Combatting Racism

The election of a black President, far from demonstrating our progress as a society in eradicating racism, ripped away a polite veneer of covert racism to reveal the racist core of American culture. At no other time since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s have we been called on as a people to confront not only our racist past but also our racist present.

Racism to a large degree is founded on and fostered by ignorance, and ingrained by segregation. The public schools have never been a complete answer to the problem of racism, but they have, at times, been one mechanism for addressing issues of inequality, of which racism is an inherent element. In fact, schools in the distant past contributed to our national racism, for example, during the “separate but equal” period under doctrine set down by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It wasn’t until 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that “separate but equal”—a mantra as disingenuous as Fox News’ “fair and balanced”—was discarded and a national effort was begun to dismantle school segregation.

However, racial minority status and low socioeconomic status are strongly linked.  Any number of scholarly reports have affirmed a correlation between poverty and poor school achievement, and minority children are mostly likely to feel the consequences. Indeed, the spurious emphasis on evaluating students and schools on the basis of standardized test scores is a tacit expression of racism. Instead of spending thousands of dollars to line the coffers of testing corporations, a glance at existing economic census data would yield substantially the same results in identifying “successful” and “unsuccessful” schools. Superficial interpretations and misuses of test data are, at their center, racist—by result, if not (and I am being generous here) by intent.

“Success” is misdefined if it is characterized solely by test scores. Set aside the question of testing altogether, and the deck is still stacked against poor and minority students by the structure of our society. Public education has the potential to address racism but that potential is diminished during the current era because the persistent attacks on public education are imperiling its very existence. Overuse and misuse of standardized tests, union-busting, cuts in funding, and other destructive maneuvers by policy makers at every level have undermined public education and are contributing to the destruction of American democracy.

Public education could be a powerful instrument in the battle to eradicate racism. But public education in its currently weakened state is on life support. Until we, as a society, stop attacking and start rebuilding our nation’s public education system, we cannot realistically hope that our schools will be able to contribute meaningfully to the elimination of the racism that mars us as a society.

Truth Teaching

An ugly truth about American public education is that Truth, writ large, has become an endangered subject. Schools have always had to battle censors and would-be censors, from the library to the classroom to the computer lab. Overprotective parents, bureaucrats, politicians, and others have long sought to control what students learn, often by denying teachers and students access to factual information. Free speech has never been free in school. The problem is getting worse, not better.

Let’s talk racism, for example. It’s a big example because racism touches every aspect of our social fabric and therefore every aspect of the school curriculum, ranging from underrepresentation—of authors of color in literature anthologies or libraries and lack of attention to historic figures who didn’t happen to be white—to outright misrepresentation. An example of the latter is a recent Texas decision, as reported in the Washington Post:

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

Furthermore, Texas school children are supposed to be taught that slavery was a “side issue” to the Civil War.

It’s easy to pick on subjects like literature and social studies where Truth has gone missing. But consider the compulsory over-testing of English and math skills that has pushed other subjects to the curricular fringe or over the edge entirely, such as music, art, civic education, and any sort of practical training—what we called in olden times home ec and shop. The truth is that the world of work, the world of human endeavor, does not rely merely on the ability to bubble in correct answers about standard prose and basic arithmetic. Turning our young into test-taking automatons is hardly an effective strategy for reaching the vaunted goal of “college and career readiness,” the latest in a legion of empty education reform mantras.

Racism is largely absent because it is, to use Al Gore’s pet phrase, inconvenient truth. Moreover it is a truth that is as plain as the nose on your face, to pile on another cliché. But it is a truth that must be ignored if we are to keep our future citizens in ignorance. And that is precisely what the rising rightwing proto-fascists (to borrow Henry Giroux’s term*) want in order to solidify and expand much of the political power they have already grabbed.

The threads of racism run through the social fabric of our country: in the wealth gap, in voter suppression, in subtle and not so subtle redlining and sundowning, in the grading of schools to reinforce the negative effects of poverty, in police brutality directed against blacks, in the over-population of our prisons with nonwhite inmates, and so much more. If we cannot teach this inconvenient truth, then we can never hope to change.

Writing in a recent article** Henry Giroux commented, “The United States has become a country that is proud of what it should be ashamed of.” That sentence calls to mind all of the recent waving of the Confederate battle flag by “patriots” hiding behind “heritage” to flaunt their fundamental racism.

Truth. How inconvenient.

Where are the rebels in our classrooms, our administrative offices, our school board meetings, our parent associations, our legislative bodies, who are willing to speak truth not merely to power, but to our children who deserve it most?

*Henry A. Giroux. Proto-Fascism in America: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy, 2004.

**Henry A. Giroux. “The Racist Killing Fields in the U.S.: The Death of Sandra Bland.” TruthOut, July 19, 2015.

Regressive Policy, Brutal Honesty

Virulently regressive, rightwing education policy is attempting to turn back the clock, handicapping all of our children, whose lives move forward not backward.

In American society writ large, recent events involving unarmed black citizens confronted, in some cases without cause, by white police officers that have ended in the gun deaths of the black citizens have turned a national spotlight on institutionalized racism. The election of a black president, far from signaling a post-racist era, has revealed deep and pervasive racism at all levels of society. At the very top, it has exposed the naked, deep-seated racism inherent in American conservatism, particularly among its extreme elements. For example, the association between the Ku Klux Klan and Tea Party radicals has become fixed in American culture, and the Republican Party has not distanced itself from its most regressive bedfellows. Indeed, the opposite often has been the case. In true trickle-down fashion, this regressive radicalism is reflected at state and local levels in increasing blatant ways.

Embedded racist, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic policies in schools are leaving the true public out of public education. Textbook dishonesty is approved policy in states such as Texas, where Moses has been morphed into a Founding Father and the Texas Board of Education has tried to pretend slavery never happened. While Texas frequently is the most egregious example of dishonest education, ideologically driven curricula that depart from fact are common is many states in which rightwing conservatives exert power over education policy. Democratic principles, civic education, science, and racial equality are among the radical taboos.

The brutality of the war being waged in American public education must be met with brutal honesty by educators, parents, and thinking citizens if there is to be any hope of reclaiming American democracy. Blatant, brutal racist actions in recent weeks have turned back the clock on race relations to the civil rights era of the 1960s, and people are responding now as they did then by taking to the streets. A similar activism is now needed to preserve public education, and the pro-education activists will need to be prepared to combat a brutal, no-holds-barred regressive response.

Thoreau reminds us: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Nowhere is this more true than in public education, where we all must mount a vigorous campaign to reclaim our schools for the children they serve, rather than the ideologues who would pervert the course of education for their own selfish ends.