Banning Critical Race Theory Could Have a Chilling Effect on How Educators Teach Racism

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Perhaps no topic has dominated education news in 2021, such as the debate over whether Critical Race Theory should be taught or if it is even taught in American schools.

Critical Race Theory is an academic framework that argues that racism is ingrained in American society and its institutions.

The debate over whether K-12 students should be exposed to this theory has prompted some Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass laws to ensure this never happens. In early July 2021, six states passed laws to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools, although laws rarely mention Critical Race Theory by name.

New laws in Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Tennessee all prohibit teaching that any race is superior. Laws also prohibit teaching that anyone should be discriminated against or mistreated because of their race or gender. In short, it seems that these laws protect all students against racism and sexism in the classroom.

But the problem arises when laws seek to control what teachers can say about whether a state or the nation itself was racist from the start, or whether the United States or any other state sought to promote white supremacy through through their laws.

A dilemma for teachers

Will these newly passed laws force educators to paint a rosy picture of the Americas’ past? Or do they still allow legitimate discussions about the role that racism has played in legally sanctioned racist practices, such as slavery and racial segregation?

As a curriculum theorist who studies how school curricula portray different events in history, I’m concerned that laws may lead teachers to avoid topics that they think might get them in trouble, even if it is not known what kind of problem it could be.

But first, let’s take a look at what some of these laws actually say.

In Iowa and Tennessee, the laws state that teachers cannot teach that the United States is inherently racist.

How can a teacher in Iowa or Tennessee explain that the United States was not fundamentally racist, when at the time of its founding racial slavery was legal and remained so until after the Civil War ?

Texas law requires teaching that slavery and racism were strictly deviations, betrayals, or breaches of the genuine founding principles of the United States, which include freedom and equality.

Does that mean that a teacher in Texas now has to say that Founding Fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison betrayed the genuine founding principles of freedom and equality because they owned slaves?

These are not philosophical questions.

What is distortion?

Not all measures against critical race theory take the form of laws.

In Florida, for example, the Department of Education passed a new policy that says teachers must be factual and objective. He also says they cannot suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, civil war and reconstruction.

But the policy also states that the bias includes teaching critical race theory. The policy makes it clear that it refers to the theory that racism is not just the product of prejudice, but that racism is ingrained in American society and its legal systems in order to maintain the supremacy of white people.

The policy further prohibits the use of material from Project 1619. This was a series of New York Times articles that linked the founding of America to a slave ship that arrived in Virginia in 1619.

Florida policy also says that teachers cannot define American history as anything other than the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles set out in the Declaration of Independence. The instruction must also include the United States Constitution, Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments, the policy states.

Potential conflicts

These restrictions create quite a bit of worry for, say, a Florida social studies professor. Now, such a teacher must figure out how to tell students what the Founding Fathers really meant when they wrote We the People in the US Constitution, without saying that the Founding Fathers were racist for excluding black people from the meaning of that phrase. .

Teachers can be torn between whether to follow these new laws and policies or follow their code of professional ethics, which states that teachers should not deliberately delete or distort subjects relevant to student progress.

How do teachers explain the motivation behind Florida law that prohibited unmarried interracial couples from spending the night together until the United States Supreme Court overturned it in 1964? How do teachers explain why Americans of Japanese descent were held in internment camps during WWII?

These are questions that lawmakers have essentially forced teachers to grapple with before embarking on teaching American history. But there are no satisfying answers for teachers, who will be forced to twist the story somehow.

Either they’ll twist history in the eyes of lawmakers who say it’s wrong to teach America was racist from the start. Or they will twist history by ignoring the fact that, as the United States Supreme Court once noted in 1857, black people were not meant to be considered citizens under the United States Constitution and no therefore had no constitutional rights.

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