By Dick Hall-Sizemore
Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist, has written a couple of pieces that provide the best synopsis and analysis of the current controversy over teaching race and racial history that I have seen. (The columns can be found here and here.)
He starts off with a perceptive comment on the current state of affairs: “It’s becoming hard to tell what the argument is about.”
In the first column, he summarizes progressives’ goals as wanting to change the way that schools teach American history by exorcising the Lost Cause hagiography and broadening the “narrative of race beyond the Civil War and the civil rights era.” They also want to “weave these revisions into a more radical narrative of U.S. history as a whole.” He notes that conservatives “often see themselves as objecting to the most radical parts of progressive revisionism, not the entire project.” He concludes on a hopeful note:
“You could imagine, out of this controversy, potential forms of synthesis— in which the progressive desire for a deeper reckoning with slavery and segregation gets embedded in a basically patriotic narrative of what the founding established, what Lincoln achieved, what America meant to people of many races, even with our sins.”
Of course, that is not the entire controversy. What has most conservatives, including the ones on this blog, upset is the debate over “how to teach children about racism today.” In this area of the debate, progressives want to
“teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how American’s racist past still influences inequalities today. In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.”
Such an approach would face resistance from conservatives, but “is probably a winning argument for progressives.” But, what is really fanning the flames is “that the structural-racist diagnosis isn’t being offered on its own. Instead it’s yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problems it describes.”
Those “sweepting theories” are the ones offered by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. Douthat argues that the goals of these theories “don’t follow necessarily from the theory of structural racism.” They betray the theory’s key insight, that you can have “racism without racists” and they “extend structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear.”
Douthat’s major point is a warning to progressives. He criticizes progressives for not “acknowledging that the dubious conceptions are a big part of what’s been amplifying the controversy” and concludes with a blunt warning:
“Here one could say that figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism, increasingly play a role similar to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side. That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over Kendian or DiAngelan ideas as just a ‘moral panic’ experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.”
From My Soapbox
Douthat’s pieces appeal to me because they articulate disparate thoughts that I have been wrestling with, but have not been able to coalesce.
Earlier on this blog, I have argued that CRT is a valid way of viewing Virginia’s history because Virginians were obsessed with race and it permeated almost every aspect of society and the ramifications of that obsession are still being felt today. (It should be noted that Douthat never uses the term CRT, which is deliberate on his part, I think.) However, I am dismayed at the direction in which the debate is going.
By uncritically embracing and promoting the extremists such as DiAngelo and Kendi (I am looking at you, Arlington County schools), Democrats have given conservatives a cudgel to use in attacking current attempts to get students to examine the role of race in the world they live in. As in all political campaigns, it is handy to have a pithy slogan and the conservatives have one in “Oppose CRT.” Because few know or understand what CRT is or its nuances, it becomes a convenient way of denying that race still is a factor in our society.
While I am on a roll, I will move on to an area that Douthat did not cover in his columns — diversity and equity.
My daughter was in a Talented and Gifted Program in her elementary school. (Hey, as a parent, I get to brag.) When I asked her what the teachers had them do in the TAG program she replied, “Sit around and talk about how gifted we are.” That strikes me as what Democrats are now doing: spending their time talking about how they are bringing about diversity and equity. The state has a Chief Diversity Officer (Cabinet-level, no less); agencies, localities, and schools, have diversity and equity officers or units. And, there are plans galore.
Of course, if one is going to try to institute a major change in the culture of an organization, there needs to be a plan to do so and there need to be people to develop that plan and to follow up to ensure that it is being implemented. But, at some point, it can seem that the plan and the bureaucracy become ends unto themselves, rather than means to an end. At some point, the bureaucracies with the high-sounding names seem to be virtue-signaling, rather than valid attempts to correct supposed wrongs.
For example, the One Virginia plan, which sets out a broad framework for “diversity” in Virginia and required state agencies and institutions of higher education to submit their individual plans by July 1, is classic bureaucratic overkill. I can imagine the churning in state agencies to produce their own plans, which, I predict, will sit on a shelf in fancy notebooks and be ignored and forgotten. That will be particularly true with a new administration taking office in January, with different priorities.
There are simpler ways of going about this. Agency heads could give explicit instructions to their human resource officers that they need to expand their hiring horizons in order to increase the diversity in the ranks of the agency. To ensure accountability, the agency head should require periodic reports. University presidents and provosts should direct the chairs of their departments and deans of schools to increase the diversity of their faculties. That would include ideological diversity as well as racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.
In other areas, there needs to be concrete goals and accountability. One good example would be a topic much discussed on this blog — the gap in reading ability among elementary students. Every elementary school principal should be told that his or her performance will be evaluated primarily on the degree to which the incoming kindergarten class passes the 4th grade reading test five years from now. In fact, every student should pass. It will not be necessary for all students to do equally well on the test, but all must pass. After all, that is the prime function of the first grades of school — to teach kids how to read. It will be up to the principal and teachers to figure out how to accomplish that. Some students will start behind others in language development, cultural awareness, etc. Equity demands that those students get extra help, somehow. The state or an individual school division may decide that the current approach to teaching reading is not adequate for meeting that goal. They may want to check with other areas of this state that have been more successful, such as Southwest Virginia, or other parts of the country, such as Mississippi, to examine what was used in those places. If they decide a different method, such as phonics, is needed, more time will be needed in order to train teachers.
The basic methods for implementing this goal have been identified in this blog. James Sherlock has developed a template for identifying individual schools in a division in which students have been passing standardized tests at a rate significantly lower than the rest of the division. James Whitehead has pointed the way to fixing those schools — identify and assign strong principals to them and give those principals the support they need.
It is time to stop just talking and time to start doing.
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