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Tamales Fundraiser

 

GOP’s Banning of Books and Attack on Teachers Expose the Party’s Rising Fascism

 GOP’s Banning of Books and Attack on Teachers Expose the Party’s Rising Fascism

 

The attacks on suppressed histories of racism represent an updated modern civil war.

 

By Henry A. Giroux

Shortly before Virginia’s gubernatorial election on November 2, the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, circulated an ad in which a white woman calls for Virginia public schools to ban classroom discussions of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved.

Pandering to racist fears and white racial anxiety, Youngkin also stated he would ban from schools what the right wing is inaccurately describing as “critical race theory,” a term which actually refers to a body of legal scholarship, but which right-wingers like Youngkin are using as a catch-all to describe any discussion of systemic racism in the U.S. And Youngkin made the boldface and dangerous assertion that educators are destroying America. Days later, Youngkin received 50.6 percent of the vote, defeating Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

Youngkin’s attack on Virginia teachers’ ability to discuss structural racism are just one example of the GOP’s ongoing attack on public and higher education — an attack that is closely aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure.

The Republican Party makes clear that educational practices that inform, liberate, empower and address systemic problems that undermine democracy are both a threat to its politics and a deserving object of disdain.

The Republican Party’s view of “patriotic education” draws directly from the playbook of previous dictatorships with their hatred of reason, truth, science, evidence and the willingness to use language as a source of dehumanization and violence. This is a language that operates in the interests of manufactured fear while producing a void filled with despair. This is a form of apartheid pedagogy that embraces the cult of manufactured ignorance, freezes the moral imagination, erases unsettling forms of historical memory and works to discredit dissent among individuals and institutions that call attention to social problems.

The attacks on suppressed histories of racism represent an updated modern civil war. This is a war against reason and racial injustice that reproduces itself through the production of, as Toni Morrison herself notes, “cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies.”

Matters of conscience, social responsibility and equity have been purged from a Republican Party that feeds off the ghosts of an authoritarian past. Its disdain for justice and civic responsibility is also evident in its defense of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, its refusal to accept the election of Joe Biden as president and its immersion in a culture of lies.

The spirit of the Confederacy is obvious in the GOP’s voter suppression laws and its support of white nationalism and white supremacy. The spirit of U.S. authoritarianism is also alive in the Republican Party’s efforts to capture the machinery of state power in order to invalidate state elections along with attempts to suppress the votes of people of color. Such actions are frighteningly similar to attacks on Black voters during Reconstruction.

The legacy of Jim Crow and an updated version of the Southern Strategy are the driving forces in the Republican Party’s attempts to remove from public and higher education, if not history itself, any reference to slavery, racism and the teaching of other unpleasant truths. In this instance, white racial fears are activated, functioning like a coma to enlist the public in increasing acts of censorship, surveillance, and other practices that deaden the moral imagination and sense of civic justice.

The current policing of education in the United States cannot be abstracted from a larger strategy to identify the institutions and individuals who “make trouble” by uncovering the truth, resisting the warmongers, and exposing the violence at work by those politicians who invite the public “to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and snitches.” Drawing on the work of Russell Banks, I believe that the currentattacks on educators who teach about the history and contemporary realities of racism are part of a broader attempt to silence those “committed to a life of opposition, of speaking truth to power, of challenging and overthrowing received wisdom and disregarding the official version of everything.”Authoritarianism and education now inform each other as the Republican Party in numerous states mobilizes education as a vehicle for white supremacy, pedagogical repression, excision and support for curricula defined by an allegiance to unbridled anti-intellectualism and a brutal policy of racial exclusion. Republican legislators now use the law to turn public education into white nationalist factories and spaces of indoctrination and conformity. Republican state legislators have put policies into place that erase and whitewash history, and attack any reference to race, diversity and equity while also deskilling teachers and undermining their attempts to exercise control over their teaching, knowledge and the curriculum.

Read more.

https://truthout.org/articles/gops-banning-of-books-and-attack-on-teachers-expose-the-partys-rising-fascism/

 

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge, 2018) and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018) and The Terror of the Unforeseen (LARB Books, 2019). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.

 

OP-ED

 

EDUCATION & YOUTH

Jim Crow Politics Have Descended on Education

For the GOP, higher education is now a battleground for conducting a race war waged in the spirit of the Confederacy.

by 

Henry A. Giroux, 

Truthout

 October 27, 2021

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What Is Critical Theory ?

 Critical theory / not Critical Race Theory 

From:  Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education.  

Duane Campbell.  4^th. edition. 2010..

Critical Theory

 

Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy

Beginning in the 1970s, a new approach to schooling for student empowerment developed in the United States. This alternative intellectual tradition, known as critical theory and critical pedagogy,  had four major historical contributors in the U.S.: the work and influence of Paulo Freire; the work and influence of scholars who followed the lead of Althusser and Gramsci  (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985); feminist scholars who were searching for alternative understandings of gender relationships; and the political movements of empowerment, from the Mississippi Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement to current struggles to rebuild the schools for democratic citizenship.

Critical Theory 

Educators using critical theory assume that men and women have a moral imperative toward developing their own humanity  and freedom. This assumption differs from the “scientific” positivist or empiricist scholarly tradition, where researchers assume the need for neutrality and objectivity of investigation (see Chapter 6). Critical theorists further assume that the current problems of any society are subject to investigation and change. They assume that individuals and groups can and should work together to build a more democratic education system and a more democratic society.

Education writers urging the use of critical theory in the United States include Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Lois Weis, Alma Flor Ada, Jim Cummins, Kathleen Weiler, Carlos Torres, Joan Wink, Antonia Darder, Stanley Aronowitz, and several of the co-authors of this book.[1]

The following concepts are central to critical theory and are useful in trying to comprehend and analyze your own teaching experience:

•     Consciousness: Awareness of yourself and your environment. Consciousness includes self-awareness. For example, “multicultural consciousness” refers to a recognition of the ethnic, racial, and social divisions in our society.

•     Culture: The collective knowledge of a group of people (described extensively in Chapter 2). Please note that European American critical theorists have tended to rely on European authors for descriptions of culture—authors who tend to emphasize class differences and to pay less attention to differences among cultures and ethnic groups.

•     Domination: The act of controlling an individual or group of people.

•     Empowerment: Education processes that lead to political courage and political efficacy. Empowerment strategies teach students to analyze and to act on their analyses. Empowerment strategies also help students gain social, political, and economic power, including the power to make their own decisions.

•     Ethics: Normative preferences and recognition that decisions are often  based on values rather than exclusively on objective research.

•     Hegemony: The overwhelming domination of ideologies or economic systems by a single group or source of power. Often ideological hegemony leaves learners unaware of alternative viewpoints. For example, most schools and teachers have an unexamined commitment to competitive grading.

•     Hidden curriculum: The variety of values and ideas taught informally in schools. These values,  attitudes and assumptions permeate school but rarely reveal themselves in lesson plans or tests. For example, U.S. schools commonly teach individualism, competitiveness, and a European American perspective on our nation’s history.

•     Ideologies: A series of interrelated ideas, such as racism or cultural pluralism. A dominant ideology is often taught in schools as if it were the only truth. For example, we are taught that the United States has a democratic government. Our system is then presented as the definition of democracy: two competing parties, regular elections, a free press, and limited government intervention in the economy. There are other models of democracy, but our particular system is taught as an ideology. In similar fashion, we are taught an ideology that our schools are politically neutral, even though they are clearly committed to the maintenance of the present economic/power system.

•     Ideological domination: Controlling the ideas presented to students by, for example,  by writing standards and  selecting the content of  tests and textbooks.

•     Social class: A group identified by its economic position in the society—that is, working class, poor, the wealthy,  owners of corporations. There are several contending descriptions of classes in the United States (see Chapter 4).

•     Social construction of knowledge: The observation that most knowledge is created by persons. What we regard as knowledge was created for a purpose. The concept of the social construction of knowledge treats knowledge as purposeful and as serving particular interests rather than as neutral and merely discovered. For example, IQ tests were generated for a particular purpose: to predict school success. They do not define intelligence; instead, they measure a specific kind of mental aptitude in relation to a specific purpose. As an alternative, Gardner (1983) proposes that the concept of multiple intelligences provides a different, more useful description of thinking processes.

Critical Pedagogy

At the turn of the last century, John Dewey (1859–1952) argued that a central purpose of schooling was to prepare students to build a democratic society. He thought that critical analysis and learning by doing were essential for the preparation of citizens in a democracy (Dewey, 1916/1966). Influenced by the massive European immigration from 1890  to 1920, Dewey was not an advocate of multicultural education as we presently know it. Like Jefferson before him, Dewey favored having schools lead the nation in developing a new, idealized, democratic American. Today, in a parallel period of massive immigration, Dewey’s works provide  important insights for the position that schools can serve in the cause of creating a democratic society.

In the 1970s, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire contributed to a  new interest  in and extension of Dewey’s ideas in the field of  education advancing a pluralistic democracy. Freire’s work revolves around a socially responsible humanism. Like Dewey, he believed that education has a central role in building a democratic society. But Freire’s writings offered a new and fresh view of education’s role as a participant in the political struggle to liberate oppressed people. He argued that ending oppression and the “culture of silence” in Brazil  was essential to the process of building a democratic, participatory community.

Freire first gained attention for the methodology he and his colleagues developed to teach literacy to the impoverished people of the Recife area of northeast Brazil. His first major book, A Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), described a revolutionary educational and social change process for the poor in Latin America. Freire believed that education workers could help empower adults by engaging in dialogue with them instead of falling into traditional teacher–student roles. The Brazilian military  government’s official response to his work was to arrest him in 1964 to stop the mobilization of the poor. After his imprisonment and eventual deportation, he worked for the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was soon being read and discussed throughout Latin America and among small circles of intellectuals in the United States and Europe (Freire, n.d., 1985; McFadden, 1975; McLaren, 2000). In it Freire describes the oppressive and colonizing functions served by traditional teacher-dominated schooling. Freire’s ideas have important ramifications for understanding the education of oppressed cultural and class groups in U.S. schools.

Prior to Freire’s work, most published education research and university work in social science education in the United States had suggested only technical improvements to the existing school curriculum. The “scientific study” of schools, common even today, used positivist, reductionist research methods (see Chapter 6). This research generally strengthened the school’s role in the domination of oppressed communities. Freire’s writings suggested new analytical concepts to describe the experiences of students. His work offered new hope and insight for teachers working with alienated and oppressed students in our own society. Teachers and activists searched his works and found alternative strategies for work with immigrant and working-class students. Freire’s work suggested solutions to the structural failure of poor children in U.S. schools, whereas the narrow research paradigms of positivism hid  the critical questions of race and class domination and provided few real alternatives.

Freire openly acknowledged that his views included a political pedagogy (Friere, 1998). He revealed the political and class dimensions underlying any education system. Education and schools could reinforce the domination of the existing structure, or they could introduce students to citizenship and freedom. Education could help young people to lead free and self-empowering lives. Following Freire’s lead, education teams in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Nicaragua taught the poor to read by helping community members analyze their life situations. Poor peasants engaged in community organizing to effect social change. Freire used the term praxis to describe the process of critical analysis leading to action. The experience of praxis empowers people to participate in democratic struggles. It gives students and teachers hope.   Multicultural education applies the principles of cultural action and praxis to U.S. public schools, particularly schools serving students of oppressed classes and cultures.

Conservative scholars accuse advocates of multicultural education of politicizing the curriculum. This charge has intimidated some multicultural education advocates and placed them on the defensive. Yet clearly the writings of John Dewey were profoundly political. Critics attack the political dimension of both Freire’s work and multicultural educational theory while refusing to acknowledge that Dewey’s major works provide the intellectual foundations of social justice teaching. Dewey argued that the schools should promote immigrant assimilation and build a democratic society. These are political goals. Freire’s work, like Dewey’s, recognizes the essentially political nature of education.

Both the present Eurocentric curriculum and its multicultural alternatives are highly political. The current standards-based, test-driven curriculum is a political project imposed by legislatures and the President. Realistically, a teacher’s choice is not between being political or neutral. Claiming political neutrality for schools actually supports the continuation of the current tracked, starkly unequal system—a profoundly political position.

The teaching strategies and attitudes described by Freire and adapted for social justice  multicultural education in the United States begin by respecting the prior cultural knowledge that all students bring to the classroom. Freire, like Dewey, argued for rooting the education experience in students’ real experiences. Freire believed that speech, language, and literacy can be understood only in a social context and that students learn language and literacy best in the context of their social experience. He worked with a number of adult literacy campaigns that have applied this principle and that have had enormous impact in societies seeking transition to democracy. Cultural action in literacy contributed to social change in Brazil, Chile, Guinea-Bissau, and Nicaragua (Freire, 1997). In his writings, Freire also applauded successful efforts in the United States—notably the  Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

   Both ethnographic research and Freire’s work in Latin America considered culture as a field of struggle, not as a fixed or static object.    In this view, developing an understanding of their culture helps students to respect themselves, to learn from the past, and to participate in the active creation of a democratic future.  The literacy programs designed by Freire and his colleagues used an ethnographic perspective to assist peasants in learning about their culture as a means of empowering them (Freire & Macedo, 1987). While many teachers in bilingual and multicultural sites were drawn to the work of Paul Friere and his collaborators  for ideas by their emphasis on culture and the power of the struggle for social justice,  other   teachers and authors, primarily African American ,  were engaged in developing a parallel U.S.  approach  known as  Culturally Relevant Pedagogy as described in Chapter 2.   

Critical Race Theory 

 Following developments in legal studies and the work of Clarence Bell,  activists, scholars, and teachers  in the 1990’s  focused   again on  examining race and racism as it played out in the U.S. and in our schools – a movement known as Critical Race Theory.      Advocates of  critical  race theory argued that race theory  complemented critical theory in  the struggle for social justice since   race and racism had not been sufficiently  recognized and  analyzed in developing most  bilingual and multicultural programs. 

Empowerment as a Goal

When students recognize their own cultural context, they can learn to think critically about it and make meaningful decisions about their life opportunities. Critical pedagogy, or problem-posing education, seeks to help students understand the world they live in and to critically analyze their real-life situations. Critical analysis, practical skills, value clarity, and self-confidence lead to empowerment. Participation in community development helps students develop the political courage to work toward the resolution of their real problems. Community action teams working with preliterate peasants in Latin America helped them to learn to read and perhaps to create a labor union or farmer cooperative. For students from oppressed or marginalized groups in the United States, the goals might be gaining admission to college, receiving a good-quality high school preparation for work, or counteracting crime in their communities.

The strong democratic social justice  perspective in  multicultural education, including critical race theory,  has adopted the goal of empowerment as central to education reform. By urging that schools help students build a more democratic society, multicultural education moves away from positivism’s stress on being an objective observer of events. Education projects designed for empowerment help students to take a stand. They provide opportunities for students to intervene in their own families and communities—to analyze situations, decide, act, and then to analyze their actions anew. Empowerment is taught to overcome disempowerment.

Teachers can teach about social justice at all levels, including the primary grades. Even the youngest children are interested in  the value of fairness .  The question is one of emphasis.  There is more reason to stress a multicultural social justice approach in high schools where the students are adolescents and approaching maturity. 

 High school students are  ready and interested in  studying their own realities and how to operate within the limits of our political/economic system. It is more urgent in high school that the students learn to take control of their own lives  and to overcome low achievement and tracking. The economic consequences, including incarceration, are more severe if students get left behind during their high school years.

Multicultural education that is social justice oriented deals directly and forcefully with social and structural inequities in our society, including racism, sexism, and class prejudice. It prepares students from oppressed groups to succeed in spite of existing inequalities. This approach argues for a bold commitment to democracy in schooling based on a belief in the learning potential of students from all races and classes, and both genders

 

Figure 7.2  describes this  approach of multicultural education that is social justice oriented.

 

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insert 7.2 about here

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___________________

SELECTING THEMES FOR EMPOWERMENT AND HOPE

Prior to 1998, teachers made the most fundamental decisions on what themes and concepts to teach and to emphasize   in their classrooms. Since then, the dominant standards movement assumes that teachers should follow a curriculum controlled and provided by the state or the district (see Chapter 12). In the area of reading and phonics  this often includes scripted lessons that tell the teacher precisely what to say (derived from remedial perspectives and the Teaching the Exceptional and Culturally Different viewpoint.) In this manner, the standards committee, or the district  or often the textbook publishers have decided precisely what the teachers should teach.

Both critical theory and a strong sense of multicultural education suggest an alternative approach: that teaching and learning should begin....

 

What Sullivan is describing is Post Modernism.  There are many left critiques of this.

 

My favorite is  The Post Modern Pooh, by Frederick Crews.

 

---

[1] See in particular Aronowitz and Giroux (1985), Freire (1997), Freire and Macedo (1987), Giroux (1988), McLaren (1989), and Weiler (1988).

Cultural War in the Classroom

 

CULTURE WAR IN THE CLASSROOM

 

It is time for educators to go on the offensive against the conservative campaign to ban critical race theory from schools.

 
Leo Casey, 
 
The American right ‘s latest culture war offensive is an all-out assault on critical race theory (CRT). Like other right-wing campaigns, the attack on CRT is taking place on two fronts one battle to define the term negatively in popular discourse, and another to enact laws and executive orders that severely restrict how racism is addressed in public schools and post-secondary public institutions. The two fronts work in tandem, feeding off each other; consequently, they must be addressed together.

The right has been shrewd in selecting its target. Founded in the 1970s by legal scholars, CRT has its roots in efforts to explore the ways that racial biases in the law result from structural and systemic inequities. In subsequent decades, the approach spread to disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, as well as to professional fields such as medicine and education, with the goal of investigating and analyzing systemic racism in different cultures and institutions. Today, its influence can be found in dozens of fields of research, and in thousands of texts by hundreds of authors.

 

Read more: 

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/culture-war-in-the-classroom

 

   

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/culture-war-in-the-classroom

Little Progress on Improving Learning for English Language Learners

A decade after a landmark report on English learners, California still has a long way to go to help students learn English.

The coalition Californians Together released a new report Wednesday on long-term English learners, defined as students who have been enrolled in school in the U.S. for more than six years, but who have not yet achieved full academic fluency in English.

Research shows most students who speak a language other than English at home become proficient in English within five to seven years. Those students who take longer are at risk of never becoming fluent and missing out on academic content in other classes unless schools do more to support them.

The report, titled “Renewing Our Promise: Research and Recommendations to Support California’s Long-Term English Learners,” is a follow-up to a landmark report on long-term English learners, “Reparable Harm: Fulfilling the Unkept Promise of Educational Opportunity for California’s Long Term English Learners,” written by researcher Laurie Olsen and released by the same organization in 2010. That report, still hailed by many educators today, was the first to put a name to the phenomenon of students who spend years in English-language schools without learning English.

California made major changes after that first report was published. The state now requires districts to identify students who are at risk of becoming or are long-term English learners. In addition, the state has also included long-term English learners in the English Language Arts and English Language Development frameworks. The English Learner Roadmap, a guide for school districts and education agencies to better support English learners, also includes specific strategies for long-term English learners.

edsource.org

Note: In spite of years of effort, there has been no measurable improvement in Sac City Unified. 

See our report.  https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/11455634/7475671096324601970

 

 

Teaching About Indian Genocide in California

 

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s not often that research for an article begins with my daughter’s elementary school textbook, but for an article published this week it was appropriate. Earlier this year I was alerted to a controversy at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law about the role of its founder in Gold Rush-era massacres. I wanted to see what California schoolchildren were taught about that period.

“The large numbers of people who immigrated and migrated to California led to more problems for California Indians,” the textbook said, adding that “settlers often moved onto Indian lands, and many Indians were killed in conflicts.”

What I learned from subsequently reading a dozen books on the subject, interviewing leading historians who study that era and poring through documents at the California state archives was how understated the textbook was.

The men who killed thousands of Indians from the 1840s to the 1870s were paid by the state of California and the federal government. Like modern-day corporate travelers, they filed expenses and were reimbursed. The massacres masterminded by Serranus Hastings, the founder of the law school, were just a part of the state-sponsored killings carried out across the state.

During the course of my reporting I learned about “Indian baby hunters” who roamed what is now Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte Counties with the express purpose of killing Indians to take their children captive and sell them.

I heard from Kevin Waite, a historian, that at the site of present-day Los Angeles City Hall, the city held a weekly “slave mart,” where Native labor was sold to the highest bidder.

And I read about a handful of legislators who in 1860 objected that the massacres of Yuki Indians were referred to as the Mendocino Indian War. To use the term “war,” they said, would be to dignify what was in fact a slaughter.

The Indians, they said, “make no resistance, and make no attacks, either on the person or residence of the citizen.”

(The Legislature ignored their objections and voted to pay the killers $9,347.39 for expenses incurred.)

Continue reading the main story

In 1850 a U.S. Army captain, Nathaniel Lyon, wrote to his superiors about the “most gratifying results” of an expedition that trapped and killed Native Americans along the Russian River. Captain Lyon, a West Point graduate, wrote that an island in the river the Native Americans could not escape from “soon became a perfect slaughter pen.” He estimated the number of people killed at “not less than 75” and probably double that number.

Some of the documents I found at the California state archives were written in an elegant calligraphy that belied their searing content.

Walter Jarboe, a militia leader who worked for Hastings, wrote Gov. John Weller in 1859 about the pursuit of Yuki tribespeople through Mendocino County.

“The fight lasted two hours,” he wrote matter-of-factly. “Killed 23 Indians.”

I felt that I was reporting from a haunted land. It reminded me of walking through prewar Jewish cemeteries in parts of Eastern Europe where Jews had been driven out. Or reporting from Cambodian villages and realizing that anyone with an education who was over a certain age had been purged by the Khmer Rouge.

The knowledge of the massacres came with a heaviness.

“People want and like positive histories,” said William Bauer, a historian who grew up in Round Valley, Calif., and is a member of the Wailacki and Concow Tribes. “It’s easier and much more enjoyable to think about the past being this kind of rugged individualism coming to California, participating in the Gold Rush and ignoring the violence that attended that event.”

Continue reading the main story

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Bauer told me he had visited Sutter’s Fort, the Sacramento Gold Rush landmark, when he was in high school. He noted that Indians were barely mentioned during the tour. He and many other historians believe that the way California history is taught needs to be changed to include more of the dark realities of what happened to Native peoples.

“I think it’s getting people to reckon with the fact that the history of the United States is built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land,” Bauer said. “And that the dispossession occurred violently.”

Greg Sarris, the chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a Northern California confederation of tribes, has contributed profits from a tribal casino to a project at the Smithsonian to teach Native history.

“The American Indian is a prick in the American conscience,” Sarris told me. “The real question is how do you ensure that the story gets told.”

Thomas Fuller is the San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times.

 

 

The Right-Wing Attack on Racial Justice Talk

The Right-Wing Attack on Racial Justice Talk: How critical race theory has become a handy target for an old-fashioned assault on civil rights.

Teachers and Reading Books

A Curriculum of Irrelevancy

Another ridiculous Zoom meeting with a school leader on the precipice of deciding no more classroom libraries because "some of the books might make kids question what their parents want them to know" has encouraged me to think that a Bloody Mary, made with tomato juice remember, is an important part of the food pyramid and I should partake right now. And doesn't vodka come from potatoes?

It has also made me so sad. We are so quickly moving down the path of sustaining a curriculum that is focused on the irrelevant ("Show three ways the author created tension in this short story."), as it guards white fragility and continues to deny a history that is a critical part in the country we are today.

Here is the conversation. All knew I was recording it. I promised not to mention school names, district names, size of district, or anything else thing else that could suggest a particular identity if I wrote about the conversation.

Principal: Dr. Beers, thank you for joining us. We've been asked to take a deep look at the books our high school social studies and ELA teachers have in their classrooms to make sure they present more than a single side of an issue. We had a concern raised by one parent because of a book her ninth grade daughter chose to read. This book was in her ELA classroom in a section marked "Autobiographies." Mrs. X, thank you for joining our call. Would you like to tell Dr. Beers what happened?

Mrs. X: Yes. Thank you. My ninth grade daughter is very sweet, very smart, actually an above-level reader. Her teacher has books in her classroom the students can choose to read. My daughter loves autobiographies and so she chose this book called Warriors Don't Cry. Do you know the book?

I told her I did. I refrained from saying that I met Melba Beals, the author, before I actually read Warriors Don't Cry and I sobbed while reading it. I'm no warrior. I didn't tell her I thought this autobiography of one of the Little Rock Nine to integrate their previously all white high school, should be required reading. I just said, "I have read it. Several times." She raised her eyebrows and went on.

Mrs X: Well, I didn't know she was reading it until one evening she read a part aloud to me and she was crying. She was crying! She said it made her sad to see what white people did to Black people and she wanted to know why white people were so mean and is that why when George Floyd got killed Black people were so angry. She said "it was like nothing had changed." The mother paused then went on: It was obvious that this book was making her feel bad for being white. No book should make a child feel bad for being white. Or, I guess, any other race. We didn't even discuss that George Floyd incident. It wasn't about us, so we didn't see any reason to discuss it. And here she was, thinking about it.

Principal: So, we have some new regulations here in [our state] that encourage having books that present the other side of a controversial issue in libraries, especially classroom libraries. We'd like your opinion on that.

At this point, I was wondering why I had agreed to be a part of this conversation, but I took a breath and began. "I think it is very simple. You have to define controversial. There is nothing controversial about what happened to Melba Beals and those other eight Black students. There is nothing to be controverted with her account - we know that because her account is documented by too many confirming stories and the white students who were the most consistently cruel to her have stepped forward, as adults, and recognized their abuse. There is no "good side" to the horrific year in her life and the abuses by many white people during this time of ending segregation in the South. If you want an example of a controversial subject that should show various positions, I suppose there is some controversy over whether people should eat a plant-based diet rather than a meat-based diet. In a health class I'd like to see students read about that issue from multiple doctors including heart specialists, environmentalists, farmers and ranchers, and nutritionists. But this book, this issue, these facts - I think you are asking the wrong question.

Principal: What's the right question?

Me: Mrs. X, what's your real concern?

Mrs. X: My daughter. She was upset. Books at school shouldn't upset anyone and certainly should not upset a young person just because she is white.

Me: Sounds to me as if your daughter has a huge heart.

Mrs. X: Well, yes. She does. Thank you.

Me: It's hard when our children begin to learn certain truths, isn't it? I bet your daughter cried a lot when she learned about Santa Claus.

Mrs. X (smiing): She did. And she said we could not tell her little [sibling] because she wanted that belief to continue.

Me: Yes. Sometimes we want some beliefs to continue. We don't want to know the truth. And sometimes the truth, when we learn it makes us cry. This is a far harder truth than Santa, isn't it. Learning this country's history is hard. I'm proud of her for feeling what Melba Beals was sharing. Have you started reading the book, Mrs. X? (She shakes her head no.) I think when you do - and I think you should - you will be proud of your daughter for crying and you will thank the teacher for having this book the classroom. Think of it this way: From your description, it sounds like she is smart enough to ask some really tough questions. Perhaps questions she hasn't considered before or things that haven't been discussed at home and maybe you aren't ready to discuss those issues. I don't blame you, they are hard ones.

Mrs. X (defensive): That's right. We don't sit around discussing how white people are bad. That's what you are suggesting, right? All white people are racist. Well, we don't believe that and I don't like my child, she's just in ninth grade, wondering that.

Me: Again, I'm deeply impressed with the questions your daughter was asking. I wonder if she'd be interested in reading more about racism and discovering what others have to say about systemic racism in the country. You know, Mrs. X, having compassion for what someone else experienced and trying to see how patterns of behavior have continued is important if we want those patterns to be interrupted. And this isn't about what I think or don't think. It is about the wonderful daughter you have who is thinking. You wouldn't want to discourage that.

Mrs. X: No, of course not. But she just doesn't need to be thinking about that. My word, that was in the previous century. My daughter is not a racist. I am not a racist. And I don't think we need our students reading things that make them feel bad for being who they are.

Me: Yes. I think a lot of people would agree. You know, for the longest time, no children's books had divorced parents in them. None. I wonder if the kids who sat in classrooms with divorced parents felt left out, unseen? I wonder if they felt bad. And for a long time, no books, or almost no books, featured children or teens who were any color other than white. I wonder how those kids felt? And for a long time, in books and on TV, the Indiginous People of this nation were portrayed as savages or simple minded or alcoholics. I wonder how those children felt. Books ought to make us feel something, and sometimes that feeling is regret; other times it is horror; others times it is courage; other times it is relief at finding someone who looks like we look. Your daughter found one of those books - a book that showed her someone, at her grade, living a very different ninth grade year, a horrific ninth grade year. And that hurt her heart. And that led to her questioning if we're treating one other justly now. And that's a great thing. I think you should be proud of her and should be thanking the teacher.

Mrs. X didn't say thank you, but she didn't say I was wrong. She said that she wasn't sure she had made her point exactly right but did see what I was saying. She said she would "certainly" be reading the book. I honestly don't know if that will make things better or not.

And then she left Zoom. And the principal said to me that this is happening almost daily now. "I don't know. Maybe the only way we can get covered what we need to teach for [our state] test is to take out books like this. I just don't know." I liked this principal. He was conflicted and willing to sit in that for a moment before rushing to a bad decision.

So, I'm mailing him a copy of Forged by Reading, which he has promised to read. I've sticky-noted the section I've pasted below which begins on page 30 of the book. I want him to seriously consider what happens when we begin removing books from shelves. What do we remove next? Who - or what - do we become?

From Forged by Reading (Beers and Probst)

Sailing into tomorrow may require us to rethink assumptions

and values so that we act differently in the future. There will

be implications and consequences for considering the new and

reconsidering what we have long thought. The only way to avoid the discomfort is to avoid the issues. If we can avoid talking about and reading about problematic matters, issues that might require us to rethink values and assumptions, then we won’t feel the discomfort that such difficult thought might entail.

If we banish from our minds, our libraries, and our classrooms any examination of politics, religion, race, environment, sex, justice, and the like, we might protect ourselves from the possible discomfort we might experience. All we have to do is trivialize the curriculum to the point that few will be bothered by anything.

If we can make instruction completely insignificant, utterly irrelevant to anyone’s emotional and intellectual life, then absolutely no one should rise up to protest the threat we pose to treasured beliefs, valued affiliations, or well-established habits of thought and action. We can teach kids how viruses are different from bacteria but avoid discussing why the health care system better serves the wealthy than the poor. We can teach what events led up to World War II and which countries fought on which sides and the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps but fail to mention our own concentration camps for American citizens of Japanese ancestry or consider why the 761st Tank Battalion or the 555th Parachute Battalion consisted solely of African American soldiers. We can give the facts of Brown v. Board of Education but never read what happened to the Little Rock Nine, never discuss how the integration of schools caused thousands of well-qualified Black teachers to lose their jobs because white parents refused to let their children be taught by a Black teacher.

We can teach the definitions of “preposition” and “conjunction.”

That will raise few hackles. “Onomatopoeia” and “zeugma” are

unlikely to drive marchers into the streets, even if we require

students to learn both definition and spelling. Better yet, we

can teach penmanship—that will threaten the values of neither

the conservatives nor the progressives, neither Republicans nor

Democrats, neither those drilling for oil nor the sailors on one of the Greenpeace ships.

Total irrelevancy, absolute insignificance, and unwavering stasis are effective strategies for avoiding the discomfort of thought and change.

***

We cannot, dear teachers, ever give in to the demands of irrelevancy. So, Mr. Principal, you must be brave. You must steer the ship into tomorrow. Your teachers will be there with you. And students, they may shudder at past injustices - long past and recent past - and I hope they do. If they don't, we are in more trouble than I thought.

I wish you all bravery. Stamina. And the knowledge that your hard work is the good work; the best work; the needed work. We need you.

Kylene Beers 

reposted from Facebook.