[ How U.S. history textbooks and prominent American universities
justified slavery, perpetuated racial stereotypes and promoted white
supremacy.]
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YOU’VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT  
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Stephen Rohde
January 25, 2023
Truthdig
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_ How U.S. history textbooks and prominent American universities
justified slavery, perpetuated racial stereotypes and promoted white
supremacy. _

John Gast's 1872 painting "American Progress," seen as an allegory
for Manifest Destiny and American westward expansion. The painting
serves as the cover for Donald Yacovone's “Teaching White Supremacy:
America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our N,

 

_You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear_

_You’ve got to be taught from year to year_

_It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear_

_You’ve got to be carefully taught_

_You’ve got to be taught to be afraid_

_Of people whose eyes are oddly made_

_And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade_

_You’ve got to be carefully taught_

_You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late_

_Before you are six or seven or eight_

_To hate all the people your relatives hate_

_You’ve got to be carefully taught_

With these haunting words from the 1949 Broadway musical “South
Pacific” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Donald
Yacovone opens his startling new book “Teaching White Supremacy:
America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National
Identity”_ _(Pantheon). Equally revealing, and an important partner
to Yacovone’s book, is Jessica Blatt’s “Race and the Making of
American Political Science” (University of Pennsylvania). These
impressive books describe how the institution of American education
trained its teachers and taught its students to believe slavery was
good for the enslaved, that Reconstruction was a disaster, that
African Americans were innately inferior and that the destiny of the
United States was to be ruled by the descendants of White Europeans.

These books would have been welcome whenever they appeared, but they
take on added urgency today as Republicans in Congress and several
state legislatures across the country actively seek to turn back the
clock by passing new laws to erase history and reimpose  a white
supremacist narrative in American education and by banning certain
books and curriculums because they offer a thorough account of the
ongoing struggle throughout American history to overcome racism,
sexism, homophobia and bigotry.

On January 12,  the Florida Department of Education informed the
College Board, which administers Advanced Placement exams, that
Florida would not allow a new A. P. course on African American studies
to be offered in its high schools, claiming the course is not
“historically accurate,” “significantly lacks educational
value” and violates
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law.  Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed legislation
that restricted how racism and other aspects of history can be taught
in schools and workplaces. The law’s sponsors called it the Stop
WOKE Act. Among other things, the act prohibits instruction that could
make students feel responsibility for or guilt about the past actions
of other members of their race. The College Board said the course, a
multiyear pilot program that has been used in 60 high schools across
the country, including at least one in Florida, is multidisciplinary
and addresses not just history but civil rights, politics, literature,
the arts and geography.

Florida law prohibits schools from teaching “critical race
theory,” an academic framework for understanding racism in the
United States, and does not allow educators to teach The 1619 Project,
a classroom program developed by The New York Times that seeks to
reframe the country’s history by putting the consequences of slavery
and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the national
narrative.  Henry Louis Gates Jr., a former chair of Harvard’s
Department of African and African American Studies and director of the
Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, who was a
consultant to the College Board as it developed the A.P. course, said
last year that he hoped the curriculum would not shy away from such
topics that spur debate, not as a framework, but as a way of studying
different theories of the African American experience.

It is imperative that we keep the focus on “systemic” racism in
the United States. We must combat the notion that racism is simply a
personal attitude that individuals happen to develop for which society
as a whole bears no responsibility.  In fact every U.S. institution
— including our educational system — has been infected by, and has
in turn perpetuated, deep-seated racial, ethnic, religious and gender
biases, prejudices and stereotypes.

Blatt’s illuminating study of the racist origins of political
science in the United States sets the stage for Yacovone’s broader
look at how textbooks in U.S. high schools and colleges intentionally
advanced the ideology of white supremacy. These books complement and
reinforce each other and contribute significantly to our understanding
of how white supremacy has been tightly woven into the teaching of
U.S. history.

THE RACIST ORIGINS OF THE STUDY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE IN AMERICA

Based on copious research, Blatt, an associate professor of political
science at Marymount Manhattan College, convincingly demonstrates that
“race thinking shaped U.S. political science at its origins far more
profoundly than has previously been recognized.”  She explains that
“the precept on which U.S. political science was founded in the late
19th century” was “the idea that our politics are born into us —
indeed, specifically that some people are innately cut out for
self-government and progress while others are by their constitutions
more suited to traditional forms of authority.”

_An illustration showing Black men and boys, former slaves, hiding in
the swamps of Louisiana during the Reconstruction period in 1873. (AP
Photo/NY Public Library),_

Well into the 20th century, “major political scientists understood
racial difference to be a fundamental shaper of political life,”
Blatt writes. “They wove popular and scientific ideas about racial
difference into their accounts of political belonging, of progress and
change, of proper hierarchy and democracy and its warrants.” She
examines “how racial ideas figured in a number of settings in which
pioneering U.S. political scientists sought to stake out their
intellectual territory and define their methods.” These settings
included Columbia University’s history department in the 1880s and
1890s; the meetings, publications and other activities of the American
Political Science Association in the decade following its founding in
1903; the first U.S.-based international journal, the Journal of Race
Development, founded in 1910; and the efforts in the 1920s by
prominent academics to bring their version of scientific methods to
bear on political questions and “to integrate the study of politics
into an interdisciplinary social science matrix” at major
universities across the country.

Blatt introduces us to one of the founders of political science in the
United States, John W. Burgess, who established one of the first
doctoral programs in politics in the nation. A constitutional scholar,
teacher of future presidents and prominent commentator on domestic and
foreign affairs, he was born in 1844 to a slave-holding Union family
in Tennessee and spent his adult life among the Northern elite. He
fought for the Union Army in the Civil War and studied history at
Amherst College and at several German universities. In 1876, he was
appointed to a professorship at the law school at what would later
become Columbia University, where he continued to teach until his
retirement in 1912. In 1886, he founded the Political Science
Quarterly.

In an early volume of PSQ, a prominent scholar wrote that the “negro
[was] not an Anglo-Saxon, or a Celt or Scandinavian — only
underdeveloped and with black skin….The African [was] on the
contrary a wholly distinct race, and the obstacles to social equality
and political co-efficiency” with “our own” race were “not
factious but anthropological.” From the late 19th century into the
20th, Black people appeared in the pages of PSQ and in papers
published in the American Political Science Review as the
“half-civilized,” “alien” element within the American
population; as “permanent[ly]…indolent and thriftless,” “unfit
to vote,” lacking “initiative and inventive genius and prone to
chicken-stealing,” “savage,” and determined to “outrage and
murder” Southern whites’ “young daughters.”

Burgess was “an especially committed and vehement racist,” Blatt
writes, “even by the standards of late 19th century America.” 
Together with his one-time student William A. Dunning (who would soon
play his own prominent role in spreading this racial ideology), he
cemented the image of Reconstruction as a “hideous tyranny” of
“negro domination.”  He wrote that “black skin means membership
in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting
passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of
any kind.”

Burgess described the Black-led Reconstruction legislatures of South
Carolina and Louisiana as “the most soul-sickening spectacle that
Americans had ever been called to behold” and the legislators
themselves as “ignorant barbarians.” According to Blatt, Burgess
“held firmly that ‘American Indians, Africans and Asiatics’
ought never to ‘form any active, directive part of the political
population’ in the United States and was skeptical about the wisdom
of extending the suffrage to many non-Aryan whites.”

At one of the most esteemed American universities, Burgess taught that
“Anglo-Saxons were the bearers of a ‘Teutonic germ’ of
liberty” which “carried forward the potential of civilization,”
Blatt writes. “As for the rest, some might eventually be
assimilated, but most were more suited to authoritarianism (at home)
and colonial domination (abroad).” Consequently, the “first
U.S.-trained cohort of political science Ph.D.s learned that adhering
to a priori fictions of equality and social contracts had only
resulted in the disaster of the Civil War.”

Blatt explains that as political science began to take shape within
the academy “leading practitioners put racialist premises at the
heart of their account of democratic legitimacy and sovereignty, the
dynamics of political change and the propriety and limits of political
reform.”  Even slavery, to which Burgess described himself as
“strongly hostile,” was justifiable in its time “as a relation
which could temporarily produce a better state of morals in a
particularly constituted society than any other relation.” It was
the “white man’s mission,” indeed “his duty and his right,”
to “hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the
civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind.” In the
classroom and in his extensive scholarly writings, Burgess taught that
any participation in government of “non-Teutonic” people was a
recipe for “corruption and confusion,” since only “the Teuton”
possessed a “superior political genius.”

Inspired by Burgess, Dunning, who was born in Plainfield, New Jersey
and educated at Dartmouth College, would get his doctorate at Columbia
where he would remain his entire career, rapidly rising to the Leiber
professorship of history and political philosophy. He taught
generations of scholars, who in turn taught generations of students,
in what became known as the Dunning School of Reconstruction, a
historiographical school of thought, which, according to leading
historian Eric Foner, “was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow
system.” It claimed that “Black people are incapable of taking
part in American democracy,” thereby justifying denying them the
right to vote on the grounds they abused it during Reconstruction.

It may come as a surprise to many that the most famous acolyte of the
racist ideology promoted by Burgess, Dunning, and their growing cadre,
was the 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. After
earning a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University,
Wilson taught at various universities before becoming the president of
Princeton University. While he criticized the Burgess-style of
political science as too legalistic and unmoored from any empirical
foundation, Wilson maintained many of Burgess’s racist precepts,
including, as Blatt puts it, “a racialized conception of the
collective shaping and authorizing government.”  According to
Blatt, Wilson’s well-received 1889 textbook, “The State,”
rehearsed the familiar themes of “the Aryan origins of the
Anglo-American political tradition; a link between Teutonic history
and the development of individual liberty; [and] an explicit rejection
of universalizing, natural law or social-compact theory.”

Blatt then traces the direct line from these racist theories to the
widespread promotion of eugenics, especially within the Progressive
movement, which saw it as a benevolent way to “improve society.” 
A leading proponent of eugenics, Charles B. Davenport, established the
Galton Society in 1918 and housed it within the American Museum of
Natural History.  Davenport was the founder of the prestigious
Department of Experimental Biology and the Eugenics Record Office,
both at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. One historian of this
period calls Davenport “the most prominent racist among American
scientists” at the time.  He would spend his career promoting
forced sterilization and institutionalizing the “unfit.”

In sum, Blatt writes, “[a]cross generational and theoretical
divides, political scientists were united in a near-consensus that
African Americans were inferior, politically incompetent and unsuited
to live under a legal system constituted by and for Anglo-Saxons.”
Consequently, “by their very presence in the United States African
Americans challenged social peace and the viability of constitutional
principles, and any attempt to integrate them into American democracy
necessarily stemmed from a catastrophic misunderstanding of that basic
truth.”

Beyond Burgess, Dunning, Wilson and Davenport, Blatt describes scores
of other prominent professors at prestigious colleges and universities
around the country who taught these gravely flawed ideas and gave
legitimacy to these racist ideologies. The real world consequences
were devastating. According to Blatt, what developed “was a
consensus that the emerging Jim Crow regime of racial segregation and
stratification represented a moderate, pragmatic response to the
realities of racial difference.”

_Lithograph of Horatio Bateman’s allegorical illustration of the
reconciliation between the North and the South following the end of
the Civil War and the beginning of the Reconstruction Era. Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division._

Blatt has written an important book that reveals in detail how
American institutions, such as the study of political science, are not
neutral bystanders in our nation’s reluctant reckoning with its
racist past. Instead, “Race and the Making of American Political
Science” concretely establishes, based on the firsthand evidence of
what the founders of this academic discipline themselves wrote and
taught, that political science as developed in the United States was
drenched in the rhetoric of white supremacy. It energetically embraced
this racist ideology and offered it to students and the public at
large as the most historically and scientifically authentic narrative
of America’s founding and destiny. The most respected scholars of
their day, teaching at the most prestigious institutions of higher
learning, anointed white supremacy with a priceless seal of
approval. 

It would take courageous dissenting voices over several decades,
including the proponents of critical race theory, reinforcing the
civil rights movement, to challenge the prevailing paradigm of white
supremacy.  Current efforts to demonize critical race theory and
marginalize efforts to address systemic racism are alarming proof that
we have a long way to go to dismantle white supremacy.  Blatt’s
revealing book is an indispensable tool in that long overdue project.

HOW U.S. TEXTBOOKS TAUGHT WHITE SUPREMACY TO GENERATIONS OF AMERICAN
STUDENTS                                       
            

In “Teaching White Supremacy,” Donald Yacovone widens the lens to
explain the broader historical and cultural context that preceded and
overlaps the developments so ably explored by Jessica Blatt in “Race
and the Making of American Political Science.” Yacovone is a
lifetime associate at Harvard’s Center for American & African
American Research, the winner (with Henry Louis Gates) of a 2014 NAACP
Image Award for “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” and
a recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University in
2013. To examine the “depth, breadth, and durability of American
white supremacy and racial prejudice,” Yacovone chooses the very
ordinary and ubiquitous institution that every impressionable student
has trusted and relied on to learn history: textbooks. So familiar and
so easily overlooked, textbooks have been a persistent instrument of
white supremacy hiding in plain sight.

“Embodying the values to be treasured by rising generations of
Americans, textbook authors passed on ideas of white American
whiteness from generation to generation,” Vacovone writes.
“Writers crafted whiteness as a national inheritance, a way to
preserve the social construction of American life and ironically, its
democratic institutions and values.” He frames his book as “an
exploration of the origins and development of the idea of white
supremacy, how it has shaped our understanding of democratic society
and how generation after generation of Americans have learned to
incorporate that vision into their very identity.”

Vacovone quotes celebrated African American writer and critic James
Baldwin, who in 1965 wrote, “I was taught in American history books
that Africa had no history and that neither had I. I was a savage
about whom the least said the better, who had to be saved by Europe
and who had to be brought to America.” 

Vacovone readily acknowledges that he is not the first to identify the
role textbooks have played in propagating white supremacy in America.
In 1939, the NAACP surveyed popular American history textbooks.
Vacavone quotes a Black student who concluded that since textbooks
“drilled” white supremacy “into the minds of growing children, I
see how hate and disgust is motivated against the American Negro.”
But his book is today the most comprehensive examination of this
subject, rich in detail, allowing us “to trace exactly how white
supremacy and Black inferiority” were taught as the prevailing
historical account of American history.

A major goal of Yacovone’s book is to debunk the notion of blaming
the persistence of racial inequality only on the legacy of Southern
slavery. While “slave owners and their descendants do possess a
unique and lethal responsibility for racial suppression,” he writes,
“if no slaves ever existed in the South, Northern white theorists,
religious leaders, intellectuals, writers, educators, politicians and
lawyers would have invented a lesser race (which is what happened) to
build white democratic solidarity, and in that way make democratic
culture and political institutions possible.”

Ending slavery did not end racism. Rather than Southern slavery,
Yacovone writes, “it was Northern white supremacy that proved the
more enduring cultural binding force, planted along with slavery in
the colonial era, intensely cultivated in the years before the Civil
War, and fully blossoming after Reconstruction. Inculcated
relentlessly throughout the culture and in school textbooks, it
suffused Northern religion, high culture, literature, education,
politics, music, law and science.”

As Yacovone sees it, “history textbooks proved a perfect vehicle for
the transmission” of the idea of white supremacy. U.S. history
textbooks began to significantly increase in the 1820s as New England,
New York and parts of Virginia established publicly supported high
schools that mandated the teaching of history. The demand for
textbooks blossomed in the 1890s when several American publishers
formed the American Book Company. By 1912, annual textbook sales
soared to at least $12 million (about $300 million in modern
currency). Six years later sales had almost doubled.  By 1960, fifty
U.S. textbook publishers earned about $230 million annually, which
leaped to over half a billion by 1967. 

Far from “mere aggregations of dead facts,” Yacovone writes,
“history texts served as reservoirs of values, patriotism and
national ethos,” which sought “to create unity through
storytelling, creating a national identity that could serve as a road
map to the future.” While he agrees that history textbooks are the
“prayer books” of our national civil religion, Yacovone is quick
to point out that “we have been selective in what we cherish in them
and blind to what, in time, has proven disconcerting, if not shameful
and humiliating.”

He traces this dreadful history in vivid detail, filled with scores of
cringe-worthy examples of appallingly racist material passed on to
students as historical fact. Much of it can be traced to John H. Van
Evrie, whom Yacovone calls “the nation’s first professional
racist,” who “worked tirelessly to permanently bind white
supremacy to the nation’s democratic ethos.” Born in Canada and
raised in Rochester, New York, Van Evrie partnered with Rushmore G.
Horton to form a small publishing empire, Van Evrie, Horton & Co, in
the heart of Manhattan. They published, among many titles, Horton’s
history textbook,” A Youth’s History of the Great Civil War in the
United States.” The book was designed, according to Yacovone, “to
repudiate the policies of the Lincoln administration, reject all
political or social equality for African Americans and guarantee that
future generations would cherish white supremacy as the nation’s
governing principle.” In particular, the book attacked the program
of Reconstruction. 

In the wake of the Civil War, Congress enacted Reconstruction to
incorporate freed people and Northern Blacks into American society
with equal constitutional protections and responsibilities. As Eric
Foner, the country’s leading authority on Reconstruction, has
written, in the South it was “a massive experiment in interracial
democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other
country that abolished slavery in the 19th century.”  During
Reconstruction, 16 African Americans would serve in Congress, more
than 600 in state legislatures, and hundreds more in local offices
from sheriff to justice of the peace across the South. The era
represented, in Yacovone’s words, “a colossal effort to transform
and refound the nation and its governing principles: in short, to
eliminate the world as Van Evrie understood it.”

Slavery may have been abolished, but because Reconstruction threatened
to dismantle white supremacy, it had to be dismantled — not only in
fact but in historical memory. President Andrew Johnson did all he
could to undermine it, and white Southerners resisted it at every
turn, led by the emerging Ku Klux Klan. In the end Reconstruction
lasted only 12 years and was replaced by a resurgence in white
political control, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement of Black voters
and full-blown segregation. And to justify this sorry result, history
textbooks were pressed into service to demonize Reconstruction
generally, glorify the KKK, in particular, and promote the Lost Cause
mythology to recast the entire history of the South and frame the
Civil War as a constitutional assertion of “states rights.”

Yacovone is particularly adept in developing this shameful period.
Reconstruction was labeled a “failure” because Blacks were
innately inferior (“ignorant and timid,” “poverty-stricken
ignoramuses,” “with a ballot in his hands he is a menace to
civilization”) and therefore unable to govern. Meanwhile, textbooks
taught that the KKK, made up of many former Confederate soldiers who
were “seeking merely fun and excitement,” represented a noble
effort to protect the “homes and women of the South” from
“pillage, and other outrages of the negroes.”

_“The first vote” (Drawn by A.R. Waud/Library of Congress)_.

At the same time, in textbook after textbook, the North never flagged
in promoting white supremacy. For example, in 1896, Samuel Train
Dutton was superintendent of schools in Brookline, Massachusetts, when
he wrote the ever-popular “Morse Speller,” which enjoyed its 13th
edition in 1903. In it he wrote: “To the Caucasian race by reason of
physical and mental superiority, has been assigned the task of
civilizing and enlightening the world.” 

Vacovone reports that at the advent of the 20th century, “the
overwhelming majority of American textbooks” began with the
assumption underlying Thomas Maitland Marshall’s popular “American
History,” first published in 1930, that “the history of the United
States was the history of the white man, his struggles against Native
Americans (usually rendered as ‘red savages’), and his need to
control the lives of African Americans,” who sought to destroy
“the superior race.” Marshall, a professor of history at
Washington University in St. Louis, began his textbook with the
headline “THE STORY OF THE WHITE MAN.”

Typical among these prominent textbooks, Marshall said very little
about the establishment and growth of slavery, preferring instead to
dwell on “slave character.”  Regardless of his situation or
condition,

_the negro of plantation days was usually happy.  He was fond of the
company of others and liked to sing, dance, crack jokes and laugh; he
admired bright colors and was proud to wear a red or orange
bandana….He was never in a hurry, and was always ready to let things
go until the morrow.  Most of the planters learned not to whip, but
loyalty, based on pride, kindness and rewards, brought the best
returns._

Leading textbooks written by prominent historians like James Ford
Rhodes, president of the American Historical Association, relied on
“science” promoted by scholars such as Harvard University’s
famed ethnologist Louis Agassiz, and informed their readers that
Blacks were either a separate species or vastly inferior humans,
“indolent, playful, sensual, imitative, subservient, good, natured,
versatile, unsteady in purpose, devoted and affectionate.” With
shocking example after example, Yacovone establishes, simply by
quoting the textbooks themselves, that until the mid-1960’s,
“American history instruction from grammar school to the university
relentlessly characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, an
enjoyable time and a gift to those Africans who had been lucky enough
to be brought to the United States.”

“The history we teach,” Yacovone observes, “is the product of
the culture we create, not necessarily of the actual history we
made.”  He cites Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon Litwack who
blamed historians as the one group of scholars most responsible for
the “mis-education of American youth” and for doing the most to
warp “the thinking of generations of Americans” on the issue of
race and African Americans.

In “The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural
Society”_ _(1998), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. bluntly declared that
“white Americans began as a people so arrogant in convictions of
racial superiority that they felt licensed to kill red people, to
enslave black people, and to import yellow and brown people for peon
labor.  We white Americans have been racist in our customs, in our
conditioned reflexes, in our souls.”  And, as Blatt and Yacovone
have so ably demonstrated, in our textbooks and political science.

HOW THE LEGACY OF TEACHING WHITE SUPREMACY LIVES ON

The lasting value of the excellent books by Blatt and Yacovone is to
equip us to confront the renewed, widespread and coordinated efforts
by conservative lawmakers to erase the grudging progress that has been
made since the 1960s in teaching American history and replace it with
a modern version of the racist textbooks and distorted political
science these authors have exposed.

In April 2022, PEN America, the literary and free expression advocacy
organization, released an alarming study entitled “Banned in the
USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’
First Amendment Rights
[[link removed]].” It
documents decisions to ban books in school libraries and classrooms in
the United States from July 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022.  The study
concluded that “state legislators are introducing — and in some
cases passing — educational gag orders to censor teachers, proposals
to track and monitor teachers, and mechanisms to facilitate book
banning in school districts.”  PEN America noted “a profound
increase in both the number of books banned and the intense focus on
books that relate to communities of color and LGBTQ+ subjects.”

In total, for the nine-month period in question, PEN America listed
1,586 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,145
unique book titles by 874 different authors, 198 illustrators and 9
translators, impacting the literary, scholarly and creative work of
1,081 people in 86 school districts in 26 states, representing 2,899
schools with a combined enrollment of over 2 million students. Of all
bans listed, 41% (644 individual bans) are tied to directives from
state officials or elected lawmakers to investigate or remove books in
schools. The report calls this “an unprecedented shift in PEN
America’s long history of responding to book bans, from the more
typical pattern in which demands for book removals are initiated by
local community members.”

Among the banned titles, PEN America found “common themes reflecting
the recent backlash and ongoing debates surrounding the teaching and
discussion of race and racism in American history, LGBTQ+ identities
and sexual education in schools”: 467 contain protagonists or
prominent secondary characters of color (41%), and 247 directly
address issues of race and racism (22%); 379 titles (33%) explicitly
address LGBTQ+ themes, or have protagonists or prominent secondary
characters who are LGBTQ+; 283 titles contain sexual content of
varying kinds (25%), including novels with sexual encounters as well
as informational books about puberty, sex, or relationships. There are
184 titles (16%) that are history books or biographies. Another 107
titles have themes related to rights and activism (9%).

The PEN America report confirms that “these bans are overwhelmingly
happening in districts where school authorities are not following best
practice guidelines to protect students’ First Amendment rights,
often making opaque or ad hoc decisions, in some cases in direct
contravention of existing policies.”

These findings overlap and align with those recently released
[[link removed]] by
the American Library Association (ALA) in 2021, which document “an
unprecedented number of book bans in public schools and
libraries.”  According to the ALA report, in 2021, “libraries
found themselves at the center of a culture war as conservative groups
led a historic effort to ban and challenge materials that address
racism, gender, politics and sexual identity. These groups sought to
pull books from school and public library shelves that share the
stories of people who are gay, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of
color, immigrants and refugees.” The ALA was quick to note that
“we know that banning books won’t make these realities and lived
experiences disappear, nor will it erase our nation’s struggles to
realize true equity, diversity and inclusion.”

For example, the ALA reports that Texas State Rep. Matt Krause
sponsored a bill prohibiting schools from teaching lessons that might
make students feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of
psychological distress” because of their race. Krause also wrote to
a number of Texas school districts, demanding to know if the
districts’ libraries included any of the 849 books listed in his
letter. The list, comprising primarily books that address the
experiences of Black and LGBTQIA+ people, spurred a number of school
and public libraries to remove books from library shelves. According
to the ALA report, “librarian Angie Manfredi put the situation in
perspective when she said that some of the book ban backers don’t
want children to learn about the experiences of underrepresented
groups, including African Americans and LGBTQIA+ people.”

In January 2022, PEN America also issued a comprehensive report
[[link removed]] entitled
“Educational Gag Orders,” which disclosed that state legislatures
across the United States were considering legislation “intended to
restrict teaching and training in K-12 schools, higher education and
state agencies and institutions.” The majority of these bills
“target discussions of race, racism, gender and American history,
banning a series of ‘prohibited’ or ‘divisive’ concepts for
teachers and trainers operating in K-12 schools, public universities
and workplace settings.” The report finds that the “bills appear
designed to chill academic and educational discussions and impose
government dictates on teaching and learning.”

The report identified that between January and September 2021, 54
separate bills were introduced in 24 legislatures. Since then, PEN
America has continued to track these kinds of bills. As of January
2023, the total number of bills
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to a whooping 227 in 40 states.  All of the bills have been
introduced by Republicans.

The report concluded that

_Collectively, these bills are illiberal in their attempt to legislate
that certain ideas and concepts be out of bounds, even, in many cases,
in college classrooms among adults. Their adoption demonstrates a
disregard for academic freedom, liberal education and the values of
free speech and open inquiry that are enshrined in the First Amendment
and that anchor a democratic society. Legislators who support these
bills appear determined to use state power to exert ideological
control over public educational institutions. Further, in seeking to
silence race- or gender-based critiques of U.S. society and history
that those behind them deem to be “divisive,” these bills are
likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of
students, educators and trainers who are women, people of color and
LGBTQ+._

In addition, the “bills’ vague and sweeping language means that
they will be applied broadly and arbitrarily, threatening to
effectively ban a wide swath of literature, curriculum, historical
materials and other media, and casting a chilling effect over how
educators and educational institutions discharge their primary
obligations.” According to PEN America, “the movement behind these
bills has brought a single-minded focus to bear on suppressing content
and narratives by and about people of color specifically—something
which cannot be separated from the role that race and racism still
plays in our society and politics. As such, these bills not only pose
a risk to the U.S. education system but also threaten to silence vital
societal discourse on racism and sexism.”

PEN America noted that it is “not a coincidence that this
legislative onslaught followed the mass protests that swept the United
States in 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. As many
Americans and U.S. institutions have attempted a true reckoning with
the role that race and racism play in American history and society,
those opposed to these cultural changes surrounding race, gender and
diversity have pushed back ferociously, feeding into a culture war.”

In particular, the report found that certain “Republican legislators
and conservative activists have capitalized on this backlash,
borrowing the name of an academic framework — critical race theory
(CRT) — and inaccurately applying it to a range of ideas, practices
and materials related to advancing diversity, equity or inclusion.”
This “critical race theory” framing device has been applied with a
broad brush, with targets as varied as The New York Times’ 1619
Project, the efforts to address bullying and cultural awareness in
schools, and even the mere use of words like “equity, diversity and
inclusion,” “identity,” “multiculturalism” and
“prejudice.”

Echoing what Blatt and Yacovone found, “Educational Gag Orders”
reveals that these “bills will have—and are already
having—tangible consequences for both American education and
democracy, both distorting the lens through which the next generation
will study American history and society and undermining the hallmarks
of liberal education that have set the U.S. system apart from those of
authoritarian countries.”

PEN America points out that the “teaching of history, civics and
American identity has never been neutral or uncontested, and
reasonable people can disagree over how and when educators should
teach children about racism, sexism and other facets of American
history and society.” But it warns that “in a democracy, the
response to these disagreements can never be to ban discussion of
ideas or facts simply because they are contested or cause
discomfort.  As American society reckons with the persistence of
racial discrimination and inequity, and the complexities of historical
memory, attempts to use the power of the state to constrain discussion
of these issues must be rejected.”

Therefore, PEN America intends “to sound the alarm and recognize
these bills for what they are: attempts to legislate constraints on
certain depictions or discussions of United States history and society
in educational settings; to stigmatize and suppress specific
intellectual frameworks, academic arguments and opinions; and to
impose a particular political diktat on numerous forms of public
education.”

“Teaching White Supremacy” and “Race and the Making of American
Political Science,” as well as PEN America, the American Library
Association and a growing number of other organizations and
individuals are sounding the very same alarm. Will we return to a time
when American institutions were free to teach racism and white
supremacy as the accepted account of this nation’s history and
destiny? Or will Americans — students of all ages — be carefully
taught that the universal dignity and worth of every person entitles
them to equality, inclusion and justice free of hatred, bigotry and
discrimination?

_Stephen Rohde is a constitutional scholar, lecturer, writer,
political activist and retired civil rights lawyer. He is the author
of “American Words of Freedom” and “Freedom of Assembly,” and
is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and Los
Angeles Lawyer magazine._

* Black History
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* teaching history
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* Racism
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* misinformation
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* white supremacy
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