Is there an uncontroversial way to teach Americas racist history?
If you follow politics at all, youve likely encountered phrases and terms such as critical race theory or anti-racism recently. Theres a debate raging over the history and legacy of American racism and how to teach it in schools. The current iteration of this debate (and there have been many) stretches back to 2019, when the New York Times published the 1619 Project, but it evolved into a kind of moral panic in the post-Trump universe, in part because its great fodder for right-wing media. The hysteria over critical race theory, or CRT, has now spilled beyond the confines of Twitter and Fox News. As I explored back in March, conservative state legislatures across the country are seeking to ban CRT from being taught in public schools. There are lots of angles into this story, and frankly, much of the discourse around it is counterproductive. The main issue is that its not clear what these concepts mean, as tends to happen when ideas ( la postmodernism) escape the confines of academia and enter the political and cultural discourse. Conservatives have appropriated critical race theory as a convenient catchall to describe basically any serious attempt to teach the history of race and racism. Its now a prop in the never-ending culture war, where caricature and bad faith can muddy the waters. A few weeks ago, I read an essay in the Atlantic by Jarvis R. Givens, a professor of education at Harvard University and the author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Givens studies the history of Black education in America, focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. His essay is mostly about the blind spots in the public discourse around race and education. But in it, he raises a point that seems overlooked: The uproar over CRT isnt about anti-racist education itself  Black educators in Black schools have practiced that for more than a century. Rather, its about the form anti-racism takes in classrooms with white students. Teaching this history to Black students comes with its own complications, but were having this discussion because white parents are protesting and entire news outlets are obsessed with it. So, I reached out to Givens to talk about why this conversation is so hard, how he responds to some of the criticisms of CRT, why he thinks its crucial to not get stuck with a single narrative of Black suffering, and why an honest attempt to teach the history of race in America is going to create a lot of unavoidable discomfort. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. Sean Illing  The term anti-racism has become so muddled that a lot of people probably have no idea what it means. Jarvis R. Givens  Its about teaching the history of racial inequality and the history of racism, to understand that its about more than individual acts of racism. The idea is that students  and educators  should have a deep awareness of how racist ideas and practices have been fundamental in shaping our modern world. Students need to be able to have these discussions honestly so that new generations of students arent just aware of this history, but can also acknowledge and comprehend how our actions can disrupt those historical patterns or reinforce them. But one thing I tried to do in my piece was remind people that anti-racist teaching isnt new. Weve been talking about it in public as though its this novel thing, and perhaps its because so much of this discussion is about how to teach white students, but for well over a century, Black teachers have been modeling an anti-racist disposition in their pedagogical practices. They recognized how the dreams of their students were at odds with the structural context in which they found themselves. And they had to offer their students ways of thinking about themselves that were life-affirming, despite a society that was physically organized in a way that explicitly told them they were subhuman. Sean Illing  I dont want to pass over what you just said about teaching white students, because that does seem to be what this is really about, and you can see it in the debate over critical race theory.  You gestured at the criticism I hear the most: that CRT (and, I guess by extension, anti-racism education) is built on an assumption that the study of racism has to be anchored to a commitment to undoing the power structure, which is seen as a product of white supremacy. To the extent thats true, the complaint is that its not really an academic discipline or an approach to education  its a political ideology. Jarvis R. Givens  I hear what youre saying, and Im not going to argue that there are no clear political commitments on the part of those scholars who gave us CRT. One thing Id be interested to hear, however, is an alternative approach to teaching the history of America, or the history of anything, quite frankly, that doesnt have an embedded set of political commitments. Any approach to framing history is going to have some political commitments baked into the narrative. The choices we make about what to highlight or omit, all of that reflects certain values and biases. Its just that we often take these for granted when its the preferred or dominant history. In the end, I dont see how you can completely remove politics from the work of education or the production of history. I dont think its ever fully possible, and thats something that isnt usually acknowledged in these conversations. Jarvis R. Givens  The best educational models can teach us to recognize injustices, and they can cultivate a commitment to resisting those things, but equally important  and this is something Black educators have done for a long time in their own communities  is modeling other ways of being in the world, other ways of being in relationship to the world. If youre striving to create more justice in the world, you cant do that if youre only focusing on the things youre trying to negate. You cant just be anti whatever. You have to have some life-affirming vision that you can hold on to, a vision thats more meaningful and points us in the direction of a better world. You have to teach people not just to resist injustice but to transcend it. This is what the Black educational models Ive studied have always done, and its lost in so much of the debate about anti-racism and CRT today. Jarvis R. Givens  I think its important because I dont want to be stuck with this narrative of Black people as frail and suffering and nothing else. If thats the image thats necessary to advance some agenda, we need to rethink some things. Im not interested in painting this picture of Black folks as only living lives in suffering. If our strategy for seeking justice relies on this image of black folks as damaged and down and out, well, it just falls into a lot of old tropes that we have to be wary of. Absolutely, theres injustice. This is a part of the story, part of our story, but Black life is much more expansive than that. It always has been. And so many of our efforts to demand justice have relied on painting an image of Black people as damaged and deficient, and Im always interested in trying to resist that, and to expand the aperture for how we have these conversations. Our strategy cant be just about proving injury. At the same time, the public has to stop denying that harm and violence has been and continues to be done. Both of these things are challenges before us. Sean Illing  Take an enormous concept like structural racism, which is a catchall to describe how contemporary inequalities have their roots in history and institutions. On the one hand, thats just obviously true. But at the same time  and I think you share this instinct  we dont want to reduce people to historical props with no agency, and we dont want to define any oppressed group by the actions of their oppressors. Jarvis R. Givens  Yeah, its about taking both structure and agency seriously. This is one of the things I tried to get at in my book. I was interested in writing against the dominant narrative that we tend to have about Black life and education prior to Brown v. Board. And this is not to diminish the significance of Brown v. Board of Education, but I was interested in thinking outside of the single narrative weve inherited: that Brown was necessary because Black people only had schools that were falling apart, with outdated secondhand textbooks, [because] the self-image of Black children was damaged and Black folks had no power. All of this was baked into the Jim Crow school structure, this racially divided school structure. Proving this, and demonstrating the inherent inequality of Jim Crow, was necessary to achieve the Brown decision. But to take that as the total narrative of Black educational life is a mistake. Having studied the history, its hard for me to paint the story in such a broad stroke. This concern, for me, began with the story of Black teachers that were writing textbooks that challenged the distorted representation of Black life in the dominant curriculum. You have all of these organizations that were created to advocate on behalf of Black educators and students. You have people like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis and Angela Davis, who are the products of these schools and the teaching within them. There was still more to that story than just the narrative of aggressive neglect, of Black schools being starved of resources. This is all to say, we can hold both things in our minds. We can talk about the violent resistance against Black educational strivings and the intentional underdevelopment of African American schools, but we also have to rigorously account for the things Black folks were doing on a daily basis to make meaningful education possible despite the neglect. And I think thats necessary if we are to appreciate the suffering and the beauty of Black peoples experience in education, if we are to account for their human striving across generations. Its liberating, as a student of history, to realize that so much of it is manufactured. This is essential not just for those of us who write history, but also those of us who are consumers of it. We have to know that the histories presented to us consist of narratives based on decisions people made to represent some aspect of the past. Its all distortion in some way. Its important to know that our narratives and origin stories about the past  well, we create them. One of the best things my high school US history teacher did for me was help me understand that no history is an exhaustive representation of anything. She made me aware of silences. When you allow students to have the agency of knowing that history is not always as authoritative as we tend to imagine, it actually invites them to establish a deeper intellectual relationship with the past. It allows us to think about why certain scholars might have chosen to represent certain aspects of the past in the ways that they did. Im not interested in painting this picture of Black folks as only living lives in suffering  Sean Illing  So much of your work focuses on anti-racist education during the Jim Crow era, but we live in a different world today  a flawed world but undoubtedly a better world. Jarvis R. Givens  This is actually getting at another element that I think is important: A lot of the conversations around anti-racist teaching are directed at white teachers and white students, without actually being named as such. This is obviously very different than talking about how Black educators engaged Black students in the Jim Crow South, or even my own experience growing up in Compton, California, where I attended majority-Black schools with mostly Black teachers. Im not going to offer any prescriptive elements about what it means to try and do this work. But Ill go out on a limb and say this: A fundamental part of being a critical educator, an educator committed to justice and equality, means being committed to reckoning with the history of racial injustice and trying to teach students in a way that supports the development of a critical awareness of that past, which includes acknowledging how that past continues to structure the ways in which were in relationship with one another in the present. It means recognizing that many of the institutions we have inherited have very long roots in this history. Theres a moral imperative for all teachers who choose to face those realities of history and own it in the present. Being an anti-racist teacher in this moment means to honor the depth of human suffering reflected in that history by telling the truth about it. But then again, thats what anti-racist teaching has always demanded of those educators who chose to teach in a manner that was disruptive to the racial inequality in our society. You cant look away from it because its in every direction you turn. I do recognize that learning the truth about our histories as different racial groups, and as a country, can be difficult. Theres going to be some level of discomfort, and we have to be real about that. Confronting the history of slavery and Jim Crow has always been difficult for Black people, those who lived through it and their progeny. We dont experience our ancestors suffering in full, but the marks are still there. Sean Illing  Discomfort is probably key here. And in that spirit of keeping it real, lets just say it: There are a lot of white people in this country, especially white parents, who see all the scary headlines about CRT and the 1619 Project, and they dont like it. They see anti-racism as anti-white and its  uncomfortable. I dont know how to teach the truth about Americas past in such a politically fraught environment, but its something were going to have to figure it out in real time, and its going to be messy. Jarvis R. Givens  To be honest, I dont really have an answer, because unfortunately, we havent had the courage to teach our history honestly. We just havent tried it. What weve always had instead is a lot of resistance to talking about our past beyond a surface level. But one thing I do know is that there are some people in this country who never had the luxury of not facing this stuff. And theyve always encountered a lot of discomfort. Its not comfortable for Black folks or Native American communities to think about the history of land dispossession or slavery or Jim Crow or lynchings, and how the legacy of these things persist today. I guess what Im saying is that certain folks never had the luxury of being comfortable. So now were at a place where were trying to figure out how to be more intentional in acknowledging our history and its consequences, and that means that discomfort is going to have to be shared in a way it hasnt been up to this point. And if were going to talk about how to unify the country, the onus cant just be on the people who are the descendants of enslaved Black people and displaced Native communities, whose forced labor and stolen land were the primary factors of production in building this country. This is something we all have to encounter, and its going to be discomforting for everyone.