I didn’t want to write this post. I frankly don’t find censorship very interesting, because it’s so obviously illiberal. Where’s the argument? I was reluctant to spend a whole post on it.
Plus, the censorship that’s been occurring lately has originated mainly with the Republican Party, and I always find it uninteresting when progressives like me criticize conservatives. Again, it’s so obvious, so trite. There are thousands of other progressive writers lambasting GOP censorship. Critiquing my own side is far more intellectually and emotionally challenging.
Nevertheless, when I told Ron—a high school teacher—about this series on recent American illiberalism, he told me I had to cover censorship if I was going to be thorough. He was of course right—and as it turns out, some aspects of this trend are quite interesting after all.
The GOP’s recent censorship has focused mainly on banning “Critical Race Theory” from schools, which you already know if you’ve been paying attention. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a 40-year-old academic theory. Here’s a little summary of it from a 2021 EdWeek article by Stephen Sawchuk:
The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies…
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
It’s been argued that CRT isn’t actually being taught in K-12 schools, and that may technically be true. As Sawchuk says, “much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.” But it does influence K-12 teaching, and quibbling about this technicality distracts from what we’re really debating.
What we’re really debating is whether and how our country’s history of racism, and the issue of ongoing racial injustice, should be taught in schools. I find that debate interesting indeed.
Here’s my attempt to articulate what each side of the debate wants.
One set of people (on the left) wants kids to understand that racism has been embedded in our country since white settlers first set foot here, and the various ways that even today, we’re inextricably linked to that racist history and its effects in the present. To this group, unpacking this complexity is necessary for moving forward, healing the wounds of generational trauma, and fixing inequity.
Another set of people (primarily on the right) are alarmed at the way teaching about systemic racism seems to divide us and the way discussions of systemic racism can devolve into the shaming and dismissal of white discussion participants. As Sawchuk says:
Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
Unlike many other progressives, I’m not inclined to dismiss this criticism outright. I wrote last year about realizing that discussions of racism can indeed be divisive, just as conservatives say. Instead of talking much about racism, conservative critics want us to focus on loftier ideals and shared democratic values and to tell a more positive national story: one of triumph over past racial injustice. They feel this story will be more unifying and thus better for the country.
Sawchuk also points out that this is the latest round in a long-term “canon war” about what should be included in school curricula.
In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.
As I’ve read my fellow progressives’ myriad critiques of the CRT bans, I’ve been frustrated by the straw-man arguments they often use. Yes, censorship is bad—I’ll get to that boring point in a moment. And yes, there is surely some racism and/or unconscious bias embedded in the conservative instinct to stop kids from examining racism very closely at school. And yes, CRT is being mischaracterized by conservative leaders as they use it as the latest wedge issue in the culture war.
But none of that means conservative concerns about CRT are totally invalid. How should we teach kids about the more shameful aspects of our country? That is a debate worth having.
As is so often the case, I think both sides have insights to offer here. Looking past the ugliness swirling around this issue, it’s clear to me that in a way, both sides are aiming to heal our national wounds. They just have opposite strategies for healing, with one party wanting frank discussions and the other worried that those discussions will do more harm than good (and both parties disagreeing about various points along the way). Both of these strategies demonstrate some wisdom and some foolishness about human psychology.
Part of the left’s wisdom is in knowing that when it comes to emotional pain, “the best way past is through.” The wounds of historical and present-day racism are real, and people need to unearth, vent, and process our wounds in order to heal them and reach a resolution. It also seems reasonable that the more we collectively understand inequity and its true origins, the better we’ll be able to level the playing field for future generations.
When I read descriptions of Critical Race Theory, its concepts sound reasonable and true to me. They are what I believe. The playing field isn’t level. I do think these concepts should be taught in K-12 schools.
And yet, at the same time, teaching kids a fundamentally negative outlook on their country and its history would be unwise. Bad for the kids, who might wind up overwhelmed, cynical, and disempowered, and bad for the country, because democracies need buy-in from their citizens in order to function.
If we grow up being told we have a terrible country that has committed atrocities since its founding, what will be our motivation for participating in that country in any meaningful way? Won’t we just want to throw up our hands, “burn it down,” and start over from scratch?
I’ve heard many progressives, including teachers, say they can’t think of much to be proud of about our country. Given the harm done to Black and Indigenous people, the unjust wars of the last half-century, and the destruction our capitalist ethic has wrought on the planet and the disadvantaged, they mainly feel shame about our country instead of pride.
And as someone invested in liberal democracy and global stability, that lack of pride concerns me gravely. I can see the wisdom conservatives are offering here: we do need to tell positive, hopeful stories that empower young people, give them a feeling of national pride, and bring us together as a nation.
So I feel there must be a middle ground—a way to teach kids about the realities of racial oppression, past and present, and to teach the many aspects of our country that nevertheless ought to instill pride. To me, our ideals, our Constitution, and our civil society are well worth preserving. And I’m proud of the progress we’ve made in creating, if not a perfect society yet, one of the most egalitarian societies humankind has ever seen. There are few other times and places I would rather have been born.
We can teach students to hold these conflicting truths at once. We have wounds to heal and flaws to fix, and we have much to be proud of.
Back to illiberalism. 🙂
Despite their having wisdom to offer in the debate over what should be taught, Republicans have overstepped in their recent attempts to control what’s allowed to be taught. After years of calling out the left’s illiberalism, they’ve enacted profoundly illiberal laws in many conservative states.
On the surface, the text of these CRT-banning laws seems largely innocuous. When I first read the text of Texas’s two laws (HB 3979 and SB 3), I actually saw various aspects that struck me as positive. I was pleasantly surprised, for example, to see the new requirement of civics, which apparently hadn’t been part of the Texas standard before. Schools will now be required to teach kids critical thinking and fact-checking skills. That’s a good thing, and I have a feeling it will ultimately benefit the left more than the right!
But illiberalism is embedded in the laws—in their restrictions on how exactly history and contemporary issues around oppression are to be taught, with very little leeway for teachers to think their own thoughts or offer their own interpretations.
As a Texas Tribune article says:
The advent of slavery in America could not be taught as representing the true founding of the United States, but rather a “deviation” from American principles… Students also couldn’t be required to learn about the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, which aims to put “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
In other words, if a teacher points out that despite the founders’ contention that “all men are created equal,” many of them enslaved other human beings and insisted that slavery remain an integral part of the country and wrote it into the Constitution, then that teacher will risk accusations of teaching history the “wrong” way and potentially being fired.
These laws and others like them have sent the message that when teaching about racial injustice, past and present, educators should be very cautious and should confine their teaching to a narrow set of concepts defined by the state. This message has already had a chilling effect as teachers and schools self-censor out of fear of accidentally breaking the law.
Then there’s the outright banning in the law —the barring of award-winning, highly relevant articles from the highly credentialed New York Times. This is blatant censorship. It prevents teachers from exercising their own free thought and discretion on how to teach. Even a teacher who disagreed with the 1619 Project, but wanted to use it as a subject of critique, would not be allowed to include it in the curriculum.
And these anti-CRT laws are part of a broader, growing conservative movement to ban various books from schools —books that have been taught and read for years, but that are now being swept up in the fury.
Historically, conservatives aren’t the only ones guilty of censorship. To Kill a Mockingbird is regularly stricken from school curricula by progressives concerned about its white-savior story or its racist language. Powell’s Books, possibly the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world, removed Andy Ngo’s anti-antifa book Unmasked from its shelves in January 2021 and then unironically celebrated “Banned Books Week” the following September.
But just as progressives are more prone to cancel culture and “civility skepticism” than are conservatives, when it comes to censorship, conservatives seem to be the main culprits. Although some of their concerns about CRT are well-reasoned, banning it from classrooms is not the solution.
Censors on both sides of politics undoubtedly find their own censorship acceptable and the other side’s censorship abhorrent. But ultimately, both are doing the same thing: trying to protect people, especially kids, from feeling uncomfortable — in the case of banning the 1619 Project or To Kill a Mockingbird, uncomfortable with our country’s history of racial oppression and the way it affects us in the present.
And in both cases, the same Enlightenment principle stands: the best way to solve problems is not to gloss them over but to pick them apart in all their intricacy, exploring them rigorously from different angles, testing hypotheses and worldviews and rejecting some of them, until eventually the best ideas are left standing. Kids need to learn to do this. Teachers need the freedom to teach them how to do it. That’s what school is for.
Racial oppression is inextricably part of our country’s history, part of the terrible legacy we all have to grapple with. But the liberal, enlightened way that we grapple with it is also part of our history — a way that includes freedom of speech and thought, and the skills to have civil discussions about uncomfortable subjects. That’s a part of our history we ought to preserve, teach, practice, and be proud of.
Censorship is bad. Need I say more?
