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On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring “training that promotes race stereotyping, for example, by portraying certain races as oppressors by virtue of their birth.” White House
Last week, President Trump gave a speech decrying the teaching of “critical race theory” and the New York Times’ 1619 project, and announced the creation of “a national commission to promote patriotic education.” White House
Read our prior coverage of the 1619 project. The Flip Side
The right is generally supportive of the commission and skeptical of critical race theory.
“The commission, at least as presently envisioned, will not dictate anything to anyone. There is precedent for such a commission. In 1973, Congress created the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, which oversaw the pageantry of public patriotic events in 1976. The Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission performed a similar function in 1986 for the symbols of America’s immigrant roots…
“The national Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution in 1987, chaired by Chief Justice Warren Burger, partnered with the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Bar Association, the National Park Service, and the Daughters of the American Revolution to educate Americans on the history and blessings of our national charter…
“Informed patriotic education was once seen as a necessary component of citizenship. No prior generation of American leaders would have argued that we should be indifferent to whether our citizens know their own history and the Founding ideals on which the nation rests. Abraham Lincoln returned often to the unique history of America, not only to hold together the nation in crisis but to call it to its highest ideals.”
The Editors, National Review
“A straight line connects critical race theory to modern progressivism to the riots in the streets. All are predicated on the idea that America was founded on racism and that all of our institutions—across government, law, culture, and society—are mere camouflage for racial domination and oppression…
“Critical race theorists, and their adherents in the new progressive movement, would replace the American system of individual rights, equality under the law, and meritocracy with a system of identity-based distribution of power. In one of the discipline’s founding texts, Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, author Richard Delgado explains that these ideas are ‘marked by a deep discontent with liberalism, a system of civil rights litigation and activist, faith in the legal system, and hope for progress.’ It is a profoundly nihilistic vision, which explains, in part, the character of recent street protests. The rioters and looters in Portland, Seattle, and Chicago are not fighting for any positive value; they are waging a war of simple negation.”
Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal
“Critical theory and its relative, critical race theory, are not like traditional theories that limit themselves to explaining and understanding certain precise areas of human motivation and behavior. Rather, critical theory is activist-oriented and emphasizes political organizing. Many of its advocates think of themselves as revolutionaries whose primary purpose is to critique and transform society as a whole…
“Advocates of critical race theory downplay the accomplishments of the civil rights movement and generally reject rights-based remedies, such as color blindness, role modeling, and the merit principle. They attack the very foundations of the classical liberal legal order that includes equality theory, legal reasoning, rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law… The law itself is not viewed as a neutral tool by proponents of critical race theory. Rather, it is considered part of the problem, structured to oppress minorities while preserving a system they believe is steeped in white supremacy.”
Scott Powell, The Federalist
Some argue, “Much of what Trump said about Howard Zinn and his bestselling book A People’s History of the United States is accurate. Indeed, earlier this year I wrote a positive review of conference participant Mary Grabar’s book in which she carefully demolishes Zinn… [but] many of the most serious critiques of Zinn have been written by liberal and left-wing historians, not by conservatives…
“There is good history and bad history, and either can be written by historians on the left or on the right. There is no such thing as left-wing history or right-wing history. There is only historical research and the conclusions drawn from evidence… Trump wants the mirror opposite of history as written by Howard Zinn; he wants to go back to the old days when history was taught in such a way that students would unreservedly love the United States… That such a curriculum might in and of itself be indoctrination was never obviously considered.”
Ron Radosh, The Bulwark
Dated But Relevant: “Historians, journalists, and politicians frequently accuse one another of twisting history to advance political agendas—and the accused parties always deny the charge. By contrast, the 1619 Project’s curriculum openly encourages such historical revisionism. Its ‘reading guide’ aims to ensure that students don’t miss core partisan talking points…
“For the essay ‘Capitalism: In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation,’ the reading guide asks: ‘What current financial systems reflect practices developed to support industries built on the work of enslaved people?’ One answer, suggested in the key terms, is home mortgages—because slaves were once used as collateral. Another acceptable answer is the collateralized debt obligation, a complex structured-finance product developed in the 1980s…
“To understand their country, students should read America’s Founding documents and the works of great figures like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and grapple with history’s circumstantial and moral complexities—not ‘reframe’ history to make it fit partisan purposes. They should be taught about the moral abomination of American slavery—but not that ‘slavery is our country’s very origin,’ or that its legacy is baked into all our social institutions, allegations that cannot stand up to any fair-minded examination of American history.”
Max Eden, City Journal
The left is critical of the commission and advocates for curricula that teach American history in all its complexity.
The left is critical of the commission and advocates for curricula that teach American history in all its complexity.
“[Is it] really controversial to point out that the early American economy ran in large part on slave labor, or that Founders who claimed to believe in human equality did not actually let anyone besides white, male landowners participate in the political process[?]…
“Some historians have criticized parts of the 1619 Project for failing to describe the varied conditions under which African-descended residents of the Americas lived during the colonial era, and for overstating the degree to which the preservation of slavery motivated American revolutionaries relative to other concerns. But even one of the most prominent scholars to make such criticism, for example, also says that ‘overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history.’”
Ben Mathis-Lilley, Slate
“Conservatives often convince themselves that when liberals point to societal problems and conditions that demand remedial action — the large number of Americans in poverty, or our high rates of homicide, or the fact that American police kill so many people — it’s because they hate America. By contrast, when conservatives complain about problems and conditions they don’t like — increasing secularism; the fact that automated customer service systems give you an option for Spanish — they’re only being patriotic, because the things they don’t like about America are betrayals of its true spirit…
“Every successful presidential candidate promises the voters rewards both material and emotional. They say they’ll improve our lives in tangible ways — better health care, higher wages — but they’ll also make us feel how we want to feel, alter the nation’s spirit to align it with what we would like it to be… This is the message Trump wants those supporters to hear: We’re done talking about slavery and racism. You don’t have to do any soul-searching, you don’t have to question how American institutions operate, and you sure as hell don’t have to feel guilty about anything.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“Critical race theory grew out of a generational response to the ebb and flow of the civil rights movement, according to a seminal 1993 book on the theory, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment… the book notes the late 1970s as a time when ‘the civil rights movement of the 1960s had stalled, and many of its gains were being rolled back.’ That’s when a post-civil rights generation of scholars recognized that while segregation had been [officially] repealed, there was still inequality to be addressed…
“[The authors] defined critical race theory as a movement and framework that recognizes how racism is ‘endemic’ to American life. In other words, critical race theory rejects the belief that ‘what’s in the past is in the past’ and that the best way to get beyond race is to stop talking about it. Instead, America must reckon with how its values and institutions feed into racism.”
Fabiola Cineas, Vox
“The Baby Boom Generation of historians challenged the notion that history textbooks should focus exclusively on presidents and legislators. That approach, they said, missed huge swaths of the lived experience of Americans… Historians from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s integrated issues of racism, sexism, nativism, class conflict and more into our understanding of our country and broadened the canvas of actors who were considered important, including marginalized and disenfranchised peoples who struggled for their rights…
“There is nothing unpatriotic about a clear-eyed view of our nation's past. Indeed, understanding the problems and failures at the center of our nation is to take our history seriously. Of course, there will be serious disputes about the American history, such as which ideas guided the nation's founders and over the different ways that racism has impacted contemporary American life. But let the historians hash this out with our professional standards of archival evidence and historiographical argumentation. We have [it] covered.”
Julian Zelizer, CNN
“Listening to Trump, one would think that a rigorous examination of slavery and its implications was a central fixture of American classrooms. Recent surveys, however, show that young people in America have enormous gaps in what they understand about the history of slavery in this country. According to a 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8 percent of high-school seniors surveyed were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Two-thirds of students did not know that a constitutional amendment was necessary to formally end slavery… Telling the truth about slavery is not ‘indoctrination.’”
Clint Smith, The Atlantic
Some argue, “The [1619] project’s defects became clear to me back in December, after four colleagues and I pointed out factual errors in the discussion of slavery and the American Revolution in the project’s lead essay. We later learned that a university historian contacted by a fact-checker had warned about these errors, but the project’s editors chose to ignore her. The mistakes concerning Britain, the Atlantic slave trade and the origins of the Revolution still appear on the Times’ website, despite a subsequent no-fault ‘clarification.’ The project has also tried to back off its original attention-grabbing claim…
“The real choice isn’t between Trump’s rendition of our history and the 1619 Project’s. It’s between ideological distortion and legitimate historical writing, with its respect for facts, its skepticism about pat answers and, above all, its refusal to shape the past to fit a fixed political agenda.”
Sean Wilentz, Washington Post
A libertarian's take
“The federal government shouldn't dictate what local schools across the country teach—and in the past, conservatives have rightly denounced the idea that it should… Whoever is in charge, that's a recipe for a biased and propagandistic version of history. Can individual states, cities, or school districts do much better? Some will, some won't—but the beauty of a decentralized system is that 1) it's easier for parents and teachers to change the bad parts of a local curriculum than it is a national one, and 2) it leaves room for parents to pull their children out of schools that don't do well at this, or at something else, and enroll them a school that does better…
“The best antidote for politicized lessons and public-school propaganda is school choice. When parents can choose between a range of local education options—traditional public schools, traditional private schools, charter schools, online schools, small-group-based ‘education pods,’ homeschooling, etc.—we leave fewer kids trapped in schools whose values don't align with their families and communities—and less room for whoever is in the White House to try to set everyone's lessons from on high.”
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason
