In grad school at UCLA, my classmate S started a running joke about the so-called Justee Awards. At the end of the year, at a party I don’t think I attended, he actually handed out little personalized certificates congratulating classmates on the degree to which they’d conducted themselves (or appeared to conduct themselves) in a “socially just” manner.
UCLA’s Teacher Education Program (TEP) had social justice running like a fat incandescent thread through the middle of each class. It was invoked at every turn, even in the admissions interview, where one White man with a beard insisted he planned to use his privilege to “lift up” the fate of the marginalized. He did not attend the program, much less the party.
In skewering the program’s relentless flogging of a palatable idea (that educators have a responsibility to celebrate students’ identities and practice pedagogy designed to fight systemic inequity), S was not mocking the message, just the heavy-handed messaging, and with it the real notion that novice educators might fall over themselves in a desperate effort to perform their fervor, to be unimpeachable in their visible commitment to Justeeness.
I think of this experience and S’s joke when I consider the current debate about “Critical Race Theory in public schools.”
I put that in quotes because CRT is not taught in public schools. That is a falsehood aptly dissected elsewhere. The turmoil befalling school boards and districts in places like Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas is instead the product of a well-funded effort to harm public schools and paint unionized educators as anti-American wokerati eager to teach good boys and girls that breathing while White in 2021 is tantamount to fire-hosing a peaceful march in 1967. I won’t yet speak to weirdo outliers that get held up as emblematic of the nonexistent trend, but the main point here is that the crisis is engineered. It’s a sleepy condo to try to sell to suburban White ladies in 2022 and 2024 electoral campaigns.
I’m not a history teacher, but even here in California, no teacher I know has tossed out the curriculum in favor of relying on the half-coherent Instagram stories of social media activist firebrands. What we’re really talking about here is pretty subtle: hitting standards with lessons based on reading and prompts in a state-approved textbook but augmenting or even replacing many of these materials with newspaper and magazine articles, book excerpts, documentaries, and so on. In other words, making the serviceable sharper and rich. Good American history teachers often try to show students how the past persists in the present, how the future will be shaped by the tracks we’ve already left. Good American history teachers want material to feel relevant and alive, not dusty and distant. Good American history teachers realize that history amounts to a bunch of takes, ancient and new, and that smart teaching makes the point of showing how some takes on what has happened have been privileged and others ignored or scrubbed away. This is teaching about the work of history-making, not just the work of knowing what’s happened, the how, not simply the what and (sometimes) why.
So, why wouldn’t you teach a piece from the 1619 Project to, say juniors or seniors, to let students see it sit alongside the textbook, to see how one take diverges from another, how, for instance, the GI Bill could mean a passport to the middle class in one story about the American experiment and an opportunity cruelly denied to Black veterans and their descendants in another?
But hold on: any teacher digging into this complexity must be ignoring the basic research, writing, reading, and organization needs of the 14-year-old historian, right? A student who, if facing a problem of prior knowledge, is more likely to be Black or Brown?
That’s the faux-civil rights argument made by people who largely do not care about the academic performance of Black and Brown students or the general strength of schools that serve diverse populations. They do care about White parents who believe that no White child should ever go to school and have to entertain for one second an opinion that institutions in supposedly meritocratic America can perpetuate inequity along arbitrarily determined racial lines.
A teacher functions like a beat reporter deciding which stories to cover and how. What’s included and what’s left out tells a story and sends a message, even if you’re not in the business of overtly subverting problematic national myths. Sometimes, you don’t get to choose. There’s a school shooting somewhere, and you have to open up the classroom to a conversation about American gun laws because kids are scared. When I teach Beloved, I share an article about George Washington’s enthusiasm for chasing down escaped enslaved people. I don’t tell students that the first president was evil for owning people but I definitely ask them how they feel about it. I have an opinion on the subject but I’m less interested in imparting that opinion than provoking conversations that will mean something to students going forward. Kids are sometimes nervous about these conversations because they know they threaten a classroom’s fragile peace.
Or the glazed-over apathy that can pass for peace.
The classroom should be a nurturing and supportive community, but peace alone is very overrated.
The other day, I was listening to Vox’s The Weeds podcast on the “debate” about “CRT.” The fundamentals were solid, and then Matt Yglesias did a bit about how kids should learn “the basics” before they wade into thornier territory, but the truth is that kids can practice any skill with any narrative of history. It’s just convenient for people to insist they start with the most prominent one. It’s not like they’re gonna skip the Federalist Papers. Students can read any text and step outside the document to ask questions. Why was this written? To what does it respond? What can we conclude about the audience and the author’s intent? How has it been interpreted and applied?
I went to a private school for the last two years of high school, graduating in 1998, and took a lot of history and English classes at Oberlin College, and it wasn’t until I started teaching high school students (of color) in 2010 that I really thought about racism as more complicated than people with prejudice in positions of authority; I never saw it as baked into the American fabric, its tentacles curling around housing, healthcare access, environmental safety, school design, and other sectors — a perpetual motion machine that would only collapse with dramatic intervention.
The closest I came was with my 4th grade teacher, Ms. C, who’d marched with Dr. King. She once broke down sobbing in class, repeating “they’re just things” over and over when she found out the principal (instantly the least popular school figure among her students) had thrown away her trove of 1960s civil rights memorabilia. Informed by the history of our home (Louisville, Kentucky) she made racial justice a central theme, the axis around which a year’s worth of lessons and readings could revolve. She brought in guest speakers, usually parents, to candidly discuss their upbringings, experiences, and struggles. We wrote stacks of book reports too. Bridge to Terabithia and Where the Red Fern Grows made my eyes leak. That was the year I was inspired to read all of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology for fun. We practiced math with Kentucky Derby bets. Unbridled made me a lot of Monopoly money. Some parents and politicians would inaccurately call a lot of what we did CRT. It was actually just one really good part of largely very good teaching at a diverse public elementary school in a former border state with a notable history of racial segregation. It responded to the time, the place, and the needs of students.
Otherwise, my education addressed racism as a recurring guest in the drama of American history, not a major player — even in my excellent AP U.S. History course. I learned to pretend to celebrate diversity. I went to a lot of MLK assemblies where the same speech was excerpted and recited. Freshman year of college, I took a wonderful year-long American intellectual history class and read a lot of Veblen and, to my recollection, nothing written by a non-White person. And today, as a veteran teacher, writer, and parent appraising our current moment, I can say it would have benefited me — as a human being — in the years between my childhood and now to have studied, say, the Sumerians a little less and American racism a lot more.
The problem isn’t just one of scarcity. Over in the lit-verse, as I’ve written before, To Kill a Mockingbird — canonical, iconic, still a book I prefer not to teach — portrays a disastrously clueless father, a timid politician resigned to accept the racist power structure that dooms his innocent client, a decent but unexceptional man whose paeans to empathy never once cross racial lines. Forget “sticking to the text”; a teacher has to commit a crime of comprehension, much less analysis, to pretend Atticus Finch presents as some kind of hero, a solution in any era to the problem we still see pulsing violently through our society. Yet most kids in America read this text when they are 14 or 15 and most of them, even in 2021, get sold that line by a well-intentioned teacher, when an honest appraisal of the book leads to a much more valuable debate. Especially when that debate includes the history of how the book has been taught. The conclusions are always messy and uncomfortable — just as they should be!
I guess what’s most nefarious about anti-CRT laws is that they attack memory itself. Ms. C losing her remembrances was terrible, but more tragic is the idea that a fair number of adults in the United States would love to reduce the youthful concept of righteous unrest to a heroic defeat of the British for the winning of freedom, to shingle over enduring American fault lines with tinsel. This, they imagine, would keep the peace. This would make our world better, if people just didn’t know exactly how it was built, how it is now shaped. It wouldn’t be hard to burn away what most kids understand about the fairly recent backstory of racism in America. They’re too young to have a built-in timeline of the 1960s. My seniors tell me they don’t learn much about slavery after 8th grade. Memes can only teach so much. My students often struggle with Beloved because it is so challenging and emotionally taxing. I don’t always teach it, but I like to, in part because it directly engages with historic and personal trauma, because it digs into how personal and public memory work, how terrible stories get turned to Swiss cheese because they hurt too much to remember fully. It’d be very easy for a state to pass a narrow law that local officials could enforce expansively. Or that local parents could invoke in the name of a petty grievance. Or that teachers might restrict themselves to avoid drama. The whole point is conflating good, honest, complete teaching with a mostly fictionalized kooky anti-Whiteness initiative and policing the former through professed resistance to the latter.
I like to have occasional chats with my inner reactionary.
Sometimes I yank him from the depths of my consciousness when I’m at a staff meeting, reading, noticing something on Twitter, or seeing what a former student posts on social media. I think, oh no, I hope Fox News doesn't get ahold of this, because the Justeeness on display feels performative, too heavy on symbolism, not tangibly beneficial to students — the kind of try-hard effort that combines a seemingly radical political stance with an ultimately flimsy core. Empty calories, I say, as the inner reactionary scoffs about California clowns. I think this when a PD leader seems to insist on participants using jargon like “leaning in,” “centering,” and “holding space” to signify the adoption of an approved system of belief. And when the PD (or arrival of a well-paid district-level consultant) appears to check a mandated or politically advantageous box instead of leading to an action-ready plan for needed change. Or when young people (like adults) frantically repost alarming statistics about police brutality or climate change but devote no time of their own to fix the problem at hand. Or when school book clubs assign White Fragility instead of The Color of Law or Stamped from the Beginning.
In a district far away from the states where the anti-CRT operation is rolling hard, I see a lot of White privilege and just enough ridiculousness on display to sometimes stir that inner reactionary. A Broadcast student produced a convoluted spot meant to dispel negative (White) stereotypes about a working-class Latino neighborhood home to many students. The spot was bad, and received fair criticism for employing few interviews and having a lede focused on a recent news-making criminal incident, but did the Broadcast teacher really have to sit through hours of meetings with parents and officials in which he was taken to task for societal ills unrelated to Broadcast class? He had not segregated the city or driven up housing costs. He’d made the class a phenomenal school asset. A lot of non-White students enjoyed the power to tell stories that the whole community watched. He made sure every story was translated into Spanish and on several occasions had entire 15-minute programs produced in Spanish. But there was no way he was going to teach it again if doing so likely meant at least one yearly tribunal, especially considering a better lesson would have involved the student who made the spot in the first place. Once, I joked with a class (while reading a story in which raccoons figure somewhat prominently) that raccoons were childlike in their curiosity and affinity for mischief, and after class a student told me I’d offended them, because “coon” (if I wasn’t aware) was a racial slur, and we’d just read a novel with Black children characters. I laughed, and said they’d lost their noodle, and then realized that all this kid had to do was tell an administrator that they were offended, and I’d be sucked into a show trial not unlike what my colleague faced.
And to get some idiotic revenge all I’d have to do would be to get in touch with Fox News.
In grad school, S was considering how absurd this shit could get. In a memorable class, a professor asked us to participate in a “privilege walk.” She read a series of statements and if a statement was false for you, you would step forward, and if it was true, you’d stand still. Do you identify as a woman? Does mental illness run in your family? Do you consider yourself a racial minority? The point was obvious from the beginning, so clear that we felt uncomfortable and amused at the same time. Whether in front or back of the group, participants rolled their eyes, shrugged, and chuckled, despite the professor’s solemnity. We knew what was being painted across that grass outside the classroom door: the degree to which we’d had access to opportunity and faced oppression because of aspects of our identities. We knew what we were supposed to later apply to our own classrooms. But it was tedious and awkward, more theater than anything — total bait for a Justee. The exercise would be stigmatizing and hurtful in a high school classroom, where students are less comfortable laughing through what bothers them.
Shaking students up, alerting them to histories they’ve never known, illuminating once-quieted voices — none of this needs to involve this type of confrontation, which fits right into that warped Fox-induced fantasy of CRT-gone-wild.
Just as it also shouldn’t involve weak gestures and half-measures that are easier to mock and paint as frivolous or academically irrelevant.
Lastly, in that podcast, Yglesias bemoans the lack of uniformity in what history teachers cover. “Why can’t they have a meeting?” he says, if memory serves me. It’s not clear exactly who the “they” is, and it’s certainly something that already happens, with officials and consultants and testing companies (who lobby heavily for more of what they produce, naturally) cooking up standards, but the idea that such a summit really would dramatically and consistently change what happens at the classroom level is laughable. He should come to a staff meeting! When administrators unveil a new program or theme, most teachers’ first response is to consider the degree to which their values, habits, interests, and plans will be impacted, and then resist, undermine, or ignore accordingly. That’s a newsletter for another day, but generally, meetings lead to committees, which lead to plans, which are so haphazardly followed that the action is limited, and the impact mild or hard to gauge. For example, my department has been trying to have nine teachers create and maintain digital portfolios for half a decade, and every year, a couple of teachers don’t do it for whatever reason, and so, by the time my seniors show up, their portfolios are so spotty that completing them and making them a useful metacognitive and reflective tool requires too much effort and time. This doesn’t mean that any change is impossible, of course; the point is that the envisioned meeting wouldn’t mean that a teacher couldn’t read the new plan, whatever it was, and say, yeah, you know what, I’m not going to do it quite that way — but, gosh, I read this article in the paper the other day, and I was thinking…
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Oh, Just One More Thing…
Back in June, I gave the faculty speech at my school’s graduation. I felt very overwhelmed when I was asked to do this, considering what students and the school community had gone through. I read a bunch of graduation speeches people had lost their heads over online and discovered that most were horseshit. Full of awful ideas like “work hard” and “be nice.” I worked hard on my speech, though, and I’d like to share the Medium post here as well.
