As a teacher who, during my nineteen years in a public school classroom, created a broad array of Civil Rights- and social justice-related projects, I have been paying particular attention to efforts in recent years to ban critical race theory (or anything that resembles what it is assumed to be) in our schools. Now, that effort has extended to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. In Alabama, where I live, the state’s Board of Education first passed its vaguely defined ban for all Alabama public schools in August 2021, then the Republican-dominated legislature had its own  “divisive concepts” bill. That particular bill did not become law, but the issue wasn’t over. More recently, Gov. Kay Ivey terminated a high-ranking state education official – a black woman who presided over a highly successful program – over these (perceived) issues.

Two things are particularly interesting to me about my state’s ban and others like it. First, during the time of legalized white supremacy in the South, educational materials and messages were openly divisive and preferential to one race, thus supporting inequality with a set of beliefs and narratives. By contrast, now that times have changed, and white majorities will be asked to have honest conversations in a modern diverse society, divisive discussions of race and inequality are problematic. And second, despite myths and narratives to the contrary, actual critical race theory has never been taught in K-12 schools anyway. (That is true all over the South.)

However, the multi-state bans’ typical wording has succeeded in its unstated goal of making public school teachers and administrators second-guess anything they plan to offer or teach if it includes race as a component. The threats of violating the law will always be there now. For example, the Alabama State Board of Education ban states:

. . . concepts that impute fault, blame, a tendency to oppress others, or the need to feel guilt or anguish to persons solely because of their race or sex violate the premises of individual rights, equal opportunity, and individual merit, and therefore have no place in professional development for teachers, administrators, or other employees of the public educational system of the State of Alabama.

Therefore, if a teacher’s lesson on slavery created the sense that there was “fault” or “blame” in the fact that white people owned black slaves, or if anyone inferred “the need to feel guilt or anguish” over that fact, it would technically be violating the ban. Or— wait— would it? Another example passage is:

. . . that individuals living today should not be punished or discriminated against because of past actions committed by members of the same race or sex,

So, any discussion or debate about reparations could be a violation, too. That’s not a ban on critical race theory. It’s an obliquely worded ban on open discourse that elbows out modern ideas about our history.

And if you’re one of those people who thinks, “He’s worried over nothing. That won’t happen” . . .  it just did in South Carolina.

I first encountered critical theory in the mid-1990s as an English major in college, though not in connection to race. Our required senior-level course in literary criticism used the third edition of A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, which contains sections on feminism and structuralism. For those unfamiliar with structuralism, our textbook put it this way: “it identifies structures, systems of relationships, which endow signs (e.g. words) or items (e.g. clothes, cars, table manners, rituals) with identities and meanings, and show us the ways in which we think.” Structuralist thinking is foundational for critical theory, which goes further than to identify the systems, relationships, and meanings we attribute to words and items. It seeks to critique them as well.

Later, after I graduated and was missing the intellectual stimulation of the classroom, I bought David Theo Goldberg’s anthology Multiculturalism and encountered Michael Eric Dyson’s essay “Essentialism.” Reading that essay was the first time that I remember making intellectual connections between structuralism and race. For those unfamiliar with the term, essentialism describes attempts to distill something down to its essence, to its core qualities. When applied to a group of people – in this case, to a racial group – it results in stereotyping that usually has negative effects. For example, the question asked by many white people in modern America, “What do black people want?” Lacking experience or understanding, the assumption is often made that all black people want the same things . . . Critical theory is one way to recognize the error in this kind of thinking, then once the recognition of those errors has been achieved,  we can identify the features of the system, ask questions about their basis and effects, and seek better alternatives.

In today’s society, one of those better alternatives is a more honest, more thorough examination of American history and culture, which would occur in part within history and literature classes in our schools. These courses are the ones where “whitewashing” has occurred evidently in the past, so balancing the content will require the inclusion of more diverse people, voices, and perspectives. A problem arises when some parents (and other members of the wider community) view this as “cancel culture” that attacks the time-honored classics and as the “woke mob” indoctrinating children. Viewing this conversation about what should be taught in school as a zero-sum game, the logical conclusion becomes: they only win if I lose. (Read “they” as The Other.) After a brief period in late 2022 when these controversies seemed to be dying down, Florida governor Ron DeSantis reinvigorated them in January 2023 by refusing to include the College Board’s Advanced Placement course on African American Studies in his state’s high schools. To be candid about it, relatively few students would even take that course. But he used it as a lightning rod, and it worked— the whole country paid attention. Also recently, DeSantis and other governors  have taken aim at DEI initiatives at public colleges. About DeSantis’ bill, the AP reported this:

Florida’s so-called “Stop WOKE” law, which DeSantis signed last year, is among the most prominent measures. It bars businesses, colleges and K-12 schools from giving training on certain racial concepts, such as the theory that people of a particular race are inherently racist, privileged or oppressed. Courts have currently blocked the law’s enforcement in colleges, universities and businesses.

What interests me about the anti-CRT/anti-DEI political movement is its similarity to the “color blind” movement among Republicans in the late 1970s and 1980s. At that time, post-Civil Rights Democrats were very much in tune with equity efforts like affirmative action and bussing in education, and their programs had begun in earnest in the early 1970s. After years of frustration over these programs, the conservative response flipped the script and proclaimed, OK then, if you want a color-blind world, let’s do that. Let’s have a world where race isn’t a factor at all, where it isn’t considered. Using post-Civil Rights Democrats’ own rhetoric against them, this counter-revolutionary stance provided the philosophical and political basis for the argument to end the race-based affirmative action and bussing programs that – Democrats were saying – could create an inclusive society based on freedom and choice, two terms that have evolved into tried-and-true talking points. The conservative narrative dressed itself up as a move that yielded to their opponents, saying they were giving liberals what they wanted. The reality was that they were done cooperating with programs they didn’t like. (You can read more about this in Matthew Lassiter’s The Silent Majority.)

This anti-CRT/anti-DEI movement smacks of the same tactics. In a world where now-prevalent black intellectuals, writers, and journalists speak critically about the effects of racism and about historical perspectives and current realities, anti-CRT/anti-DEI efforts in the 2020s have flipped the script again. OK then, they say, let’s not allow anything in schools that prioritizes any one race’s perspective. It may be an end-around maneuver that skirts hard truths, but once again, it’s savvy politics. This line of thinking allows conservative white parents to say, If our schools can’t teach anything that could make black children uncomfortable, then in the name of equality, schools can’t teach anything that could make my children uncomfortable! The dire political and legal danger of this methodology is the baseline: if you feel attacked, then you have indeed been attacked. (Which is not always true.) Despite the long-term dangers, these bans, with their broad wording, do achieve two things that conservatives have wanted to achieve anyway. First, here is a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter that denies any racist intent, and second, it enables a greater degree of parental control over what their children learn in schools, both of which allow for new myths and narratives to be crafted at home.

As a student of modern history, I wonder where this serpentine path of cultural progress will lead us next. I grew up in the age of bussing and newly integrated schools, and I was a teacher during the age of re-segregation, rampant testing, and the recognition of achievement gaps. And everybody, from education researchers in their nonprofit institutes to Bobby and Susie Knowitall at the neighborhood barbecue, seem to have their own narratives about what is happening and why. The saddest part is that all of them impede progress by making a teacher’s job harder. And to be candid once again, anybody on any side that is being combative about it is forwarding the idea that we shouldn’t be teaching the truth, but instead only teaching one group’s approved set of narratives and myths.

A note from the editor:

Someone may ask, What do you want to see happen then? I would like to see historical facts taught in an objective way during direct instruction in the classroom with companion assignments, like essays, group projects, or in-class debates, that provide students with opportunities to explore an array of perspectives— competing perspectives. This combination would enable students to encounter a variety of ideas, consider a variety of ideas, and critique a variety of ideas after they have the facts. No teacher should ever conflate the facts with an interpretation of the facts, since they are not the same thing. The job of schools is not to teach students what to think, but how to think. In my vision, everybody’s kids would be exposed to verifiably true information about the past, and everybody’s kids would be asked to consider multiple interpretations in a respectful way. This approach would differentiate instruction, provide opportunities to develop critical thinking skills, and enhance students’ understanding of respectful citizenship in a pluralistic nation.

With respect to literature classes and reading lists, I believe that students should have a mix of self-chosen readings and common readings. Within this practice, students should be assured in compassionate ways that education is about growth and self-improvement, not about the comfort of having one’s own life and values reified. On the one hand, I am always against book bans, and on the other, I  do not believe that all books belong in a school library or in a classroom lesson. (No K–12 school library should ever stock the Marquis de Sade, nor Debbie Does Dallas, even though they are both culturally significant. There are also books that people should encounter as adults, not as children, like Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or anything by Charles Bukowski.) Furthermore, school libraries are not the one end-all-be-all source of books in a modern world with myriad ways to obtain books and other media. Thus, efforts to weaponize school libraries, public libraries, and public schools – by both the Left and the Right – cause these important institutions to lose their value, their esteem, and their utility by and for the general public. American libraries have their roots in the work of Benjamin Franklin, who believed that well-educated people make better citizens. That said, closed-minded people of any political stripe, who work to limit knowledge and discourse, should never be the arbiters of a public-use library’s holdings or programs or of education policy. That is when literature classes and reading lists – and thus, libraries and schools – become about teaching young people what to think, not how to think.