Gillian Frank and Adam Laats: This Critical Race Theory Panic Is a Chip Off the Old Block

Sharing this piece from Slate.com as it provides some historical grounding on the nature of conservative outrage in the context of the anti- anti-racist teaching and curriculum agenda. We've been here before my friends and it isn't pretty.

-Angela Valenzuela

Gillian Frank and Adam Laats: This Critical Race Theory Panic Is a Chip Off the Old Block

How 20th-century curriculum controversies foreshadowed this summer’s wave of legislation.

A demonstrator in Charleston, West Virginia, on Dec. 3, 1974. AP Photo

By the 1970s, backlash against supposedly progressive curriculums had ossified into predictable outcries about unpatriotic content, which often meant targeting material that dignified Black voices. Even if conservative complaints were rote, their activism was literally explosive. In Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, white parents reacted with violent rage to false rumors about the contents of popular textbooks. In this case, a new series of English language arts textbooks had been approved by the state. One school board member, Alice Moore, warned that the books were full of anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-white propaganda and indoctrination.

These warnings stoked a fire that had been smoldering for decades. For weeks at the start of the 1974–75 school year, outraged parents boycotted the schools and their “dirty books.” Protesters shot and vandalized school buses. They threw firebombs into empty school buildings. They exploded a dynamite bomb at the school district headquarters. Their fury, once again, was only loosely connected to reality. In this case, protesters had circulated flyers at the picket lines, warning that the books were sexually graphic. Opponents also objected to the inclusion of excerpts of work by Black authors such as Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. By doing so, the textbooks—one conservative parent told a school board meeting—reduced the English language to “the language of the ghetto.”

Outraged white parents took to the streets to defend their children from exposure to such words and ideas. The supposed excerpts about sex were nowhere to be found in the actual textbooks under review. Still, protest leaders such as Alice Moore defended their opposition to Black authors. They were tired—as Moore said—of being called “racist” merely for “insist[ing] on the traditional teaching of English.” When it came to conservative outrage, the actual content of the books did not matter. As one boycott leader explained, “You don’t have to read the textbooks. If you’ve read anything that the radicals have been putting out in the last few years, that was what was in the textbooks.”

In addition to the immediate violence and destruction of the boycott, the Kanawha County campaign led to familiar long-term damage. Teachers censored themselves. As one teacher remembered, she and her colleagues were terrified by all the “chaos.” Another teacher remembered checking with her principal before she taught a lesson in biology class about the asexual reproduction of mollusks. She did not want to be accused of warping young minds about sex. Teachers stopped teaching books such as 1984 and Brave New World, on the off chance that someone might find them too controversial.

Today’s backlash against the alleged teaching of critical race theory in America’s schools, like these earlier flare-ups over humanities curricula, holds the same potential to curb honest reckonings with the American past and present. As with prior reactionary movements, opponents of CRT maintain that American history is not meant to be merely another set of facts for children to learn. Instead, history must be a well of inspiration, a pure source of greatness from the past. From this perspective, CRT is any dangerous drop of doubt that will contaminate comforting white fantasies about America’s past, present, and future.

Classes in subjects that include the history of race and racism might be banned or canceled, due to the chilling effect of the backlash; some schools have already gone there. Even worse, teachers and students may resort to a stultifying self-censorship, avoiding topics that are vitally important precisely because they help students understand the true contours of America’s troubled history. It’s impossible to face history if teachers are always looking over their shoulders. And for those cynically leading the charge against CRT, that’s precisely the point.