“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell
by James A. Bacon
The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is working on revisions to an advanced-placement course on African-American history, and the forces of wokeness are agitating to preserve the ideological framework they wrote into the course description four years ago. In short, they seek to ensure that the full four centuries of the African-American experience in Virginia is interpreted through the prism of systemic racism.
That’s not the spin on the story you’ll read in The Washington Post, of course. In an article published today the Post accuses the Youngkin administration of foisting its worldview on K-12 school students by, among other things, “striking some references to ‘white supremacy’ and ‘systemic racism.'”
There was plenty of racism and oppression in Virginia’s past, to be sure, and the course doesn’t shy away from any of that, according to evidence in the Post’s own article. What’s at issue is the conceptual framework for thinking about race, slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights, and contemporary race relations. The wokesters, who approach history as the playing out of intersecting forms of oppression, aren’t content to have teachers present their ideology as one way to think about race relations. They want the course to reflect their viewpoint throughout.
American Oversight, a watchdog group that pursues among other things “threats to democracy” and “Trump accountability,” used the Freedom of Information Act to review revisions to the African-American history course content. The group supplied the documents to the Post, which duly wrote an article advancing the narrative that Youngkin is whitewashing dark aspects of America’s past in Virginia’s K-12 schools.
The course was announced in 2020 under Governor Ralph Northam, and VDOE developed it in partnership with “WHRO Public Media, and committees of history and social science public school educators, university historians, and college professors,” according to the Post. Launched in 2020-21, the course is now taught in 45 school districts and 89 schools.
Did the scholars who designed the course have an ideological agenda?
The Post doesn’t broach that possibility. But it’s clear that the critics of Youngkin’s proposed changes, which have not yet gone into effect, do have an agenda, as I shall explain.
Why did the Youngkin administration revisit the course? Here is how the Post frames the explanation: “The changes to the elective come after the state was embroiled in controversy for revisions to its history standards, and as there have been efforts and legislation across the country to limit what schools teach about topics such as race, racism and sexuality in the classroom.”
What Team Youngkin wants to “limit” is the imposition of a leftist interpretive framework that is, in essence, critical theory packaged for high schoolers.
That much is evident from the Post’s own reporting, which the writer and editors are too blind to see. In a small detail that reveals much, the article mentions in passing that the Youngkinites are removing “lessons on implicit bias and equity.” Implicit bias and equity are integral to the intersectional-oppression paradigm and essential to the interpretation of modern-day America as a systemically racist nation.
The critics betray their biases in many other ways, as seen in the WaPo table below that highlights supposedly egregious changes to the course’s learning objectives. As you read these, remember, these are not to be taught as possible arguments that teachers and students might make about African-American history — they are the learning objectives themselves.
Let’s proceed point by point.
Rise of racism. The Northam-era formulation presupposes that colonial-era governments used slavery as a “mechanism for enforcement” of racism. In other words, racism came first, then slavery arose as a mechanism to enforce it. This aligns with the view that racism is an eradicable trait of “whiteness” and has been intrinsic to America since its founding. But the formulation gets the causation reversed. The early English settlers had no fixed views about race. Slavery came first, and in a complex interplay of forces, racism as a belief system evolved as a justification for the practice.
Team Youngkin is not downplaying discussion of racism, discrimination or slavery, as it is accused of doing, but is changing the template for understanding those historical phenomena.
White supremacist customs. The next example betrays the ideological suppositions of the Northam history writers: Discuss the impact of “White supremacist customs and laws” on veterans following World War II. Racism and segregation were all too real in 1945 America, but the concept of “White supremacy” as presented here must be understood in the context of critical theory. It conveys an understanding that White racism is an ineradicable trait, and it presupposes that social structures in 2024 are systemically racist as well.
The Youngkin formulation acknowledges that Black WWII veterans faced discrimination when they came home but does not contain the loaded term of “White supremacy.” The re-write does not block classroom discussion of White supremacy as one among many concepts for understanding Black history. Rather, it disallows using White supremacy, with all its connotations, as a foundational building block for the course.
UVA eugenics. The next offense in the minds of Youngkin critics was changing the wording regarding the study of eugenics at the University of Virginia. The Northam scholars stacked the deck by pre-supposing that a purpose of eugenics in Virginia was to “control African Americans.” That is a debatable proposition, to be sure. Eugenics was a popular idea across the political spectrum, in Europe as well as America, and the odious idea of cleansing the gene pool applied to mentally ill and feeble-minded Whites as well. One is entitled to advance the argument that a motivation in Virginia was to “control” African Americans, but that is an interpretation of history rather than foundational fact. Deleting the language from the learning objectives does not forbid teachers and students from discussing that interpretation; it eliminates the mandate that it be taught as dogma.
Redlining. A fourth alleged offense committed by the Youngkinites is excising language presupposing that the past practice of redlining, banned in 1968, continues to have a negative impact on African-Americans 56 years later. Team Youngkin did not ban the discussion of redlining. Rather, it clarified that redlining occurred in the past. It is progressive dogma that echoes of redlining reverberate to this day as a cause of African-American poverty. But, again, that is a debatable interpretation of history, not inarguable fact. Team Youngkin was correct to delete such an ideological presupposition from the course objectives.
Youngkin critics appear to be incapable of drawing a distinction between things they think to be true, but are in fact contested, and things that should be taught as indisputably true.
“White supremacy and institutional racism does not exist according to this document,” Derrick Lanois, a Norfolk State University history professor who helped to develop and implement the course, told the Post.
No, the revisions do not assert that white supremacy and institutional racism do not exist. Rather, they prohibit treating the white-supremacy/institutional racism narrative as dogma that the course should be structured around.
The Post seems unable to grasp the fact that Lanois and his co-course designers, not Team Youngkin, are the ones who larded the course with ideological bias. Actions the critics see as efforts to “whitewash” history are better seen efforts to undo previous “blackwashing” of that history, make the course more ideologically neutral, and prevent the foreclosing of diverse ways to view Virginia’s history.