagiarism, he gets to crusade against anything he deems “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Of course, when mainstream media asks him questions under their terms, he turns to cellophane, but that’s another layer to this conversation. Time and again, the same set of ghouls lay out the playbook through their social media platforms and articles. To deconstruct institutions that they and so many others have benefited from, they use the very people whom those in powerful positions have rarely sought to defend. In other words, if you can reshape Harvard by attacking Black women and other scholars with marginalized identities using tools that have historically limited these populations from coming through the door, then the task is merely academic.
I’ve argued on several occasions that telling the public “We don’t teach critical race theory” isn’t effective in beating the attacks back. America must name the vital role of our institutions, defend the value of those institutions in nation-building, and make the experience of these institutions better from a racial and social justice lens. Otherwise, this country continues to leave the responsibility of keeping this country prosperous to the people least likely to benefit from its largesse.
It also occurs to me how we’ve seen this in K-12, too.
Now that the United States is about three years into this era of censorship laws, we’re as far away as we’ve ever been from having authentic conversations and actions that lead to a pluralistic and inclusive democracy. State houses and local school boards across the country have further concretized racism, sexism, and transphobia into a variety of ambiguous policies, it’s created an icy effect on classrooms across the board. But, as I listen to teachers across the country, it’s not only solidified boring and traditional views of curriculum and pedagogy. These laws have also made the recruitment and retention of Black teachers and other teachers of color that much harder.
For every white teacher who’s nervous about teaching Morrison, Coates, and Baldwin, there lies even more trepidation about hiring Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native American teachers whose lived experience could inform those texts. This extends into all subject areas, too, because the “problem” is the embodied history.
American society has, at best, paid lip service in defending its teachers of color. Even though the burgeoning body of research clearly shows a plethora of academic and socioemotional benefits in having more teachers of color, we also see how teachers of color are less likely to be promoted, more likely to work in less-resourced schools, and more likely to be fired. Even though the benefits extend to white students, teachers of color I speak to are unapologetic about who they wish to impart this knowledge to.
This was happening before 2020. Imagine how the confluence of censorship laws, a global pandemic, and systemic racism are having on the prospects of retaining this critical subset of teachers.
At times, it doesn’t even take a “CRT” or “DEI” law to target these teachers, either. It just takes an administrator wishing to target them through seemingly innocuous rubrics and metrics to get rid of them. It just takes an anonymous complaint from someone with no evidence, just negative vibes. With these laws in place, some teachers in high-pressure schools have sent permission slips home to allow them to acknowledge Black people’s humanity. How is that progress?
In this vein, some people name the Brown vs. Board of Education decision for the dismissal of over 30,000 teachers in the US South, but not enough name the mechanisms of white supremacy in that dismissal. Superintendents and governors at the time didn’t have to dismiss licensed teachers and principals from their workplaces. But they replaced these educators with often-unlicensed white educators because they, too, understood the power of teacher diversity. When we couple these dismissals with white flight, we get a clearer picture of why the works of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and so many other legal scholars create an important lens for our work as educators.
Critical race theory is about you, too. It’s about all of us.
Many private higher education institutions have less to fear than public counterparts, which might make one think that they can take bolder steps and stand firm in their espoused commitments from only four years ago. Not necessarily. Also, while public universities have seen governors demolish DEI programs over the last year with little retribution, many public-school policymakers have turned their attention to “science of X” propaganda and further from culturally responsive curricula. Of course, research suggests a plethora of benefits from making broad changes in how we think about literacy, but people prefer to talk up phonics and decoding. As if. While policymakers wave the learning loss flag at Black and Latinx communities, this curricular retrenchment feels less like a pendulum swing and more like a generational pivot from a small spark in 2020.
Instead of fighting for an inclusive set of curricula and pedagogies for every student, policymakers have gone more narrow to make these vital institutions more chaotic and less secure. We learned the wrong lessons from school shutdowns.
Thus, the malcontents understand how deeply America holds its ideological traditions. All of them. In invoking race among other identity-based structures, they sense that a large swath of America won’t fight back, even if it means that institutions like schools, libraries, and colleges must crumble in front of them. The policymakers, institutional presidents, and other engaged citizens can’t keep throwing their red muletas at these charges and, every time they attack an institution, yell “¡OLE!”
It’s about time for us to learn how to fight the bull. Or at least call out its excrements.
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