In late-May, Florida\u2019s Board of Education issued guidance prohibiting teaching materials<\/a> in social studies courses from mentioning critical race theory. A month prior, similar policies led Florida\u2019s Board of Education to ban 54 math textbooks<\/a> for not \u201caligning\u201d with the state\u2019s policies on critical race theory. (Over forty of those books were subsequently unbanned after, the state said, their publishers removed \u201cwoke content.\u201d At least one publisher contests this<\/a>, saying they made no changes to their textbooks.).<\/p>\n That these policies now apply to social studies courses is unsurprising. In courses on U.S. history, government, and sociology, America\u2019s students learn to recognize or deny, as Florida would have it, the realities of racism and inequality in the country. Florida\u2019s policies, in other words, were always meant for the social sciences. The banning of math textbooks was merely a rehearsal for the more contentious and consequential \u201creview\u201d of social studies textbooks.<\/p>\n Nor is this effort particularly new. Nearly a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois described how educational institutions in the U.S. taught propaganda as history, presenting Reconstruction in the U.S. south in ways that affirmed white supremacy. Since then, educational scholars have pointed out the many ways that the \u201chidden curriculum\u201d of educational institutions erases histories of inequality and oppression.<\/p>\n History and social science textbooks, especially, have long been implicated in the hidden curriculum. In his influential book Lies My Teacher Told Me<\/em>, James W. Loewen documented this, identifying factual omissions in a dozen leading US history textbooks. In a portion of his book particularly pertinent today, Loewen shows how history textbooks glossed over President Woodrow Wilson\u2019s racist politics and policies, such as the segregation of the federal government and Wilson\u2019s promotion of D. W. Griffith\u2019s white supremacist film Birth of a Nation<\/em>.<\/p>\n How America\u2019s educators teach the past contributes to our collective understanding of the present.<\/span><\/p>\n Of these omissions, Loewen concludes, \u201cabsolving Wilson\u2019s racism goes beyond concealing a character blemish. The cover-up denies all students the chance to learn something important about the interrelationship between the leader and the led. White Americans engaged in a new burst of racial violence during and immediately after Wilson\u2019s presidency.\u201d Indeed, during Wilson\u2019s presidency, white Americans massacred Black Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Valdosta, Georgia (1918); Elaine, Arkansas (1918); and Ocoee, Florida (1920).<\/p>\n The latter massacre occurred on the day of the 1920 election, leaving at least three dozen Black Americans dead. \u201cAmericans need to learn from the Wilson era,\u201d Loewen writes, \u201cthat there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response.\u201d But this learning would require the genuine and honest teaching of that connection and the historical facts that make it apparent.<\/p>\n Loewen first published Lies My Teacher Told Me <\/em>in 1995. But still today, textbook publishers and education boards continue to downplay and deny systemic racism, inequality, and violence through omissions. In January 2020, the New York Times<\/em> compared history textbooks<\/a> adopted by market-setter states California and Texas. Specifically, they compared textbooks that both states adopted but which were, at the behest of state educational boards, \u201ccustomized\u201d\u2014the industry\u2019s euphemism for censoring, I suppose\u2014for each state\u2019s use.<\/p>\n As described by Dana Goldstein, the author of the Times<\/em> article, the gulf between these panels is substantial. \u201cAll the members of the California panel were educators selected by the State Board of Education, whose members were appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat. The Texas panel, appointed by the Republican-dominated State Board of Education, was made up of educators, parents, business representatives and a Christian pastor and politician.\u201d<\/p>\n On one hand, Goldstein notes that \u201crecent textbooks have come a long way from what was published in past decades. Both Texas and California volumes deal more bluntly with the cruelty of the slave trade.\u201d Still, in Texas\u2019s version, references to housing discrimination against US citizens of color, redlining, and white flight were absent. All appeared in California\u2019s version. Without teaching and learning on these issues, school boards and textbook publishers prevent today\u2019s students from understanding contemporary America, with its high levels of segregation and the inequalities that this creates.<\/p>\n Still today, textbook publishers and education boards continue to downplay and deny systemic racism, inequality, and violence through omissions.<\/span><\/p>\n Omissions are not just a problem of secondary school textbooks. Kathleen J. Fitzgerald, a sociologist of race, analyzed the four leading undergraduate textbooks<\/a> in the sociology of race and race relations. Fitzgerald did so to assess the adequacy of the books\u2019 coverage of the racial massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fitzgerald found that only one of the four textbooks she analyzed discussed these massacres.<\/p>\n The \u201cother three,\u201d she writes, \u201ccompletely ignore the nationwide pattern of violence directed at African Americans.\u201d Meanwhile, criminologists K. B. Turner, David Giacopassi, and Margaret Vandiver analyzed twenty-one criminology and criminal justice textbooks<\/a> published after 2000 to see how these books presented slavery and slave patrols. They found that most either neglected or offered only superficial analysis of the role of slavery and slave patrols in American legal systems and policing.<\/p>\n How America\u2019s educators teach the past contributes to our collective understanding of the present. This is particularly true in the teaching of the country\u2019s history of systemic racism. When the continuities between the past and present of racism, inequality, and violence are denied, students may believe that the past returns merely as tragic episodes, rather than as an explanation of or, more radically, a demand on the present.<\/p>\n This has consequences in the classroom. Educators, and especially white educators, may struggle to teach the history of systemic racism beyond textbooks. Many of us, too, have learned within schools and universities shaped by the denial of racism. They may also be immobilized by fear\u2014of losing control, of making mistakes, of being seen as biased, and now, of facing lawsuits or being fired for addressing racism. And they may also be untrained, unpracticed, and inexperienced in teaching on systemic racism.<\/p>\n These limitations on historical knowledge and competency in teaching are not accidental. They are the intended effect of denial of systemic racism, as the national efforts to censor teaching and learning on the U.S.\u2019s history makes clear.<\/p>\n But these efforts suggest something else, too. By banning words and textbooks, school boards, boards of education, and state governments across the country admit that teaching and learning on systemic racism are potent counter-forces to the denial of racism.<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/denial-cover-200x300.jpeg\")
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