writer, researcher, and editor
This GWM writes with a nostalgia for the charter school “reform coalition” movement that is as dangerous as it is factually incorrect (again, if only we actually taught CRT in schools).
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In this post: Logical fallacies and why we're in this mess in the first place.
Last week: What we all stand to gain from reading more diverse books, and What White People Can Do Now Part Six.
Next week: An Interview with Jessie Daniels about the subconscious terrorism of racism & the need to take down nice white ladies.
Dear friends and fam,
Last week, I fan-girled hard over writer Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel The Poet X, and hardly even got to talk about how much I love how she has merged poetry with story-telling from a stylistic point of view. Anyway, this week, I’d like to offer a fact-check on CRT, the reality behind “de-segregation,” and my hot take on all of the f******cking absurdity of the not-quite-right Right (hint: it’s about our education system).
In a recent New Yorker article, “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory,” Jelani Cobb profiles the civil rights attorney Derrick Bell. As per usual, his fight in the court involves a white school board closing a school in the heart of the Black community of Harmony, Mississippi in 1961 as a direct reaction to Roe v BOE in 1955. The school had been provided the seed money in 1912 by the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, whose commitment to Judaism led him to provide financial support to the African American community. Unlike today’s white saviors and impact investors, Rosenwald gave the community a check and let them build the school they desired. Emma Dabiri’s treatise on coalition building in What White People Can Do Next most likely would approve of this instinct (and it’s where we need to orient our thinking about urban education today).
At any rate, our main man of the week, Derrick Bell enters the picture to try to fight what white people did in the aftermath of Roe v BOE, which was to close the “segregated” Black schools under the cry of reverse-racism or whatever the f racists justified their actions with back in 1961 (screams into the void: reverse racism is a logical fallacy).
So, white folks invested in education closed all the Black schools, the ones that philosopher and education activist bell hooks talks about as having such revolutionary potential, bused BIPOC students to white schools, and in the meantime, made sure to enroll their own kids in private school. If you think I’m exaggerating, I am not. That is precisely what my grandparents did following de-segregation. Never get in the way of a white person making sure their child’s education is better than a BIPOC child’s. (See: hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom)
This is not a drill. This is an actual Tweet.
This is not a drill. This is an actual Tweet.
Why public schools in the south suck more (spoiler: it’s bc of racism):
So, with all the middle to upper class white kids fleeing to private schools, we have the fundamental reason why southern states lag far behind others in terms of education outcomes: because the south was the only region to really have desegregation enforced, white lawmakers actively voted to defund public education just so BIPOC students would not receive an equitable education. So what that it also screwed over an entire generation of working-class whites in the south who might have liked to have more upward mobility and career track options following the outsourcing of manufacturing. Perhaps we wouldn’t have that raging meth epidemic if we had considered poor white kids worthy of a decent education.
I’ve written about my particular joy I found when Tucker Carlson professed to be “terrified” of CRT in schools over the summer, and made my favorite graphic for a post to date, read why I think Tucker Carlson’s right to be afraid.
Jelani Cobb best sums up how ignorant republicans have defined CRT for their mostly lower-socio economic and under-educated as well white base:
"C.R.T. has been defined as Black-supremacist racism, false history, and the terrible apotheosis of wokeness."
As per usual, that definition has nothing to do with how Derrick Bell later taught his constitutional law-class, Cobb quotes his former student and teaching assistant on the issue to clarify:
“When people fear critical race theory, it stems from this idea that their children will be indoctrinated somehow. But Bell’s class was the least indoctrinated class I took in law school. We got the most freedom in that class to reach our own conclusions without judgement.”
Nevertheless, white people persisted in ruining shit. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (arrest her murderers ffs), our all time favorite Texan governor signed into law this summer a bill that restricts teaching about race in the state’s public schools. And now, a bunch of other shitty states like Oklahoma (ugh), Tennessee (they’re the worst anyway), Idaho (potatoes are white right?), Iowa (they have potatoes too??), New Hampshire (holla @ my racists in the North East), South Carolina (duh), and Arizona (that also tracks).
All of you, dear readers, are invested in equity in education if you’ve kept reading to this point. What is within your power to do about correcting CRT myths, or even addressing them head on in your classrooms, meeting rooms, and boards.
As Emma Dabiri reminds us, coalition building is key. Without CRT and the flourishing of race theory writ large, we would not have the tools to investigate how white people are also screwed over by racism. And without it taught in schools…. Well, we can expect more of the same Trumpian ethos and democratic erosion.
Bell, in many ways, through his efforts to fight for an equitable education for all students, lived through the revolution of the Civil Rights movement, and lived just long enough to understand the limitations of its achievements. Today, public schools are more segregated than they were during Raegan. But worse than that, the quality of education continues to fall (thx charter schools and the public school boards who made them possible).
Citation: Emily Richmond’s Atlantic piece, “Schools are more segregated today than during the late 1960s.” June 11, 2012. As an update: shit’s gotten worse since charter school proliferation took off around the same time as this article was written. smh.
But most of all, we are not educating the majority of Americans writ large to think critically. If we were, abortion would still be legal in Texas, Stacey Abdrams would have become governor of Georgia, and perhaps poor working class whites would understand how much they have to gain by building a coalition with their BIPOC brothers and sisters (this has, in fact, already happened, see the NSFS from August 31 2021, “Activism in Education: On transportation, coalitions, and rainbows”).
If any of y’all have got some ideas about what you personally can do, lemme know! Just reply to this email :)
Until next week,
A
Paino, Maria, Rebecca L Boylan, and Linda A Renzulli. “The Closing Door: The Effect of Race on Charter School Closures.” Sociological Perspectives, 2017. Vol 60(4)
Levy, Tal. “Charter Schools Legislation and the Element of Race” Western Journal of Black Studies. Spring 2010; 34, 1.
Blanchett, Wanda. “Disproportionate Representation of African American Students in Special Education: Acknowledging the Role of White Privilege and Racism.” Educational Researcher; Aug/Sep 2006, 35, 6
I come by my disdain honestly in a long tradition of southern writers who remain obsessed with the uneasy cultural quagmire of postbellum southern history.
This subconscious terrorism of the mind that white supremacy perpetuates, and how it makes white people act foolish (aka racist). If you can’t first name the white supremacy lurking in your own mind, you aren’t going to be of much use in the revolution.
N.S.F.S takes on another GWM, the supreme court going apeshit, and the crises within the education system.
N.S.F.S is back with a note on toxic masculinity in the wake of the Uvalde shooting and James Baldwin knowledge. While Baldwin doesn’t use that term per se, I think he would have found it a useful shorthand for how he describes the “American boy” in his essay “Nothing Personal.”
I discuss James Baldwin’s words as a balm for writer’s burnout, what we do when we feel our activism has made no progress towards meaningful change, and worse, when things seem to be back sliding back into the racist and sexist dark ages.
As I am writing this, Russian troops are on a long convoy headed towards Kyiv. I'm writing to extend my empathy to those in Soviet-ravaged and war-torn places. NSFS About the Russia-Ukraine Crisis, World Problems, and the Russian Warship.
Substitutes, like adjunct professors, are cheap and expendable labor. I talk about going bankrupt for one lost cause in education and jumping into the flames. About white saviors, corrupt urban charter schools, subbing, TTeju Cole, Emma Brown, and Soraya Chemlay.
“I spent most of my life trying to curtail my anger, my loudness, and most of all, the assertiveness with which I express myself.” Dr. Allison Harbin gives excerpts from a phone call with her landlord as a reflection on anger, and its use as an assertion of rights and worth as declared by Chemlay. In this Not Safe for School (NSFS) newsletter, she discusses expendable labor, adjuncts, and white saviorism.
