Critical Race Theory in the Classroom

I'll never forget him. And he walks into He walks into the classroom by slamming the door as hard as he can behind him and and pulling off this like blackboard jungle bullshit where he starts screaming at us. Wait in that movie. Now he's he's a white guy, and you know, and the class is, you know, very multiracial, and the first thing out of his mouth is, hey, kiddos, I'm not a racist. I hate everybody. That's nuts. That's a greeting to us. That was our multi racial education.

I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad and I'm Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are as in I'm not a racist. Some of my best friends are dot dot dot dot dot. In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities

of a deeply divided and unequal country. And on today's episode, we're gonna look closely at how the teaching of American history, specifically the history of race and racism, helps explain the actual country we live in. You know, as you say at the start of every episode, I'm the historian, so you're the perfect partner for this, that's right. That Yeah, well, occasionally my expertise will matter in this conversation. How about that? All right? All right, one oh one, that's our class.

The bell is ringing. Here we are at the start of another school year, and along with our kids going back to classes and all our anxiety and uncertainty about the coronavirus, there's also this assault on what can be taught in classrooms not a schools, and a flashpoint issue how to teach and discuss race in America's classrooms. Tonight we look at our children's history lessons in the curricula

at the center of controversy. Yeah, I mean, it's a it's an incredible moment because after everything that's happened over the past eighteen months. You know, there's this great opportunity to finally, you know, reckon with our past and socialize a whole generation of kids about like what our country is and what it can be. And yet in so many states, at least twelve states have actually banned the teaching of race and racism, and at least another seventeen

are trying to pass legislation. It's crazy. So these legislative acts have centered as their primary target a more expansive understanding of how racism has evolved in America and the justification for this in these laws. I've looked at several

of them. In the case of Iowa in particular, says these are quote unquote divisive concepts, and because they're divisive concepts and because they traffic in what they say is race stereotyping, then at the end of the day, they're basically saying, if people feel uncomfortable with you talking about any kind of racism or it implies that white people have done things to black people, that feels like a stereotype.

It's out of bounds. And it has created a situation where teachers have been targeted by administration, by school boards in such a way that it's creating a chilling effect in the classroom. Yeah, so you said twelve states have passed laws restricting the teaching of racism. Twenty nine states in total are at least considering similar bands. That's crazy. You mentioned the Iowa one, but I saw that in Florida, the States school Board voted unanimously to ban the teaching

of the sixteen nineteen Project and critical race theory. In Alabama, the school superintendent proposed a resolution where you can't teach concepts that quote oppress others. And one part of that resolution they say the United States is not inherently racist, and also the state of Alabama is not inherently racist. Right. Yeah, Oklahoma, you can't teach the myth of meritocracy. You know, Texas, you can't teach political activism. There's an Arizona law that

you quote. You can't teach any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. Conservatives are arguing now that if you teach about racism, then in fact, you are the racist. I know, it's crazy. So let's talk about why this was so controversial, the sixteen nineteen project, and why there was such a backlash against it and why it made people so uncomfortable. Let's

talk first about the sixteen nineteen Project. Yeah, that's exactly where we need to start, because it's it's because of its publication two years ago that this current round of attacks you know, first got got started. It was fuel for that fire. Yeah, yeah, this is really where the

story we're telling today begins. So I know a lot of listeners will have read the sixteen nineteen Project, but for those who haven't, I mean, this was an incredible project born out of the imagination of Nicole Hannah Jones. So I've been thinking about the year sixteen nineteen since I was in high school and across that date in a book called Before the Mayflower, and I just was struck by how people of African descent had been here that long and I never knew that data, never heard

about it. So as the anniversary was approaching the four hundredth year, I thought that this was a time to actually assess what is that legacy been and to bring this year sixteen nineteen to most American households where it was probably going to pass without them knowing. She's an investigative journalist and senior writer for the New York Times magazine. She wanted to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the sort of official arrival of twenty or thirty enslaved Africans

to Jamestown, Virginia in sixteen nineteen. Right, So this this project was published in August of twenty nineteen, and she assembled this incredible group of journalists and historians. Incredible group of historians because you were one of those historians. I mean, really, they were incredible. Right. I did write an essay on sugar, the long history of sugar as the basis for European

conquest and settler colonialism. That is, you know, Europeans coming here and staying, particularly in North America, so you know, everything in this effort to center the presence of black people as an indispensable part of the American story that basically you can't understand the country today without understanding all these connections that go back to the very beginning. So this was published first in the New York Times magazine

that filled up an entire issue. Yes, that's right. So the magazine for this issue dedicated the entire magazine, which is unusual. So there were several essays on history there were creative writing, there was graphics, and the magazine itself became a kind of cultural touchstone for a broader conver station, you know, tied to Black Lives Matter, tied to racial reckonings, and there were lines around the building when the magazine was selling the print edition aside from what people got

in their Sunday newspaper. You know, I know you're downplaying your role in it, but I'm really I'm really proud of you. I mean, you're you're a major contributor for this, and this is now in book form and you're in a best seller. Well, James Patterson, I'm not sure I can take credit for that, but but but I can't say that Nicole's work, the editor's work, did win a Pulitzer Prize, and that's a certainly a really big deal.

And what a visionary she is for this, I mean, to really to really sort of demand of us to to take a different historical look on the country and to think about our origin stories in our beginnings, and then, as you said, forcing us to see everything that comes after through it through a different lens. Yeah, that's right. So, of course, when I saw Nichols call for for people like me to contribute. I jumped at it and I'm happy,

you know, continue to be proud of this work. And you know, with the book coming out soon this fall, it's it's incredible and we'll see we'll see not only people responding positively to it, but we'll also see, you know, more backlash against the significance of this work. So in September twenty twenty, Donald Trump tweets, of course, and what a great thing not to say that anymore, like did

you see Donald Trump? Sat? But right? Trump responds to a tweet about California teaching the sixteen nineteen project and its schools, and he says that the Department of Education will look into it and it will defund the state if he if he finds evidence of that. M Yeah, of course he has no he has no authority whatsoever exactly right states control education. So what he does is he goes on to issue an executive order that bands diversity train in federal agencies and also in companies that

do business with the federal government. So he doesn't mean just diversity and inclusion training. He actually says something that isn't true. He says, you can't talk about America as irredeemably racist and sexist. But nobody who does diversity training talks about America as irredeemably racist and sexist. They might talk about the problem of racism and sexism, but this irredeemable aspect, this notion that there's nothing we can do about it, is the boogeyman in the conversation. And that's

a thing that gets people so riled up. And that's why he's had such support for this, had such support, And now it's continuing and we finally nail Trump and we catch him on saying something that isn't true. This is the journalistic moment. Some of my best friends are we did it, good work, but no. But it's such a subtle thing because if you keep saying that something that's not happening, then reasonable people can be upset about. And that's why this thing is metastic. So then he

takes it further. Of course, at the start of the school year last year, so in September twenty twenty, the Trump administration announces that they're going to form something called the seventeen seventy six Commission, a Patriotic Education Commission. It's a direct response to the sixteen nineteen project, and Trump goes on to say, he says, quote, they're a crusade against American history, which is what we're talking about today.

And he says, instead, what the country must focus on, what classrooms must focus on, is quote the legacy of seventeen seventy six. So forget about that sixteen nineteen. Let's go back to this declaration, back to everything that every school child has already learned about the basic story of

the American Revolution. Yeah, there's a larger, sort of an ah historical attack going on that sort of wrapped up in this idea of critical race theory, and there's a sort of fewer at the start of the school year that we're you know, who's teaching this. We talked about this at the top of the episode, but that's really part of what's going on here, right, Yeah, Yeah, Well, I think we owe it to our listeners to actually

define what critical race theory is. Yeah, let's do it. So, first of all, it is, strictly speaking, a legal theory and historical approach that began in the nineteen eighties, led by at the time a Harvard law professor, an African American man named Derek Bell and also by a African

American legal scholar, Kimberly Crenshaw. And the basic approach to critical race theory then and now was to literally understand the legal history of racism, which means, ultimately critical race theory was very, very much interested in the limits of the law to wrestle with the problem of racism, going back to the beginning all the way up to the present, even including affirmative action and antidiscrimination law. And why is

this important? This is important because what critical race theory as a legal concept did, and it's still relevant, is we still have limitations in our law with respect to dealing with the consequences of structural racism. The fact that any company might actually choose, let's just say, a preferential approach, even a reparative or reparations approach to redress its own

history of discrimination is actually illegal in our law. And critical race theorists wanted to point that out because it wanted to say, we have very limited tools legally to deal with this massive structure of racism and inequality, and that's it. That's what critical race theory is. Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, this is a pretty obscure

academic take and discipline looking at structural racism. It's not listen, it's not something you're a historian of this, it's it's not a term that I was especially familiar with before the right started throw it in my face and saying

it's everywhere, that's right, that's right. So it has become a catch all for absolutely any discussion of race or racism anywhere, from kindergarten to an old folks nursing home where someone might show up have to talk about the disproportionate deaths of covid if impacting black and brown residence of nursing homes, as my uncle Javan, who was eighty

died in one in Chicago. Like, that's how ridiculous the notion that critical race theory is everywhere and is infecting everybody and is a poisonous, toxic ideology unleashed on the innocent American public. When we come back, we're going to talk about how historian Khalil Jabron Muhammad got swept up in these attacks and how we should be teaching history.

All right, Khalil, So you've been busy teaching outside of the classroom as well, and really, you know, I'm thinking about after the murder of George Floyd, there was a surge of interest in how racism has persisted in the country and what we should do about it. You know, they're that video that was spread around of the police officer in Minneapolis kneeling on the neck of George Floyd was sort of an undeniable depiction of injustice and the

two tier society in America. And so after that there were like, you know, books like how to be an Anti Racist by our fellow Pushkin podcaster Ibram Kendy and White Fragility by Robin D'Angelo. They were flying off the shelves, and businesses and corporations were also like, well, we need to do something, and some of them made statements, you know, they put banners, but they also invited in some scholars and others to instruct them about about racism in the country.

That's where you come in. My friend, you went into some of these corporations and I wanted to ask you, like, can you tell us what actually did you talk about? So the basic ask was help our employees understand what is systemic racism? Okay, what is the history of it?

And that covers everything in the most simple definition from the history of colonization, the conquest of indigenous people, to the enslavement of people of African descent, to the period after slavery of formal segregation in jem Crowe, to a history of redlining, to a history of education segregation, to a history of financial services and predatory lending, and everything we now know both as academics and more increasingly the

public about what is actually systemic racism. And so that's a huge list that you just said, and you certainly didn't talk about all of those in each session. I pretty much did okay well time as our listeners, as our listeners will will will pick up on this show, we cover a lot of ground here. Yeah, it's it's

a pretty it's a it's a heavy lift. But the point is to socialize the basic idea that structural racism is not a fantasy of some cabal of radical academics, but in fact is the history of this nation, and the degree to which we want to change the present of our nation is the degree to which we have to come to terms with the history of the nation. And so is what you're teaching. You know, this is it like a forty five minute lecture that you're giving at a corporation. Is it sort of a thumbnail of

what you might teach over an entire semester. That's a great yep. That's a short answer. Is absolutely. As one of my colleagues, a former student of mine, sat at Harvard a couple of years ago. She said, Man, Khalil, if you could take what you taught me over sixteen weeks into a two hour lecture, we could change the world. And uh. And that's that's the that's a tall ask and it's impossible in a way, but that really is

the invitation for raising public awareness around these issues. But you were recently put on blast for these courses for what you what you said in front of some of these compresentations, in front of the companies ye for the presentations, and you were actually talked about recently by Bill O'Reilly critical race theory seminars. Let me give you an example. So a recent one featured a guy named Khalil Mohammad. He is the great grandson of Nation of Islam founder

Elijah Mohammad. Pretty bad guy. Elijah Mohammad, pretty bad guy, ask Malcolm X. Okay, so his grandson, and you shouldn't demonize a grandson because his grandfather was a bad guy. Teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard, my alma mater, and he is demanding, is Khalil Mohammad that an American Express have reduced costs for black customers. So therefore got an American Express court and you will black your interest rate below then white last racist. Wow, so you're getting

attacked by the right wing. What is it you're actually doing in these courses that you've done at different businesses? What are you what are you teaching there? What are you saying? Because clearly you're touching a nerve. Yeah. Sure, So this isn't even about one company because the this the guy who wrote an article that Bill O'Reilly looked at, a guy named Christopher Ruffo, has now sort of found social media evidence of a talk I gave out another company.

So in terms of the actual content, it's the same because the history doesn't change. And what I essentially said is if you ex company want to be committed to racial equity, as you have said in your public statement, then you have to decide whether or not your business practices are exacerbating or alleviating racial disparities and structural racism in American society, and that is the part of the conversation that takes the history and then offers a way

of thinking about what comes next. Let's just talk for a second about Elijah Mohammad, like he was wrong. It's not your grandfather, it's your great grandfather. But let's you know, that's an interesting thing to bring up, you know, as a way to identify you. Yeah. Yeah, well listen, first of all, it's not a secret, so there's no reveal there. My entire career has been shaped by this biographical note. I'm very proud of my legacy as the great grandson

of Elijah Mohammad. The nation of Islam in it today, beginning in the forties, fifties, sixties, and certainly helped to shape Malcolm X change a lot of black people's lives, built a lot of black businesses, was a source of pride, was a source of black history. And that's that's the absurdity of the way that someone like Bill O'Reilly is trying to weaponize who he was, who Malcolm X was, and the issues that we face today. Yeah. Yeah, we

were talking about history and what's being taught. There's also this incredible denial of history. There's a denial of truth and fact that leads to then those norms are also denying them. And there's a sense of you know, there's something that seems almost incredibly infantile about it, Like if you close your eyes and say it's not there, then it's not there. Now it's it's it's way more sinister

than that, as you said, like it has these implications. Yeah, but but you know this is that feeling that it's spreading everywhere is what makes people think suddenly, like it's in all of our schools, and you know, we talked about the states that we're considering laws banning critical race theory, and not just in our schools. Now, it's in our fortune five hundred companies, which you're purportedly guilty of, you know,

helping to propagate and permeate. Yeah. So you know, all these media hits basically are trying to discredit people like me for essentially teaching about the history of race and racism. And because I'm now kind of in the crosshairs of conservative media, I get these crazy emails and racist phone calls from people threatening my life. These people are problems with white people, don't you big problems, don't you you're racist? Motherfuckers? What you are? Okay, that's what you are? Ilf fly

halfway across the country. You fly halfway across the country and you call me a racist to my face? What do you think, Khalil, you get the balls to do them? So obviously that guy hasn't listened to our show yet, Like now that you're talking to that just goes to show you, man, how the bad a shape we're in, right, Like the idea that I don't know white people or talk to white people, like black people are twelve percent

of the population. You can't you can't live past five as a black person and not have a conversation with white person. But anyway, yeah, here I am talking to you. Yeah. So kind of the brilliance of these people is also to co opt the very language that helps us to situate ourselves in history, helps us to be able to say we've actually learned something from the past. And that's what makes this so difficult. And that's that is the situation we face today in part a legacy of how

how or a job of history we've actually done. I would really love to hear you talk more about why the sixteen nineteen project and critical race theory sort of with your own sense of teaching history is so effective. You know, what is the way that you want to teach history? What is the way that you want American history taught? Yeah? Yeah, Well, well I appreciate that because it is the work that I've been doing for a

quarter century. And from my vantage point, history is always debatable as to how much evidence in weight or it should say interpretive weight you put on a point. So, and I'll say that that the sense of myth and reality are always in tension. When we're talking about a country's history, it's tied up with our national identity. So there's always this tension, this conflict between what we mythologize

and what was real, what really happened. Yeah, no, absolutely, And so to answer the question, I think first we have I have to say that in the quarter century, I've taught a lot of student who opted into my class and expressed to me at the undergraduate level. At the graduate level, I remember teaching a group of future teachers like, oh my god, I can't believe I never learned any of this. And again that and what is this?

This is that the problem was much more deeply entrenched in the soil of the nation at every moment in the past, from the colonial period to the national period to the Belling period, and that in each of these moments, when we look at the scale and scope of a slavery, for example, as as a form of anti black racism, that that it was, in many ways the economic basis of America's wealth. And so even something like that as a as a truth, right, it's not. It's not make believe.

Slavery created wealth in the nation, that gave America a head start in the world. Um, and he lasted so long. It lasted longer here than our European cousins, so to speak. And as such, what most students were learning was like, slavery happened, it was really bad, and thank god it's over because Abraham Lincoln free the slaves. Like that's the very glib take on it. But that is, in a

sense what students have been learning. So there's no detail to it, and there's no sense of the stakes of why we had a civil war in the first place that was fought actually over slavery, according to the Confederate Bills of sedition or should say secession. So because in

that way. And I'll just give a data point. This organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, looked at the quality of teaching about slavery in a twenty eighteen report, and they found that when students were asked the question how much did they understood that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War? Take a guess on what percentage of the students said that was true. Thirty one eight percent

is za nuts eight percent. Again, to analogize, imagine anywhere else in the world where there was a third of the population denying the impact of this massive system of oppression towards people. It just would be unacceptable. It is not debatable as to the central role of slavery in the Civil War as a matter of fact, but it is debatable in the matter of our national memory and our political culture. And of course the people who still waive Confederate flags and say this is about heritage and

not hate. Yeah, yeah, And you know that I appreciate this, professor, because I feel like I'm getting a Harvard credit right here, figured your mama. I'm thinking about on the what critics say, like, can that be over emphasized? You know? And this is sort of this is the devil's outcot point, like, can that be stressed too much where you're then a louding

all other aspects of American history. Yeah, so on the one hand, we have gone too far forever, right, there's never been a golden age of getting this history in the way that is balanced, and so let's just take that as a given. That's the status quo. And so when I look at the critiques, it seems to me that the critiques are not trying to find a middle

ground to say, Okay, let's do this both end. Let's let's actually get the history right, that is the history of race and racism as a central category of the American story. Let's just ban talk about race and racism because it's a divisive concept. I mean, so we can't even really get at some kind of balance. And if we were to get at some kind of balance, I think that we would all benefit from that. In other words, black people also don't like I mean, you've heard these

stories before. Black people don't like feeling like they're nothing but victims, that they've only experienced oppression, And certainly, as a teacher of African American history alongside slavery. I'm telling the story of Negro spirituals. I'm telling the story of the birth of jazz. I'm telling the story of the political genius of African Americans in the reconstruction period that helped to deliver public education to the South for the

first time. But the only way that you can actually appreciate the agency and the resistance is to know with clarity what people overcame. It cannot be abstracted. So look, something like the sixteen nineteen project is not only important as a cultural milestone in having kind of America's newspaper of record lead an effort to say we know that we haven't gotten our history right a at all levels

of society. That if we were to compare the United States to other parts of the world that have had to reckon with what happened in those countries, whether it was a party in South Africa or the Holocaust in Germany, Americans would look at these places and think it was absurd that they had a distorted version of that past,

and we would hold them accountable. And yet here we know that teachers were not allowed to talk about slavery and Jim Crowe as evidence of white supremacy for the entire period of the twentieth century, because that's what the evidence shows. I mean, I talked about being childish, but you know, like I'm rubber and your glue kind of like back and forth whether nothing you can do, and so then I'm going to throw it back on you. You're the historian. You were speaking to these groups. You know,

you're dealing in hard facts. So you have history. What do you do well? I think it means that for me, and what I advise people is you have to say the course. And so just like when black civil rights workers were marching in towns and lesions of white families came out like they did in Little Rock, Arkansas, outside of Central High School, we want to keep our schools white.

There is a way in which this moment helps us to use that history as a way of saying, oh, okay, these folks don't really want to change America, because if we got our history right, we would have a different America. Yeah. Yeah. At the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, as you enter, there's a quote by Maya Angelou. History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived. But if faced with courage, need not

be lived again. The brainchild of the lawyer and activist Brian Stevenson, the Legacy Museum is about as wrenchingly painful a bit of American history as one could ever imagine. It covers the painful history of lynchings in the country, and so saying lynchings did not happen or not wrestling

with that terrible history doesn't make it not so. And the idea that that we have to look back on even these most painful parts of our history is part of who we are and to ensure that to try not to ensure, but to to maybe make possible that we don't we don't do terrible things again and uh, and that memorial is just a powerful testament to how we as a nation have yet again an opportunity to learn from our past in ways that will ensure that

future generations will not repeat those mistakes. Yeah, yeah, I think about. You know, what truly makes America exceptional is that we are this multi racial and multi ethnic democracy and those same things are what make this country so fraught and problematic because that is our history also of oppression and of conquest, and that you don't get the exceptional part of that without thinking about the difficulty. And you don't. You don't. You don't reach a true multiracial

democracy unless you wrestle with that past. That's right, because if we do change our history, and we do create more awareness about the history of structural racism in this country for all Americans, for all adults, the country is likely to change. And that's a good thing. That would be a really good thing. Well, we're going to keep on moving forward together, Khalil. Maybe mister Leon is still around, Maybe so, and he's gonna say, I'm not a racist.

I love everybody. Oh, I love the thought of that. I love you, love you too. And some of my best friends are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil Dubron Mohammed and my best friend Ben Austin. It's produced by Sheer Vincent and edited by Karen Shakerji. Our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, our associate editor is Keishell Williams, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Lee Taal Molad and

Nia Lobell At Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fane, Carl Migliori, John Schnars and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan Avery R. Young, from his amazing album Tubman. You will definitely want to check out more of his music at its website, avery R. Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at Pushkin

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Look for Pushnick exclusively on Apple podcast subscriptions. By the way, Stephanie told me that this dress is like an AKA dress at one of their annual conventions, and so all the moopie Akas from Spellman. Whoever sees these little video clips gonna be like, hey, wait a minute, I mean they all have the same day, all have the same dress. So even though it's not AKA colors, no, it is come on, man, come on, I raised you better than that.