[It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on
“critical race theory” as a culture war. This is a political
battle.]
[[link removed]]

THE LONG WAR ON BLACK STUDIES  
[[link removed]]


 

Robin D. G. Kelley
June 17, 2023
New York Review
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
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*
*
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_ It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on
“critical race theory” as a culture war. This is a political
battle. _

, Cliff Joseph: Blackboard, 1969

 

We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth
in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in
the future.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, _Black Reconstruction in America_

It is strange…that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom
have not risen up against the present propaganda in the schools and
crushed it. This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching
movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in
the schoolroom.

—Carter G. Woodson, _The Mis-Education of the Negro_

On January 20, Florida’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr.,
tweeted out a chart justifying the state’s decision to ban schools
from teaching a newly created advanced placement course in African
American Studies. The graphic singled out the curriculum’s inclusion
of Black queer studies, intersectionality, Black feminist literary
thought, reparations, and the Movement for Black Lives as “obvious
violations of Florida law.” It also identified scholars whose work
was included in an earlier iteration of the curriculum as radical
propagandists bent on smuggling “critical race theory” (CRT),
Marxism, and deviant sexuality into high-school classrooms.

Despite the fact that the College Board had not yet released the final
curriculum to the public, Diaz and the state’s governor, Ron
DeSantis, claimed it violated Senate Bill 148, better known as the
“Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” or the Stop W.O.K.E.
Act. Sponsored by Diaz and signed in April 2022, the law prohibits
teaching anything that might cause “guilt, anguish, or other forms
of psychological distress” or “indoctrinate or persuade students
to a particular point of view inconsistent…with state academic
standards.” In other words, introducing and teaching race, gender,
sexuality, and anything remotely resembling critical race theory was
strictly prohibited.

When the College Board released the final curriculum eleven days
later, it had changed substantially. Most of the material the Florida
Department of Education (FDOE) found offensive was removed or
downgraded from mandatory to optional. The revised 226-page curriculum
eliminated queer studies, critical race theory, mass incarceration,
and a section titled “Black Struggle in the 21st Century,” made
the Black Lives Matter movement and reparations optional research
projects, and added a project topic on “Black conservatism.” The
names of all the offending authors—including myself—were removed.

The College Board insisted that it had not bowed to political
pressure, despite a trove of email exchanges with the FDOE discussing
potentially prohibited content and a final letter from the FDOE
thanking the board for removing topics the state had deemed
“discriminatory and historically fictional.” The fact is that the
College Board stood to lose millions of dollars if Florida canceled
its AP courses. Although a federal judge blocked portions of the Stop
W.O.K.E. Act that restricted academic freedom in public colleges and
universities, the law still applies to private businesses and K–12
education.

Rather than accept a watered-down curriculum bereft of the theories,
concepts, and interdisciplinary methods central to Black Studies,
students, teachers, scholars, and social justice activists fought
back. On May 3 they organized a nationwide day of action calling out
the College Board and defending the integrity of Black Studies.
Apparently it worked. A week before the national protest, the College
Board announced plans to revise the curriculum yet again. As of this
writing, however, no specific changes have been announced.

*

The right’s vehement opposition to Black Studies is predictable.
Black Studies has been under attack since its formal inception on
college campuses in the late 1960s, and repression of all knowledge
advancing Black freedom goes back much further. Most state laws
prohibiting enslaved Africans from learning to read and write were
introduced after 1829, in response first to the publication of David
Walker’s _Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World_—an
unrelenting attack on slavery and US hypocrisy for maintaining
it—and then to Nat Turner’s rebellion two years later. Back then
the _Appeal_ was contraband: anyone caught with it faced
imprisonment or execution. Today it is a foundational text in Black
Studies.

The historian Jarvis R. Givens found that during the Jim Crow era
Black school teachers often “deployed fugitive tactics” and risked
losing their jobs in order to teach Black history.

 In Mississippi, organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) taught contraband history
[[link removed]] in
“freedom schools,” while the Council of Federated Organizations
(COFO) established “freedom libraries” throughout the state
stocked with donated books—many on Black history by Black authors.
Between 1964 and 1965, white terrorists burned down the freedom
libraries in Vicksburg, Laurel, and Indianola.

Who’s afraid of Black Studies? White supremacists, fascists, the
ruling class, and even some liberals. As well they should be. Not
everything done in the name of Black Studies challenges the social
order. Like any field, it has its own sharp divisions and
disagreements. But unlike mainstream academic disciplines, Black
Studies was born out of a struggle for freedom and a genuine quest to
understand the world in order to change it, presenting political and
moral philosophy with their most fundamental challenge. The objects of
study have been Black life, the structures that produce premature
death, the ideologies that render Black people less than human, the
material consequences of those ideologies, and the foundational place
of colonialism and slavery in the emergence of modernity. Black
Studies grew out of, and interrogates, the long struggle to secure our
future as a people and for humanity by remaking and reenvisioning the
world through ideas, art, and social movements. It emerged as both an
intellectual and political project, without national boundaries and
borders. The late political theorist Cedric J. Robinson described it
as “a critique of Western Civilization.”

A chief target of this critique has been the interpretation of
history. Battles over the teaching of history are never purely
intellectual contests between ignorance and enlightenment, or
reducible to demands to insert marginalized people into the
curriculum.

 Contrary to the common liberal complaint that schools “ignore”
the history of slavery and racism, Black and Native people have long
occupied a place in school history curricula. Generations of students
learned that white people settled the wilderness, took rightful
ownership of the land from bloodthirsty Indians who didn’t know what
to do with it, and brought the gift of civilization and democracy to
North America and the rest of the world. During most of the twentieth
century, students were taught that Negroes were perfectly happy as
slaves, until some conniving Republicans and carpetbaggers persuaded
them otherwise. Leading history books by Ivy League professors
repeated the myth, and in the first epic film in the US, D. W.
Griffith depicted the “great and noble” Ku Klux Klan redeeming the
South from rapacious, ignorant Negroes and shifty carpetbaggers,
obliterating all vestiges of the Black struggle to bring genuine
democracy to the South and the nation.

Black scholars and their allies consistently contested these
narratives. In “The Propaganda of History,” the last chapter of
his epic text _Black Reconstruction in America_ (1935), W. E. B. Du
Bois called out the ideological war on truth masquerading as objective
scholarship. He believed in reason but came to see its futility in the
face of white supremacy, colonial rule, and “one of the most
stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an
effort involving universities, history, science, social life and
religion.”

Du Bois wasn’t out to make a name for himself in the field of
nineteenth-century US history. He was trying to understand the roots
of fascism in Europe and in his native land. He saw the battle over
the interpretation of history play out in the streets, statehouses,
courts, and newspapers for decades—often with deadly consequences.
The rise of the second Ku Klux Klan was inspired in part by a national
campaign to erase the history of Reconstruction. The chief catalyst
was Griffith’s _The Birth of a Nation_, released in 1915, the same
year the renowned Black historian Carter G. Woodson founded the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. 

Respectable white supremacists such as the Ladies Memorial
Associations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in
1894, waged their own soft power campaign, building monuments to the
defenders of slavery in the region and around the nation’s capital.
The movement to erect statues celebrating Confederate war heroes took
off in the early twentieth century rather than immediately after the
end of Reconstruction because it took over three decades of white
terrorism, political assassination, lynching, disfranchisement, and
federal complicity to destroy the last vestiges of a biracial labor
movement, ensuring that white supremacy and Jim Crow could reign
supreme.

*

What the right demonizes as CRT bears no resemblance to actual
critical race theory, a four-decades-old body of work that
interrogates why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy
structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality. Racism,
these theorists argue, isn’t just a matter of individual bias or
prejudice but a social and political construct embedded in our legal
system. Taking a page straight from the anticommunist playbook, the
right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle, turning an
antiracist academic project into a racist plot to teach white children
to hate themselves, their country, and their “race.”

The chief architect of this strategy is Christopher Rufo, currently a
senior fellow at the archconservative Manhattan Institute, who in the
wake of the mass protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd
declared that the spread of critical race theory was behind the
unrest. By his own admission
[[link removed]],
Rufo sought the “perfect villain” to mobilize opposition to the
antiracist insurgency and had no qualms about distorting CRT to do it.
Ignoring the scholarship while naming the scholars, notably Kimberlé
Crenshaw and the late Derrick Bell, he presumed that these three words
“strung together” would signify “hostile, academic, divisive,
race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” As he explained
to his Twitter followers in 2021, the plan was to rebrand CRT and 

eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural
insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public
read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think
“critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will
recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that
are unpopular with Americans.

Rufo’s ploy soon became White House policy. He helped draft
Trump’s now-rescinded Executive Order 13950, issued on September 22,
2020, which warned of a left-wing ideology threatening “to infect
core institutions of our country” by promoting “race or sex
stereotyping or scapegoating.” The document pitted this invented
ideology against the principles of “color blindness” derived from
a distorted reading of Martin Luther King, Jr. to justify eliminating
workplace diversity and inclusion training in federal agencies. It
helped spawn a wave of anti-CRT legislation. According to a recent
study
[[link removed]] released
by UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program, from the start of 2021 to
the end of 2022 federal, state, and local legislative and governing
bodies introduced 563 anti-CRT measures, almost half of which have
been enacted or adopted. At least 94 percent of the successful
measures target K–12 education, affecting nearly half of all
children in the country’s public schools.

These measures target not just CRT but liberal multiculturalism and,
more pointedly, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and any
modern academic discipline that critically studies race and gender.
(From here on I will refer to this scholarship collectively as
“critical race and gender studies,” make specific references to
Black Studies or CRT when appropriate, and use “we” occasionally
when explaining what scholars in these fields do.) Most of these bills
allegedly intended to protect education from politics share identical
language because they derive from model legislation
[[link removed]] drafted
by well-funded right-wing think tanks, including the America First
Policy Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for Renewing
America, Alliance for Free Citizens, and the Ethics and Public Policy
Center. Stanley Kurtz, a leading critic of the African American AP
course who masquerades as an investigative journalist for _National
Review_, ironically named the model anti-CRT legislation he drafted
for the Ethics and Public Policy Center “the Partisanship Out of
Civics Act.”

Some of the text of that legislation was lifted from the section of
Executive Order 13950 prohibiting the teaching of “divisive
concepts.” These concepts include the idea that one race or sex is
“inherently superior” to others; that the US “is fundamentally
racist or sexist”; that a person, “by virtue of his or her race or
sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive” or “bears
responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of
the same race or sex”; that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard
work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race
to oppress another race”; and that some people “should feel
discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological
distress on account of his or her race or sex.” The assumption here
is that confronting the history of American racism would provoke
feelings of guilt and shame in white kids and their parents. Such
legislation never considers the psychological distress Black, brown,
and Indigenous students frequently endure as a result of whitewashed
curricula, tracking, suspensions and expulsions on the slightest
pretext, even abuses by law enforcement inside their own classrooms.

Such allegations against critical race and gender studies strain
credulity. No serious scholar believes that someone is “inherently
racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or
unconsciously,” solely “by virtue of his or her race or sex.” We
teach the opposite: that race is neither fixed nor biological but
socially constructed. Modern categories of racial classification were
Enlightenment-era European creations that relied on a false science to
claim that discrete “racial” groups share inherent traits or
characteristics. We reject such claims as essentialist and recognize
that behaviors and ideas attributed to race, gender, class, and
sexuality are not inherent but ideological, and therefore dynamic and
subject to change. We use evidence-based research to show that
policies that further racial, class, and gender inequality need not be
intentional, and that anyone can be antiracist, regardless of their
race.

The belief that hierarchies of race and gender are based on
“inherent” characteristics is the basis for white supremacy and
patriarchy. Such ideologies have been used to justify conquest,
dispossession, slavery, segregation, the exclusion of women and Black
people from the franchise, wage differentials based on race and
gender, welfare and housing policies, marriage and family law, even
the denial of women’s right to bodily autonomy. Many conservatives
backing anti-CRT legislation do subscribe to the idea that certain
differences, especially regarding gender, are “inherent”—that
is, fixed and immutable. CRT and Black Studies do not.

Likewise, to accuse CRT of teaching that “meritocracy or traits such
as a hard work ethic” are racist is to turn its interpretation of US
history on its head. What Black Studies and critical race theory
reveal is the extent to which wealth was accrued through the labor and
land of others. The foundational wealth of the country, concentrated
in the hands of a few, was built on stolen land (Indigenous
dispossession), stolen labor (slavery), and the exploitation of the
labor of immigrants, women, and children.

Finally, critical scholars of race and gender categorically reject the
claim that any individual “bears responsibility for actions
committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” The
language is intended as an attack on the idea of reparations, but
advocates of reparations hardly claim that all present-day white
people are “responsible” for slavery. Rather, they acknowledge
that enslavement, land theft, wage theft, and housing discrimination
resulted in extracting wealth from some and directly accruing
generational wealth to others. Slavery and Jim Crow—more precisely,
racial capitalism—suppressed wages for white workers, and the threat
of interracial worker and farmer unity compelled the Southern
oligarchs to pass antilabor laws and crush unions. The result was the
subjugation of all working-class Southerners, including whites.

The right-wing movement to remake education is not limited to K–12.
Nearly a fifth of the 563 anti-CRT measures introduced and 12 percent
of those enacted target colleges and universities. In Florida,
DeSantis has launched a successful coup against the administration of
New College, replaced a majority of the board of trustees with
handpicked allies, and begun to totally overhaul the curriculum,
wiping out all vestiges of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The
latest attack on Florida’s state university system, Senate Bill 266,
which DeSantis signed into law last month, is a flagrant attack on
academic freedom and faculty governance. The Board of Governors is
charged with reviewing state colleges and universities for violating
the Florida Educational Equity Act, which forbids teaching “theories
that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in
the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain
social, political, or economic inequities.” The law also prohibits
faculty or staff from advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion,
promoting or participating in political or social activism, or
granting preferential treatment “on the basis of race, color,
national origin, sex, disability, or religion.” And it gives boards
of trustees the power to review the tenure status of any faculty
member on demand, which means that even tenured professors are subject
to arbitrary dismissal.

Buried in this law and shrouded by the state’s “anti-woke”
rhetoric is another agenda: transforming the state college system into
an engine of market fundamentalism beholden to business interests. One
of its objectives is “to promote the state’s economic
development” through new research, technology, patents, grants, and
contracts that “generate state businesses of global importance,”
and to create “a resource rich academic environment that attracts
high-technology business and venture capital to the state.” In 2020
the governor and the state legislature established and lavishly funded
the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International
University, tasked with promoting “a better understanding of the
free enterprise system and its impact on individual freedom and human
prosperity around the world, with a special emphasis on the United
States and Latin America and the Caribbean.” SB 266 further elevated
the Adam Smith Center by giving it all the powers of an academic
department, including the ability to hire tenure-track faculty and
offer majors and minors.

*

A matter of days before issuing Executive Order 13950, Trump announced
the formation of the federally funded 1776 Commission
[[link removed]] to
promote “patriotic education” and portray the US in a more
positive light. Advisors for the commission blamed colleges and
universities for distorting history and promoting “destructive
scholarship” that sows “division, distrust, and hatred among
citizens…. It is the intellectual force behind so much of the
violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our
universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and
symbols.”

The commission issued its first and only report less than two weeks
after the insurrection at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. It
denigrates popular democracy, whitewashes the history of slavery, says
nothing about Indigenous peoples or dispossession, and claims that
“progressivism” and “identity politics” are at odds with
American values, not unlike communism and fascism.

Perhaps its most egregious fabrication is turning Martin Luther King
Jr. into a colorblind libertarian. The report recasts the civil rights
movement as a struggle for individual liberty and equal opportunity
that, with the death of King, lost its way when it embraced “group
rights,” “preferential treatment” for minorities, and
“identity politics.” This is the same King who in his book _Why
We Can’t Wait_ (1964) supported “compensatory or preferential
treatment for the Negro” because “it is obvious that if a man is
entered at the starting line of a race three hundred years after
another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in
order to catch up”; the same King who called on the federal
government to divest from the war in Vietnam, invest in the war on
poverty, recognize racism as a source of inequality, and acknowledge
“the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244
years.”

The stunning distortion of King’s ideas should surprise no one, King
least of all. He knew something about the politics of history. On the
occasion of Du Bois’s hundredth birthday in 1968, King delivered a
speech at Carnegie Hall on the significance of _Black
Reconstruction_’s challenge to the “conscious and deliberate
manipulation of history.” Du Bois, King observed, proved that “far
from being the tragic era” of misrule and corruption, Reconstruction

was the only period in which democracy existed in the South. This
stunning fact was the reason the history books had to lie because to
tell the truth would have acknowledged the Negroes’ capacity to
govern and fitness to build a finer nation in a creative relationship
with poor whites.

Multiracial democracy, or what Du Bois called “abolition
democracy,” represented the greatest threat to the classes that
ruled the South and the nation. It still does. DeSantis, Trump,
Governors Greg Abbott and Kim Reynolds, the 1776 Commission, the
Center for American Freedom, the American Enterprise Institute, the
Ethics and Public Policy Center, and their copious allies all claim
that their war on critical race and gender studies aims to present US
history in a “positive light.” Why then not teach the history of
movements that tried to make sure every person enjoyed freedom and
safety and fought to end slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and sex
discrimination? If “patriotic education” embraces the principles
of freedom and democracy, why not introduce students to courageous
people—like Benjamin Fletcher, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Ella
Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Johnnie Tillmon, George Jackson, Fran Beal,
Barbara Smith, and others—who risked their lives to ensure freedom,
democracy, and economic security for others? Why not create a
curriculum centered on the abolitionist movement; on Indigenous
nations as early models for US constitutional democracy; on the
formerly enslaved people who crushed the slaveholding republic, tried
to democratize the South, and fought the terrorism of lynching, the
Klan, and the Black Legion; on the suffragists and labor organizers
who expanded our democratic horizons and improved working conditions?

But in our current neofascist universe, this is “woke” history.
The right masks its distrust of multiracial democracy by calling it
“progressivism” and its opposition to antiracism by labeling it
“identity politics.” According to this logic, antiracism has
sullied America’s noble tradition. _Ruby Bridges Goes to School_,
books for young readers on Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on
Washington, Ibram X. Kendi’s _How to Be an Antiracist_, and his
children’s book, _Antiracist Baby_, have all been targeted for bans
as subversive literature. There is no commensurate movement to ban
books that promote racism, like Thomas Jefferson’s _Notes on the
State of Virginia_ (1785), which asserts frequently that Black people
are innately inferior to whites—physically, intellectually, and even
imaginatively; Edmund Ruffin’s defense of slavery, _The Political
Economy of Slavery_ (1857); or books and articles by Samuel
Cartwright, Josiah Nott, George Fitzhugh, Louis Agassiz, Herbert
Spencer, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, or Daniel G. Brinton, the
eminent anthropologist who in his book _Races and Peoples_ (1890)
wrote, “That philanthropy is false, that religion is rotten, which
would sanction a white woman enduring the embrace of a colored man.”

The point of these attacks is to turn antiracists into enemies and the
people identified as “white” into victims. Marginalized white
working people, who are victims of stagnant wages, privatized health
care, big pharma, and tax policies that redistribute wealth upward,
are taught instead that they live in what was once the perfect country
until woke forces took over and gave their hard-earned income to the
Negroes and immigrants who are now trying to take their guns. It would
be a mistake to think of such rhetoric as a “culture war.” This is
a political battle. It is part and parcel of the right-wing war on
democracy, reproductive rights, labor, the environment, land defenders
and water protectors, the rights and safety of transgender and
nonbinary people, asylum seekers, the undocumented, the unhoused, the
poor, and the perpetual war on Black communities.

As I write these words, the predominantly white Republican Mississippi
state legislature is stripping the predominantly Black city of Jackson
of political authority and revenue. Many of the same states adopting
anti-CRT laws are also passing anti-trans bills and extreme abortion
bans, and relaxing gun laws. The Tennessee state legislature expelled
two young Black representatives, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for
joining protesters demanding stricter gun laws after a mass shooting
at a Nashville elementary school. And Texas governor Greg Abbott is
planning to pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of killing the
antiracist activist Garrett Foster during a Black Lives Matter protest
in 2020.

Colin Kaepernick, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and I put together a new
anthology, _Our History Has Always Been Contraband
[[link removed]]_,
to respond not only to these right-wing lies and attacks but also to
an ill-informed mainstream discourse over the meaning, purpose, and
scholarly value of Black Studies. Despite the claims of even
well-meaning and sympathetic pundits, Black Studies courses are not
designed to serve Black students alone but all students. The point is
not to raise self-esteem or make students feel guilty, nor is Black
Studies merely a diversity project. The essays and readings we
gathered make clear that Black Studies sits not at the margins of
social inquiry but at its very center. As we face a rising tide of
fascism, we must remember how we got here: by protest, occupation,
rebellion, and deep study. As long as racism, sexism, homophobia,
patriarchy, class oppression, and colonial domination persist, our
critical analyses will always be considered criminal.

_A VERSION OF THIS ESSAY APPEARS IN OUR HISTORY HAS ALWAYS BEEN
CONTRABAND: IN DEFENSE OF BLACK STUDIES, EDITED BY COLIN KAEPERNICK,
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, AND KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR, AVAILABLE NOW
FROM HAYMARKET BOOKS
[[link removed]] AS
A FREE EBOOK AND TO BE PUBLISHED IN HARDCOVER AND PAPERBACK JULY 4. _

_ROBIN D.G. KELLEY is the Gary B. Nash Professor of US History at
UCLA. His books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American
Original._

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