Tag Archives: Critical Race Theory

Current Events

I Read Florida House Bill 999 So You Don’t Have To

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And it is worth worrying about.

It is known as Florida House Bill 999. Those numbers are what you dial when you experience an emergency in Great Britain. In that sense, the numbering is fitting, for this bill poses a grave threat to intelligence, critical reasoning, and freedom of thought. It is no laughing matter.

The bill applies to all public postsecondary institutions in the Sunshine State. It empowers a Board of Governors to “align the missions of each constituent university with the academic success of its students; the education for citizenship of the constitutional republic; and the state’s existing and emerging workforce needs,” among other things. The Board must “provide direction to each constituent university on removing from its programs any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor.” They will also oversee an “Accountability Plan” that lists majors by the salary of their first-year graduates, and demands the collection of evidence on the universities’ promotion of “education for citizenship of the constitutional republic and the cultivation of the intellectual autonomy of its undergraduate students.”

Faculty members who choose not to toe the line can face discipline. The Board of Governors has the power to “initiate a post-tenure review of a faculty member at any time with cause.” Each state university board of trustees can make decisions for hiring and is not “required to consider recommendations or opinions of faculty of the university or other individuals or groups.” In other words, academic departments would not have a role in assessing the expertise of their would-be colleagues. Faculty cannot be trusted with hiring new faculty. Hiring decisions may not use “diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, Critical Race Theory rhetoric, or other forms of political identity filters as part of the hiring process, including as part of applications for employment, promotion and tenure, conditions of employment, or reviewing qualifications for employment.” Each school’s Board of Trustees may also “review any faculty member’s tenure status,” should they fail to conform. Shut up and take it, the state legislature is telling faculty, and if you do not like it we will ruin your life.

This is dangerous and draconian. It flies in the face of everything an education is supposed to be. Free-inquiry is not a cardinal value on Florida, where legislators with little expertise in education are crafting policies for universities.

The legislation also proposes to create the Florida Institute for Governance and Civics, which will “provide students with access to an interdisciplinary hub that will develop academically rigorous scholarship and coursework on the origins of the American system of government, its foundational documents, its subsequent political traditions and evolutions, and its impact on comparative political system.”

That may sound relatively benign, but its not. The Institute will “encourage civic literacy in the state through the development of educational tools and resources for K-12 and post-secondary students that foster an understanding of how individual rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, and federalism function within the American system of government.” This includes holding on-campus forums to allow students to hear from “exceptional individuals who have excelled in a wide range of sectors of American life to highlight the possibilities created by individual achievement and entrepreneurial vision.” This is all coded language. Horatio Alger would be proud. There is no systemic injustice in America, and students in Florida should learn that the only reason for their failure can be their inability to work hard and think big.”

Historians clearly are part of a problem that the Florida State Legislature hopes to eliminate. “General education core courses,” the legislation reads, “may not suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” History and other courses “with a curriculum based on unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” might be accepted as electives, but not for general education. Students should stick to “this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”

The language in the legislation is vague and unclear. Critically important terms are left undefined and could conceivably lead faculty members teaching theoretical physics on the hot seat. What, to the legislators, is the meaning of “intersectionality”? Of “Critical Race Theory”? What, for that matter, do they mean by “a curriculum”? The legislature, I suspect, want the small number of people who read this bill not to worry about its contents: a proposal to shut off entire fields of inquiry aimed at understanding and proposing solutions to demonstrable and easily-documented injustices in American life. But that a bill of this sort could even be considered is a sad state of affairs for a Nation ostensibly founded on Freedom.

Action is required. While the leader of the American Historical Association bitches and whines about “presentist” scholarship, Florida lawmakers are setting fire to the very idea that students should be exposed to ideas that challenge them, make them feel uncomfortable, or aware of the obvious and yawning gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be. This country is not healthy, and the problems we face today have historical roots. Meanwhile, the entire historical profession has fallen victim to a process of slow strangulation as public university systems deal with declining state funding. Much of the extraordinary talent of a generation of historians has been squandered. Public historical illiteracy is growing by leaps and bounds.

And now, this spate of Republican bills crushing free inquiry and silencing dissent. This legislation is racist and dangerous, a threat to all who value freedom and the ability to raise troubling questions. It is incumbent upon all of us who care about the field of history to explain why. Each of us who believes in the importance of Intellectual Fearlessness, and the importance of raising big questions, more than ever, must act. Each and every chance we get.

Current Events

The Gag Order Party

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If you have not read the Penn America Center report on “Educational Gag-Orders,” you really ought to. Although the focus of state legislation described in the report rests on teaching about gender, sexuality, and Critical Race Theory, the language in the bills could have an impact on teaching and learning about Native America. Because so much of this legislation originates in Red States with rich Native American histories, the Penn America Center report is a sobering read.

            Each of the bills examined in the report “represents an effort to impose content- and viewpoint-based censorship.” They send the signal, the report argues, “that specific ideas, arguments, theories, and opinions may not be tolerated by the government.” Twenty-six of the bills “explicitly apply to colleges and universities.” Six of the bills failed, three have become law, and the remainder are making their way through the legislative process. Many of them prevent teaching that includes “CRT” and information presented in work like the 1619 Project. Some bills propose to eliminate tenure to ensure that instructors do not teach their students ideas and content that legislators find subversive or dangerous.

            A South Carolina bill, HB 3827, offers an alarming example. The legislation outlaws promoting or endorsing narratives that “the United States was founded for the purpose of oppression, that the American Revolution was fought for the purpose of protecting oppression, or that United States history is a story defined by oppression; or (ii) with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality”

            This is pretty rich from the state that fired the shots that began the Civil War.

            Think about this for a second.  How might an instructor in South Carolina tell her students about the “3/5 Compromise,” which counted each enslaved person as 60% of a human being, and gave slave states more representation in Congress, more electoral votes, and thus control of the national government? How might one teach the history of the Nullification Crisis without doing an entire injustice to American History? Or Secession, and the arguments that slavers made in favor of leaving the Union.  When I taught the America survey, my students read Charles Dew’s brief but incredible book, Apostles of Disunion. Secessionists are condemned by their own racist speech, their own frequently-voiced arguments that the Founders created a republic with white men in charge, and that white supremacy was worth fighting and dying for. But under this proposed legislation? A dutiful teacher might assert that South Carolinians were standing up for their state’s rights. But their right to do what?  Imagine, if you will, that you see your next-door neighbor packing up the car.  He is leaving his wife.  You are stunned. They seemed like such a wonderful couple. They had been together for ever, it seemed, close to four score and five years. Stunned, you ask what happened.  Your neighbor tells you he is leaving because he has the right to do so.  Nobody will find that a satisfactory answer. But that is what South Carolina’s legislators are contemplating.  Steer clear of controversial subjects.  Do not indoctrinate students.  Deny the racism of the past. Pretend it did not exist. Indeed, teach nothing that could make a student, somehow, feel ashamed of their race. Don’t talk about the gibbets in Charlestown, the trade in Cherokee scalps, and enslavement, which cuts to the marrow of South Carolina’s history.  Don’t talk about Nullification and John C. Calhoun and his views of the Constitution.  Don’t talk about Fort Sumter, and the Palmetto State’s embrace of lynching.  Lie to your students.  Tell them nothing that will upset their frightened parents.  Lie to them, and lie some more.  It is all good.  It is all progress. Conservative White South Carolinians are good people who need to hear that, over and over, it seems.  It is a message they will drill into the skulls of their children.  These lawmakers are so fragile and frightened that those who refuse to toe the line can expect termination.   Or worse.

Teaching Native American History

Montana Story, Part I: Erasure

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During a cross-country drive last month, we stopped in Billings, Montana, where I lived in the mid-1990s. It was at Montana State University-Billings where I began my career as a professor in the fall of 1994. We drove around the town, looked at the houses where we used to live. It was clear that the city had changed a lot in the more than twenty years since I last had been there.

            I was eager to see the campus. I left my family at the hotel—they all wanted to hang out by the pool—and I drove up 27th Street North to the campus. I struggled to find my bearings. It had been a long time. An addition to the science building had taken over what formerly had been a faculty parking lot. I headed toward the Liberal Arts Building.  My office had been on the eighth floor, I believe, and all the classes I taught were held in that imposing edifice. I spent some time walking around the campus on a quiet Sunday evening.  All the buildings were locked, so I could not go see my old office or the classrooms where I taught.

File:MSUB LA Building.JPG - Wikimedia Commons
More Daunting than Mordor

            Much had changed, so much that I felt a bit lost. Buildings had grown. It seemed like a very different place, and I noticed things I had forgotten over the years, especially the small garden that stands in the shadow of the Liberal Arts Building.  The garden was named after an English professor named Bruce Myers, who had died young—younger than I am now—two years before I arrived in Billings. A centerpiece in the garden was a poem Myers wrote shortly before his death:

“Last Class”

Seeds are floating from the cottonwoods

And the wind is up. All around us

Poets gather on grass the air carries

White puffs. We read each other’s words

Wondering if this as close as we’ll come

To the flight of clouds? Or is this

What flying means—sitting in Spring

Our bodies, full of birds and grass and words,

Wondering as cottonwoods whisper at our ears?

I do not know the word for this vision

This congregation of poet bodies, poet words

Beneath this tree. But last this once

This single sunlit singing afternoon

Love will do.

What a perfect statement of the depth of the joy that teaching can bring.

Where is Cookie?: Remembering: Poet's Garden honors legacy of a fine teacher

            I learned a lot from teaching in Montana. It was the first time in my career where I had significant numbers of Native American students in my classes. They drove in from Crow and from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. I learned from these students things that put my academic and scholarly concerns in perspective. Many of the debates that dominate the field of Native American Studies and Native American History on college campuses simply do not carry much register in Native American communities on the Northern Plains.

            I learned a lot, but I spent much of my time at Billings trying to find a job someplace else. I was in a deeply dysfunctional department on a struggling campus, where more people left than went up for tenure.  The Dean of the College of Liberal Arts had no respect for what I did and said that whatever research I produced should be “relevant” and “applied.”  I asked her what she thought that meant, and I never really got a good answer, but it was clear that unless she thought it was important and relevant, today, to her, that it would not count for much.  Bruce Myers’ words meant nothing to her.

            I would like to think that things are better in the field of Native American history than they were in the 1990s, and that the field is booming.  A tremendous amount of scholarship is produced each year. Native American history no longer exists on the margins of the field. But the same day I arrived in Billings last month, I read on Twitter of a bill introduced into the Texas legislature by one of the Lone Star Republic’s many East Texas lunatics. He sought, in his effort to combat what he saw as the mortal threat posed by “Critical Race Theory,” to remove from the state’s social studies standards a requirement that students learn about “the history of Native Americans.”  If we do not talk about the bad things, they never happened.

            Erasure.

            When it appears this baldly, it puts our academic and interpretive debates in perspective. We argue about interpretations, evidence, and approaches, and then there are those who could not care less about any of this.  “Cast all this aside,” they seem to say. History must be a celebration of White Christian America’s greatness.  Nothing else matters.

            I began teaching in Montana in 1994. That same semester conservatives worried about the spectre of political correctness.  Lynne Cheney had recently gone on a crusade against the National History Standards.  Liberal professors, she argued, were out to indoctrinate American students, to teach them that America’s story was one of racism, oppression, and greed.  They were teaching “multiculturalism” and emphasizing the bad parts of American history.  It is an old, old, argument, a tried-and-true Conservative tactic to avoid talking about historical moments that challenge their cherished and largely fictional narrative of the American past. Some of my colleagues in the department, too, shared Cheney’s concerns. They attempted, and to my embarrassment succeeded, in making my life miserable because I was newly hired on a tenure-track gig. I made the mistake of caring what these old racists thought. I hold no malice towards them now: they are retired, dead, or out of the academy, and I have spoken to none of them since the Clinton years. But they did not see Native American history as central to the American story.

            I have been at this for thirty years and there always have been people who claim to know something about my line of work that do not want to hear anything that is not a celebration of American greatness. I have friends who find it exhausting, the feeling of always having to justify their work. I am sympathetic. I felt that way during my four years in Montana, before I got out. As I walked around the quiet and empty campus, I realized how much I have changed. I have great faith in the power of teaching still, like Professor Myers, and I can view encounters with those who reject what I do as teachable moments, as opportunities for dialogue and engagement.  I feel like I must.  Of course, there are those who do not want this, and recoil from dialogue, who retreat from any situation in which their cherished notions of the past are called into question.  I have no control over that. So I work to keep my mind open, to exclude no one, to keep working with Indigenous communities, as I have done for the past 23 years, and to keep trying to produce scholarship as well. Doing good work in this field means trying to get it in front of as many eyes and into as many ears as possible.

            I learned from my time in Billings that in academia, as in so many other things, one must learn to accept that there are things beyond our control.  Accepting that brutal fact will help you sleep at night. The job market in higher education is, well, not much of a market at all.  Administrators can be cruel or obtuse, colleagues selfish and petty, and students, sometimes, just are not able to care.  There are those out there who reject everything we do without reading a word of what we write or listening to a word of what we say. Some of them are open to reason. You can engage with them.  But others will not listen no matter what you say.  Why let those people get to you?

            I do my work. I teach classes. I do service, on campus and off. I am fortunate to be able to work with, for, and in Indigenous communities. I write books and articles, knowing full well that more people will read this post on my obscure little blog than anything that appears in a scholarly journal.

            The first time an English-speaking writer put pen to paper to try to understand the Native American past and the Native American present on its own terms, there were English-speaking readers who not only rejected this work, but actively tried to discredit the author. Some tried to keep others from reading that author’s work.  The textbook policing of those little men who crusade against CRT—they are nothing new. Their assault on higher education, against free inquiry of any kind—may seem like a pernicious and unprecedented threat. It is not unprecedented at all. Remember what the anti-racists say. The rot is deep, and it goes to the core. It is fundamental. There have always been white loudmouths crying “Patriotism” and “Love of Country” and “MAGA!” as wittingly or unwittingly they seek to exclude, marginalize, and erase.

            Don’t laugh at these people. Don’t ignore them. Have the courage to engage them when the opportunity presents itself (and you absolutely should seek out those opportunities). Ask them questions. Hold their feet to the fire. Accept that this may be frustrating. They may be too fragile to engage you in dialogue. And that is the way it always has been. Take care of yourself, but do not give up and do not retreat. Peace.