We Must Keep Teaching Toward Equity
Among the oft-repeated lines from James Baldwin’s writing is one that has become a rallying cry for advocates of racial justice: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Baldwin’s insight first appeared in his 1962 New York Times essay, “As Much of the Truth as One Can Bear,” a meditation on what our country’s canonical literature at the time revealed about mainstream America’s capacity to assess the actual social and political health of the nation. In the piece, Baldwin also observes,
“It is, alas, the truth, that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred. It means fighting an astute and agile guerilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.”
Half a century later, in an address on a phenomenon she identifies as post-traumatic slave syndrome, Dr. Joy DeGruy discusses the persistence of the panic Baldwin described when she asks why there is still so much cultural resistance to confronting the trauma of slavery. As DeGruy explains, peeling back layers of this trauma suffered directly by African Americans involves peeling back layers of trauma for all of us. But unless we look squarely at that trauma, she says, “none of us can heal.… This is a collective process.... It’s not just a pointing of fingers. All of us have been impacted by historical, multigenerational trauma.”
At present, however, longstanding and expanding educational efforts to confront that historical trauma are under a coordinated attack that has spread swiftly through panic-fueled rhetoric. In recent months, legislative attempts to restrict teaching about racism and bias have spread to 28 states. Educational practices grouped by their opponents under the term “critical race theory” include, among other things, teaching about the history of enslavement and its crucial role in this nation’s story, and analyzing the persistent impacts of structural racism in this country and elsewhere.
Such educational practices are mandatory in public education curricula and instruction in some states, and they should be mandatory and supported in all states. If our multiracial nation is ever to achieve its potential as a truly democratic body, we must continue to face, and help young people face, the full history of our nation — including the parts that are hardest to confront — as well as the damaging reverberations of that history. Only in the context of an ongoing, rigorous analysis of our past and its impacts on our present can we direct the course of our shared future toward real equity and true freedom for all of us.
It’s important to pause here to examine the term “critical race theory” (CRT) — a phrase coined in the 1980s in the field of legal studies to describe ways in which structural racism can lead to differential legal outcomes that are inflected by racial identity. It’s also essential to consider the misleading way in which this term has recently been appropriated, especially in the last year, by those proposing to ban educational practices they say fall under the heading of CRT.
St. Louis attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey offer a clear example of the current rhetorical use of the term “critical race theory” by many Trump loyalists and other far-right conservatives. The McCloskeys first became internationally notorious on June 28, 2020, when they brandished firearms at a group of racial justice protesters, some of them children, who were marching past the McCloskeys’ mansion en route to the nearby home of St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson. In an article the next day, St. Louis American reporter Sophie Hurwitz, who witnessed the event, noted the bias revealed in the only incident report the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department filed on the day of the protest: “...[T]he victims advised the group that they were on a private street and trespassing and told them to leave,” the police report reads. “The group began yelling obscenities and threats of harm to both victims. When the victims observed multiple subjects who were armed, they then armed themselves and contacted police.”
That report contradicted the clear evidence of several videos taken at the scene, on the basis of which the McCloskeys were later charged with felonies (they pled guilty to reduced charges in June 2021 only to be pardoned by Mike Parson, Missouri’s Republican governor, six weeks later). Six months later, while their own criminal case was still pending, the McCloskeys filed a lawsuit against a group of teachers and administrators at Villa Duchesne, a Catholic school in an affluent St. Louis suburb, on behalf of a white student and her parents. Mark McCloskey — an alumnus of another nearby private school— said of the suit, “The goal is to stop the indoctrination of students with this critical race theory and to also make the community aware that even at Catholic parochial schools, this bizarre, racist, anti-racism is being force-fed down the throats of their children.” The McCloskeys’ preliminary statement in their St. Louis Circuit Court filing reads as follows:
“Villa Duchesne, an elite college preparatory girls Catholic high school, engages in overt and intentional racial discrimination against its Caucasian students including Daughter herein by encouraging and facilitating race-based aggression against her promulgated by African American fellow students and through the use of coercion, intimidation, and threats by faculty and administrators to attempt to force Daughter to adopt or espouse the political philosophies of Critical Race Theory, including but not limited to attempts to indoctrinate Daughter into the concept that all Caucasians are racists by virtue of being Caucasian and that African American students should be free from discipline regardless of their behavior.”
The timing and rhetoric of the McCloskeys’ suit against one private school in St. Louis reveals much about the national story of far-right backlash against the global burgeoning of the racial justice movement during the summer of 2020, the season when the term “anti-racism” entered the mainstream lexicon as people around the world protested the blatant brutality of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The language of the McCloskeys’ suit against Villa Duchesne directly echoes the language in a memorandum that Russell Vought, head of then-president Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, had sent to the heads of federal agencies in early September. Vought wrote,
“The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.... [A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these unAmerican propaganda training sessions.”
This memo laid the groundwork for a much more elaborate statement by President Trump on September 22, 2020 in Executive Order 13950, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” Part of the section of E.O. 13950 that defines “divisive concepts” is of particular interest:
“‘Divisive concepts’ means the concepts that (1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist; (3) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (4) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (5) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; (6) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (7) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (8) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (9) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.” [Emphasis mine.]
The word “inherent” signals a key way in which those currently opposing equity education misrepresent those who are working toward equity and justice both in education and other institutions. Equity educators and activists understand race and racism to be constructs, and thus not inherent or essential qualities of any individual person. It is the very constructedness of race and racist structures that indicates the possibility of positive change — and the capacity for intentional change is the opposite of determinism. Led by those who have worked for equity and justice through generations, those who strive toward equity and justice now understand this simple fact: because systems that oppress were built, systems that liberate can be built in their place.
To that end, on Jan. 20, 2021, just a few hours after his inauguration, President Joe Biden overturned Executive Order 13950 with Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved,” which offers this key definition: “For the purposes of this order... the term ‘equity’ means the consistent and systemic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American Persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons, persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.”
So on day one, President Biden blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to shut down diversity and equity training and teaching, and reauthorized programs designed to advance systemic equity. Since then, the conservative alarm cries over CRT have grown louder. Russell Vought, author of the memo quoted above, has gone on to found The Center for Renewing America, the website of which asserts that
“The widespread manifestation of Critical Race Theory into K-12 curricula and ‘diversity training’ around the country has become an increasing flashpoint as outraged parents, families, citizens, and communities aim to push back against this corrosive worldview. The imposition of state sanctioned racism by progressive ideologues is intended to corrupt children and future generations into both self-loathing and hatred toward their fellow countrymen. Proponents of Critical Race Theory use our university campuses to radicalize our own children.... They use their control of HR departments and boardrooms of corporate America to impose this radicalism in all private workplaces. Their organized mobs terrorize private citizens with a “cancel culture” that seeks to erase the people and ideas who refuse to adopt their totalitarian mindset.”
Terms like “corrosive,” “state-sanctioned racism,” “self-loathing,” “radicalism,” “mobs,” and “totalitarian” tell the tale of the barely masked “American panic” Baldwin described in the passage quoted at the top of this essay, a panic that is tonally comparable to the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950s.
And we who teach are rendered vulnerable to that panic and the politicians wielding legislative expressions of it like so many firearms. In a June 2021 episode of the podcast Undistracted, host Brittany Packnett Cunningham discussed the furor over so-called critical race theory with famed legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term back in the 1980s. As Crenshaw explained, CRT began as a legal framework for “looking at law’s role in creating both race and racism.” Crenshaw continued,
“We believe that race is not essential. We believe that race is a fiction, but law has helped turn that fiction into reality. It has helped turn what it means to be white and what it means to be Black into concrete realities that stretch all the way back to 1619 and all the way to this present moment.”
Critical race theory is about telling a more complete story of how the laws that can protect some can oppress others. “The whole story,” Crenshaw said, is that “law has enslaved us; law has sometimes been a tool to help us fight against the contemporary consequences of that past; but law can also turn on a dime and justify all sorts of practices that we clearly see as... contemporary echoes of a white supremacist past.” As Crenshaw clarified, while classical critical race theory has been taught in law schools and other level graduate programs, it has not generally been taught in K-12 education. But what is part of K-12 education, Crenshaw said, “is critical thinking about race and racism… [that] racism is not inherent, but racism is real, and it has created real consequences, both historically and now. That’s important work that needs to be done.”
Crenshaw noted that the timing of this swiftly spreading panic over CRT is predictable: it is one more iteration of a much-repeated pattern in our country’s history, that of retrenchment in reaction to reform. What those attacking diversity- and equity-informed training and education are trying to do, Crenshaw said, “is create a mythical story about our past that whitewashes so many of the truths about how we’ve come about — about the fact that the wealth of this country has been built on stealing labor and stealing land, and rationalizing that theft by characterizing the people whose land and labor has been stolen as less than white people.” That mythical story is built on insecurity and grievance in the face of power-sharing in a multiracial democracy, “And we have to build a coalition that calls that out,” Crenshaw said.
Such grievance and insecurity was thinly veiled beneath the bravado of Mark McCloskey’s comment on the final outcome of his and his wife’s own criminal trial in June 2021, when both pled guilty to charges for their gun-brandishing that had been reduced from felonies to misdemeanors. “This is a good day for the McCloskeys,” Mark McCloskey said after the verdict was announced. “The prosecutor dropped every charge except for alleging that I purposely placed other people in imminent risk of physical injury, right, and I sure as heck did.... I’d do it again any time the mob approaches me.… I stood out on the porch with my rifle and made them back up…. If that’s a crime in Missouri, by God I did it, and I’d do it again.” The landing page of the website for McCloskey’s campaign for U.S. Senate features a photo of him and his wife with their AR-15 rifle and semi-automatic pistol on the day of the 2020 protest.
Meanwhile, early this summer, a local school board in Tennessee fired a tenured teacher for teaching a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay published in The Atlantic, as well as, on a separate occasion, showing the same high school class, called Contemporary Issues, a video of a spoken word poem called “White Privilege.”
I graduated from Metro Nashville public schools in Tennessee, but I don’t teach in my home state. I teach in a progressive independent school in Missouri, a state where anti-CRT legislation has been proposed but has not yet passed. In my twelfth-grade English class, I teach James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; I cannot teach either of those works without contextualizing them within the history of structural racism in this country. In my seventh-grade English class, I teach Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Jaqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, and again, I cannot teach those books without also teaching the real histories they rise out of and represent. If I worked in a Tennessee public school, my actions in both classes could get me fired.
The pressure created by the conservative-led agenda to silence educators who teach the truth about American history and racial trauma is driving a clear need for the sort of coalition building Crenshaw advises. In the introduction to her podcast conversation with Crenshaw, Brittany Packnett Cunningham, a former elementary school teacher, said, “We have to question what is preserved by teaching children a lie in the first place. If you are afraid of teaching the history, it’s because you know what’s in it. Spoiler: it’s white supremacy…. That’s why teaching is the frontline of the revolution. Because people who understand how oppression functions can set themselves and everybody else free.”
I’m with Packnett Cunningham. I’m with Kimberlé Crenshaw, too. I’m with James Baldwin. I’m with students and their right to an uncensored examination of history. I'm with all at my school who for the last quarter century have worked toward greater equity and inclusion — a network of committed visionaries that reaches from board members, to the diversity director and the office of DEI, to administrators, to fellow teachers and staff members, to parents, to students. I’m with all who believe in the potentially transformative power of listening to the full stories of those who have been underserved by this nation’s structures and policies.
I’m with those who believe that we can make positive change for all in our multiracial society when we cultivate empathy and power-sharing, rather than fear and power-hoarding, as our operative communal values. I’m with everyone who believes that critical reflection on the origins and dynamics of the racialized structures that still bind us is a key part of loosening, then shedding, those binds. I’m with the students — including white students — whose growth into fully functional adults and citizens is served by compassionate honesty and obstructed by avoidance and deception.
I know that many educators in both public and private schools are also aligned in the desire to transform our curricula from those that obscure the truth to those that tell it — for the sake of our students and the future of the country. What is clear, however, is that we’ll need to step up our efforts this year, form coalitions and work together to counter the American panic that is being fueled by lies about equity education and is manifesting in the manipulation of our legislative and judicial systems. In an August community conversation about the CRT controversy sponsored by NYU’s Steinhardt Metro Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation Schools, Executive Director David E. Kirkland said, “We won't shrink from this moment; we will rise. We believe that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. We are inventors.”
We can be that brave. We must be brave enough to work together to invent an educationally fair and functional future. By supporting our students as they learn to think critically — and bravely, too — we open the path toward real healing and freedom for everyone. I’m with all of you who believe this, too, and teach accordingly.
Ellie DesPrez, Ph.D., a graduate of Metro Davidson County Public Schools (Tennessee), Vanderbilt University, and Washington University, has worked in public and independent schools for over three decades. Since 1998, she has taught English at John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where she also serves on the Faculty and Staff Steering Committee for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.