Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project: Why Anti-CRT Bills Matter to Higher Education

The fight over Texas' HB 3979 bill that I've addressed in this blog over the past few weeks is currently a K-12 issue. That said, higher education should care deeply about this as it will soon migrate to higher education. This is already happening in Idaho [read: Idaho moves to ban critical race theory instruction in all public schools, including universities], as well as in the case of award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones' who was denied tenure by the University of North Carolina Board of Regents. 

According to Adam Serwer at The Atlantic, this took place because of her viewpoints, most notably, her work on the "1619 Project." This is clearly a blow to Academic Freedom that exists to create a space in universities to be independent thinkers, scholars, and critics, a feature of liberal democracies that like a free press, help society to be informed and self-correcting.

The UNC Board of Regents disregarded this, as well as her meritoriousness.  Merit always counts in such decisions, however, Hannah-Jones' Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur genius grant weren't sufficient because key people in power do not want to address our country's deep racial divides—even if doing so promotes domestic tranquility and a virtuous society. 

They subscribe instead to the unsupportable myth that history plays no role in today's unequal outcomes, thusly necessitating a suppression of critical readings of history which is what the fight over HB 3979 is about, as Serwer thankfully also mentions below. The irony here is an inescapable contradiction that if inequality were solely an artifact of one's individual effort and ability, then why fear the truth of history?

Just as we know that the 50s gave rise to the 60s [see: "It Was The Stultifying 1950s That Provoked The 1960s Rebellions], Serwer's conclusion that moves like these are what set the stage "for the next awakening" is historically on point. And for that, we should be hopeful, grasping in a fresh way, I trust, the power of history, historical memory, and critically consciousness teachers and professors.

-Angela Valenzuela

Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project

Objections to the appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones to an academic chair are the latest instance of conservatives using the state to suppress ideas they consider dangerous.

MAY 21, 2021

Adam Serwer, staff writer at the atlantic

RAQUEL ZALDIVAR / CHICAGO TRIBUNE / GETTY / THE ATLANTIC

Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism.

The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s appointment to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship, after a “rigorous tenure process at UNC.” But in an extraordinary move, the board of trustees declined to act on that recommendation. Hannah-Jones was instead offered a five-year, nontenured appointment following public and private pressure from conservatives. Notably, other Knight Chairs at the journalism school have been tenured on its professional track, which acknowledges “significant professional experience” rather than traditional academic scholarship. Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer and MacArthur genius grant surely qualify.  

One anonymous trustee told NC Policy Watch that “the political environment made granting Hannah-Jones tenure difficult, if not impossible.” A statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted that “if it is accurate that this refusal was the result of viewpoint discrimination against Hannah-Jones, particularly based on political opposition to her appointment, this decision has disturbing implications for academic freedom.”

Adam Serwer: The fight over the 1619 project is not about the facts

If you’ve taken recent debates about free speech and censorship at face value, you might find Hannah-Jones’s denial of tenure deeply confusing. For the past five years, conservatives have been howling about the alleged censoriousness of the American left, in particular on college campuses. But the denial of tenure to Hannah-Jones shows that the real conflict is over how American society understands its present inequalities.

The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.

The 1619 Project is a particularly powerful part—but not the cause—of a Black Lives Matter–inspired reevaluation of American history that began in the waning years of the Obama administration. Many Americans were struggling to understand how a nation that had elected a Black president could retain deep racial disparities not only in the rate of poverty, access to education, and health care, but also in matters of criminal justice and political power. The election of Donald Trump, a president who understood American citizenship in religious and ethnonationalist terms, accelerated that process of reevaluation.

Like all the works this period of reevaluation has produced, the 1619 Project has its flaws—although fewer than its most fanatical critics would admit. But the details of its factual narrative were not what conservatives found most objectionable. Rather, they took issue with the ideological implications of its central conceit: that America’s true founding moment was the arrival of African slaves on America’s shores.

Hannah-Jones’s conservative detractors cast this claim as an argument that America is a fundamentally and irredeemably racist country—indeed, as NC Policy Watch notes, a columnist at the right-wing James G. Martin Center complained that the 1619 Project “seeks to reframe American history as fundamentally racist.” A different columnist at the same organization fumed that “young people—the white ones, at least—are even taught to hate themselves for the unforgivable sins of their ancestors.” The idea that ugly aspects of American history should not be taught, for fear that students—white students in particular—might draw unfavorable conclusions about America, is simply an argument against teaching history at all.

In truth, the animating premise of the 1619 Project is more threatening to the right—the idea that America can indeed be redeemed, by rectifying racial imbalances created by government policy.

Clint Smith: Telling the truth about slavery is not ‘indoctrination’

The fight to define the American past is not new. In the middle of the 20th century, a massive conservative backlash erupted in California against a textbook co-written by the celebrated Black American historian John Hope Franklin. In it, Franklin offered a very different rendition of Black history from the one found in generations of American textbooks that hewed to doctrines of white supremacy and portrayed people of color in ways that were overtly racist or, at best, paternalistic. Franklin’s reevaluation of American history was, like Hannah-Jones’s, related to a national movement for Black rights.

The civil-rights movement of the mid-20th century was concurrent with the academy’s reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, whose attempts at building a genuine multiracial democracy in the South had until then been portrayed by most white scholars as a tragic mistake. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to the historian C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow as the “historical bible” of the movement, by which he simply meant it showed that segregation had been the product of political choices rather than an inevitability. New choices could be made.

The tone of the textbook Franklin co-authored, Land of the Free, remained “resolutely patriotic,” as Joseph Moreau wrote in his account of the conflict in his book Schoolbook Nation. But this was not sufficient for the textbook’s opponents, who, Moreau wrote, believed that “history teaching existed to cultivate patriotism” and that the “debunking of historical myths or premature attempts to furnish young people with painful truths could not be countenanced.” Anxiety over the civil-rights movement, and this reevaluation of American history, fueled a white backlash against the textbook, and rewarded conservative politicians willing to exploit that sentiment. Franklin’s history was closer to the truth than the version his opponents wanted to promote—but the accuracy of the history was beside the point.

Again, it is not the case that every proposal to remedy racial inequality or fight discrimination is a good one. As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has argued, some suggestions to remedy inequality in education are misguided or counterproductive. Good intentions do not a good idea make. But to accept that a problem exists is to accept the obligation to find a solution. And conservatives who don’t want to address America’s deep racial disparities are attempting to suppress any reading of history that suggests contemporary inequalities are the product of deliberate choices.

To that end, conservative opponents of what they derisively refer to as “wokeism” are engaged in a campaign to stigmatize such arguments, and where they can, use the state to purge them from the educational system. State legislatures are outlawing the teaching of “critical race theory” which in this context as my colleague Adam Harris reports, is ultimately a shorthand for “anything resembling an examination of America’s history with race.” The Trump administration threatened to investigate institutions of higher education that discussed systemic racism, and conservative state governments are interfering with state institutions of higher education.

In Texas, legislators are seeking to ban the teaching of the 1619 Project, and suppress the role of slavery in the state’s independence. The 1836 constitution of the Republic of Texas not only protected slavery, but also barred slave owners from emancipating the enslaved and denied “Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians” the ability to become citizens. The state government is seeking to prevent exhibits at the Alamo from “explaining that major figures in the Texas Revolution were slave owners.” As with the Trump White House’s “1776 Commission,” whose report reads like a Twitter thread from a cocaine-addled right-wing Wikipedia obsessive, the objective here is not a more accurate history but one that justifies the present economic and racial hierarchy, and offers conservatives, as Moreau put it in his book, a “comforting alternative to the burdens of the past.”

In the specific case of Hannah-Jones and UNC, the objective is to intimidate those who might share her views by showing that such views could cost them a job. As the conservative writer and aspiring politician J. D. Vance put it in a speech to the Claremont Institute, “If you’re fighting the values and virtues that make this country great, then the conservative movement should be about nothing if not reducing your power and if necessary destroying you.” The traditional argument between American liberals and conservatives is over what problems the state can or should remedy; the position of the Trumpist GOP is that the state is an instrument for destroying your enemies—by which its members simply mean Americans who disagree with them.

This won’t work with Hannah-Jones; in fact, I suspect it will make others more sympathetic to her arguments. But UNC’s decision also reflects an unhealthy conservative preoccupation with her as an individual—like many of us, Hannah-Jones has a combative social-media presence that has drawn critiques more personal than substantive. Although the essays from a variety of scholars and journalists published in the 1619 Project provoked a number of interesting discussions over issues such as slavery’s relationship to capitalism or health disparities, in the political debate these have been shunted aside in favor of a campaign to punish Hannah-Jones personally, and thereby discredit the 1619 Project as a whole, rather than contest its individual assertions or arguments.

Such attempts to stigmatize positions one disagrees with are a natural part of how societies form a consensus of acceptable opinion, and are distinct from using the power of the state to silence one’s opponents. But in this case, the same people who insist that harsh criticism of their ideas or behavior is a form of censorship are also highly engaged in using the state to suppress speech, on the grounds that the ideas they oppose are too dangerous to be allowed the usual protections.

The historical record shows that efforts to use the power of the state to settle an argument usually fail, although they can be successful for a time. The irony is that these awakenings about the truths of American history are the result of people attempting to warp the facts into a narrative that reassures them of their essential virtue, and subsequent generations discovering that what they were taught was but a bedtime story. These attempts to use the state to suppress ugly realities about the past are merely setting the stage for the next awakening.

ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.

In other words, Idaho wants its citizens to fly blindly into life. Be insensitive to the call for sensitivity to difference that rests at the conceptual center of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Become immune to others' experiences in the world. Be actively ignorant.

How is the banning of CRT a recipe for success in an increasingly diverse world? Have these folks in Idaho not read the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Bible that can be fully interpreted from a CRT lens? It teaches us that being open to difference is a much higher calling than being distrustful and cynical toward others—and most especially in their hour of need.

May I never become immune to others' experiences in the world.

I do take comfort in knowing that CRT existed before there was a name for it and will continue to exist after its banned. After all, we will always continue to learn much from the lived experiences of racism, sexism, classism, transphobism, and the like in society despite the predictable fashioning by the dominant group of illusory, inaccurate views of how society works—or doesn't work—as the case may be.

After all, a more heterogenous life experience provides more conceptual anchors from which to analyze social inequality, separate from what those in power want us, as minoritized subjects, to believe and parrot. Rather than learning from diverse viewpoints for which CRT courses create space, this anti-intellectual posture seeks to block alternative views of lived experience.

That's what makes this stance fascist: We are all being told what and how to think, that is, ahistorical, decontextualized, de-personalized, and prescriptive. These are ways of knowing that come with a cost. That is, how can we as a diverse society learn to live differently with each other—ideally, at peace in a vibrant democracy—if we're not open to reconceptualizing our ways of relating to each other in ways that the CRT classroom generally provides?

Why not unmask prejudices and bias? Don't we all want to be better people in the world and assume responsibility for our own growth? What would Jesus want us to do? Certainly not what we see playing out in Idaho and other places.

Hence, to be against CRT is tantamount to the institutionalization of ignorance, arrogance, and insensitivity. This is hardly a virtuous education. Far from it, especially since it ironically reinscribes majority-minority relations anew! "Once a Samaritan, always a Samaritan" is not the actual takeaway from this parable. Or at least it shouldn't be...

Thanks to Dr, Valerie A. Martinez for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

Idaho moves to ban critical race theory instruction in all public schools, including universities

By Leah Asmelash, CNN

Updated 5:48 PM ET, Tue April 27, 2021

The bill, having passed the state legislature, now awaits Gov. Brad Little's signature.

(CNN)As some public school districts move toward embracing critical race theory in their curriculums, others -- like in Idaho -- are doing the opposite.

Idaho lawmakers have advanced a bill that would prohibit public schools, including public universities, from teaching that "any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior," which, according to the bill, is often found in "critical race theory."

It also prohibits teachings arguing that "individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin."

Critical race theory and teachings like it "exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the well-being of the state of Idaho and its citizens," the bill reads. Proponents have argued that students are being indoctrinated.

The bill, HB 377, passed the state House last week and the Senate Monday. It now awaits the governor's signature.

Critical race theory has become politicized in recent months, with proponents arguing the area of study is based on Marxism and a threat to the American way of life. But the study, according to scholars, explores the ways in which a history of inequality and racism in the US have continued to impact American society today.

"It's an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it," Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor at UCLA and Columbia universities, told CNN last year.

CNN reached out to Idaho state Rep. Julianne Young and Sen. Carl Crabtree, both sponsors of the bill, for comment, but did not receive a response.

"The passage of HB 377 and the accompanying insinuations about Idaho teachers are very disappointing," said Layne McInelly, president of the Idaho Education Association, in a statement. "This is a 'monster under the bed' problem brought about by a false and misleading narrative that some legislators have willfully conflated. They aim to diminish the public's trust in our teachers and schools, just to come back next year and push to privatize education."

The bill has become a high-profile issue in the state, as dozens of Idaho students and teachers protested peacefully on the steps of the state legislature on Monday before the Senate vote, and filled the Senate gallery during the debate.

As HB377 is debated and passed by the Idaho Senate Monday, April 26, students and teachers filled the gallery.

"We have a group that's put out public comments that our teachers are brainwashing our children with a liberal, leftist indoctrination and that's simply not true," Idaho state Sen. Janie Ward-Engelking said during the debate, according to CNN affiliate KIVI.

Meanwhile, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin announced a task force earlier this month, aiming to "examine indoctrination in Idaho education and to protect our young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism."

"As I have traveled around the state and spoken with constituents and parents, it has become clear to me that this is one of the most significant threats facing our society today," McGeachin said in a news release. "We must find where these insidious theories and philosophies are lurking and excise them from our education system."

Across the country, public school entities are considering the inclusion of aspects of race education in school curriculums. In March, after years of debate, California approved an optional ethnic studies model curriculum for districts to employ if they so choose.

"By affirming the identities and contributions of marginalized groups in our society, ethnic studies helps students see themselves and each other as part of the narrative of the United States," a draft of the California curriculum reads. "Importantly, this helps students see themselves as active agents in the interethnic bridge-building process we call American life."

Other locales have made similar moves. Last year, Connecticut announced it will require high schools to offer African American, Black, Puerto Rican and Latino studies, becoming the first state in the nation to do so. Also last year, the San Francisco school board approved the development of a K-12 curriculum in Black Studies.

And yet, the area of study has been weaponized by some Republican lawmakers. In September, former President Donald Trump called critical race theory "divisive, anti-American propaganda," language similar to that found in HB 377.

"Students in our universities are inundated with critical race theory. This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed," Trump said at the time.

CNN's Faith Karimi contributed to this report.

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