As wisely and eloquently stated by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” this adage holds that the written word acts as a powerful tool in the transmission of ideas.
Why else would oppressive regimes and other avid enforcers of the status quo engage in censorship and book burnings throughout the ages?
The United States has been the only nation to have forbidden education to those it has enslaved. Except for imposing Christian conversion through religious instruction, legislators enacted laws making it a crime in most Southern states.
Following an enslaved people’s uprising led by abolitionist Nat Turner in 1831, some states extended the education ban to free blacks as well.
Slavers identified literacy as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and their economic dependency on the labor it provided. A North Carolina law of 1831 stated in part:
Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion.
The Code of Virginia of 1849 was passed to prevent the enslaved from assembling for religious or educational purposes as legislators believed that education would lead to uprisings.
If enslaved people developed literacy, they would be able to read the writings of abolitionists, for example, about attempts to help people escape to the North, or about the 1791-1804 slave revolution in Haiti, and the end of slavery in 1833 in the British Empire.
Slavers believed that literacy would make enslaved people angry, dissatisfied, and rebellious.
As stated by Washington, D.C. lawyer and clerk of the US Supreme Court, Elias B. Caldwell:
The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them, in their present state,” he argued. “You give them a higher relish for those privileges which they can never attain, and turn what we intend for a blessing [slavery] into a curse. No, if they must remain in their present situation, keep them in the lowest state of degradation and ignorance. The nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy.
With the end of slavery, the legal exclusion of education to formerly enslaved people, their children, and their descendants did not expire. Throughout the Jim Crow era and during the next several decades up to the current moment, African Americas have faced de jure and then de facto segregation, underfunded schools, implicit bias from educators and schools administrators, and public sentiments ripe with myths and stereotypes regarding the intellectual capacities of the African heritage mind.
Following the Revolutionary War, leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and others called for state supported and mandated public education, believing that the very survival of the new Republic depended on an educated populace.
Jefferson, for example, advocated for a three-year publicly supported education for all white children, but no such guarantees were to be extended to children of enslaved Africans. In addition, he argued for advanced education provided to a select few white males, and not females.
As Jefferson wrote in 1782, the schools will be “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish.” He included all enslaved Africans as an integral part of that pile of rubbish.
How very ironic that today several states are either proposing or have passed laws prohibiting the teaching of slavery and other aspects of U.S. history that are not particularly flattering?
Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, on June 8 of this year, signed what many are calling an “anti-Critical Race Theory” act into law, which seriously restricts what educators may teach in history and civics public school courses throughout the state.
These states, largely with Republican-controlled legislatures, are weaponizing the teaching of history to excite their base with the scare tactic that the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” will make white students feel bad about themselves and will result in black students hating the United States.
Critical Race Theory
Professors primarily teach Critical Race Theory – a fairly technical set of concepts — in college and university departments of legal studies. Generally, educators do not present CRT in public schools.
Critical Race Theory, developed by such notable preeminent legal scholars, educators, and theorists as Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Camara Phyllis Jones, Mari Matsuda, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and others rest on several essential pillars:
- Counter-Storytelling as Counter-Narrative by naming one’s own reality to refute the “single story narrative” told about one’s group.
- Racism is a permanent and pervasive feature of societies.
- Whiteness as property; that white racial identity is deeply interrelated with the concepts of property and unearned privileges.
- Interest Conversion: white people will support civil rights when they see what is in it for them as white people.
- Critique of Liberalism: Whites are the primary beneficiaries of civil rights legislation; the failure of incrementalism; the elimination of racism requires large-scale sweeping change efforts. This advocates a more aggressive approach to liberation and transformation while rejecting a more cautious approach, a race-conscious approach to liberal adaption of affirmative action, “color blindness,” role modeling, or the merit principle (so-called “meritocracy.”)
Theory, though, is not simply some notion fabricated by intellectuals in the Ivory Tower. Instead, social researchers develop theories from studying real human behavior, the lived experience of people and groups. Researchers’ results are empirically based rather than coming from the researchers’ passion to propagandize or impose their personal, political, or philosophical agenda.
Much like scientific testing for medical treatments and therapies, which must demonstrate that they treat or cure what they are developed to treat and continue to show effectiveness in large samples of patients, so too must social research.
But if I were to boil down the tenets of CRT taken together, it would be that we must study and teach history age-appropriately and truthfully. So, why is that so scary to some people?
“White Fragility”
Robin DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” in 2011 to refer to the defensive position taken by white people when questioned about the concept of “race” or about their “race.”
Are white people really so fragile that they cannot discuss the legacy of racism on which the United States is based? Do racial discussions actually “teach” white people to hate themselves and black people to hate the United States?
The anti-diversity crowd are not merely historical facts hesitant, but they are factual and age-appropriate history averse. They deny and reject history. They are opposed to arming young people with the truth, which would provide them a greater sense of confidence to join with their peers and elders to increase their knowledge base.
The legislatures of states denying the teaching of U.S. history in all its dimensions treat today’s students as they once treated enslaved Africans: with fear, superstition, and utter disrespect.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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