History

No Kings

/ Steven Volk / 1 Comment

For many summers over more than a decade, I have had the pleasure of working with high school students attending the Great Books Summer Program. Great Books is a program for middle and high school students, devoted to an inquiry-based pedagogical model. Students engage in deep discussions of a set of texts selected by the instructor to guide them through a topic, subject or problem of our own design. Last year, for example, I taught two courses at the program’s Stanford campus: “From Harm to Repair” with readings ranging from Seneca and Aeschylus to James Baldwin and Desmond Tutu, and “From Law to Justice” in which we discussed works by Whitman, Camus, Ha Jin, Shakespeare, and Frederick Douglass, among others.

This year, I am inaugurating the program’s Scottish venue at the University of Edinburgh. I struggled for a bit wondering how to merge the Highlands locale with my ongoing concern for the truly frightening moment we face in the United States.  I have given many “Know Your Rights” presentations since mid-January, and each one seems to require more information as Constitutional Amendments fall like so many novice ice-skaters, not simply ignored, but ridiculed by the government. Even if the freedoms and liberties boldly proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and later enumerated in the U.S. Constitution are, for many, more accurately described in the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr as “promissory notes,”, that is all the more reason to defend and extend them with all our strength and imagination.

Jonathan Groff as King George III in “Hamilton”

As a Latin American historian, I found hardly any time to devote to the study of my own country’s history, and what little I once knew about colonial America and the early republic has long since retired, as the poet Billy Collins delightfully wrote, “to the southern hemisphere of the brain/to a little fishing village where there are no phones.” I’ve tried to remedy this in my retirement years, attempting grapple with first century of the nation’s history and to understand, among much else, what Jefferson and the “founders” understood when they wrote of “self-evident” truths, or “unalienable Rights,” or the “pursuit of Happiness.”

It wasn’t long before I came upon a host of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, David Hume, among others) whose ideas were important to, and perhaps shaped, how Jefferson and other early republican thinkers imagined the country they were writing into existence. And so, my course emerged: We would discuss the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence. (I should clarify that it’s way above my pay grade to engage in the hotly debated question of whether one can credit these Scottish philosophers as the “hidden authors” of the Declaration. I’m much more interested in exploring with my students what they meant when they wrote of “happiness” or “Nature’s God” while examining the tensions they acknowledged between individual and communitarian freedoms.)

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If Not Now, When?

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In a recent New Yorker article, Susan Glasser wondered “Why aren’t we in the streets?” As Trump — who now refers to himself as a “king” and toys with the idea of serving a third term in the White House — and his co-president Elon Musk rip through the government, mocking legal barriers, scolding allies, and shredding the lives of millions, we remain, Glasser laments, “quiescent.” Perhaps we have simply been “overwhelmed by the unimaginable becoming real,” as M. Gessen suggested.

While the abysmal cruelty of Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the trans community is intended to isolate and terrify those vulnerable communities, his campaign to dictate what can and cannot be taught in our nation’s schools threatens to reinforce the structures of white supremacy and undermine the very purpose of education itself.  

Consider the email recently sent by the Provost of the Naval Academy, Samara Firebaugh, to her faculty. In it she instructed faculty to comb through course materials to extirpate such offensive words as “diversity,” “minority,” “belonging,” “bias,” “representation,” and “oppression.” “Do not use materials,” she commanded, “that can be interpreted to assign blame to generalized groups for enduring social conditions, particularly discrimination or inequality… Do not employ readings or other materials that promote the concepts of ‘gender ideology,’ ‘divisive concepts,’ ‘race or sex stereotyping,’ and ‘race or sex scapegoating,’ including critical race theory, intersectionality, privilege, patriarchy or other such theories.”

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Muzzling the Debate

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Retirement offers many opportunities: sleeping later in the mornings (haven’t figured that one out); learning to paint (not really interested); becoming fluent in a new language (没有); streaming more television (Yes!). But in large part, being away from the daily demands of teaching has open the possibility of reading more deeply in fields of history that were outside my own.

U.S. history has been at the top of that list, particularly the early republic, slavery, Black history, and Black struggles for equality and dignity. Ever since reading the 1619 Project a few years ago, I’ve tried to engage the historiographic debate about the shaping of the Constitution: was it “abolitionist” or “pro-slavery”? Sean Wilentz’s 2015 op-ed in the New York Times and David Waldstreicher’s response in The Atlantic nudged the debate over to non-specialists as well, and I followed the rolling, often heated, discussion in the pages of the New York Review of Books (see, for example, here and here), among other publications. That conversation, and a recent review by David Blight in the NYRB, encouraged me to pick up James Oakes’ The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (Norton 2021).


Reading The Crooked Path led me to reflect, once again, on how historians think about contentious issues in the histories we explore. In the first place, I understand that I have not read deeply enough in the field to draw strong conclusions of my own on the central issue of whether the U.S. Constitution was “pro” or “anti” slavery, although I’m persuaded by Oakes’ superb book that it was both. Second, I found it affirming and energizing that historians who have been deeply immersed in the subject are not just capable of, but willing to modify their analysis in the face of more reasoned arguments and new evidence. As Blight observed: “We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths.” Finally, and because of both points, I find it utterly infuriating that these rich debates will be shut out of classrooms in dozens of states because their instructors, quite simply, are forbidden by state law from raising them. Under the banner of opposing the “indoctrination” of students, hundreds of bills have been introduced to ensure that students will be prevented from grappling with the debates that shaped the nation’s history and continue to influence its evolution.

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Behind the Attack on Critical Race Theory

/ Steven Volk / 2 Comments

Republican legislatures in approximately thirty states have sprinted to pass legislation which seems intent on banning teachers from discussing race, racism, and what has been termed “divisive” concepts. Also forbidden: anything that makes (white) students feel “discomfort” or a “sense of responsibility” for the past. The current efforts by Republican legislatures and conservative school boards have been packaged as an opposition to “critical race theory” (CRT), an academic framework that views racism as ingrained in law and other modern institutions. But, as others have noted, “critical race theory” is a red herring that functions as a catch-all term that includes any consideration of race and racism (e.g., multiculturalism, “wokeism,” identity politics, culturally responsive teaching, etc.). Any hint that “racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society,” or any attempt to offer anything but a sanitized history of the United States is equally likely to be caught up in the Republicans’ expansive nets.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

CRT emerged in the legal studies field in the 1970s, spreading to other academic disciplines as a series of theoretical propositions. As Jacqueline Jones, president of the American Historical Association, recently summarized, it “provides an intellectual framework for understanding the many ways that governmental entities and private interests have put racial ideologies into practice in the forms of laws, taxation policies, public works projects, regulatory guidelines, profit-making schemes, hiring preferences, and more.” In terms of educational policy, the theoretical concept moves away from the individual child, focusing instead on “suspension rates, assignment to special education, testing and assessment, curricular access…who gets into honors and AP, who doesn’t,” as Gloria Ladson-Billings observed. (Ladson-Billings co-authored what is considered the definitive article on critical race theory in education.)

“Critical race theory” was always a suspicious target for legislators and school board members if only because it simply is not taught at the K-12 level. Indeed, it’s rarely offered at an undergraduate level.  But the increasing diversification of the U.S. population and the unprecedented calls for social justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 left the Right searching for a response, and “critical race theory” was at once vague, all-encompassing and suggestively threatening. Fox News, always a good barometer of Right-wing currents, virtually ignored CRT through mid-2020, raising it a scant 12 times between June and August 2020. Then, spurred by Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, Tucker Carlson jumped on board. By September, Trump added the power of the presidency with an executive order banning as “divisive” diversity training in federal agencies. Fast forward one year: between  June and August 2021, Fox referenced CRT over 1,900 times.

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Taking Responsibility

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I’ve used some of the space opened up during COVID-times to begin to address a gaping hole in my education. Truth is, I know painfully little about U.S. history, even less as regards its African American component. That I know more about the history of Chile or Mexico than the history of my own country is unsurprising since I’m trained as a Latin American historian, and have spent the better part of 50 years studying those countries. But how I could avoid taking responsibility for my own country’s history for so long is puzzling. In any case, I’ve begun to address my ignorance with generous amounts of Douglass and DuBois, Baldwin and Rankine, McGee, Glaude, Jr., Wilkerson, and Blight. I’ve also put my long walks outside to some educational purpose by listening to podcasts covering this history, including any number of episodes of NPR’s “Throughline” with hosts Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah, David Blight’s 27 lectures at Yale (History 119) on “The Civil War and Reconstruction,” Brooklyn Deep’s “School Colors,” as well as “Floodlines,” “A Strange and Bitter Crop,” and many others. Yesterday, I caught up with the final episode of “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning,” produced out of WNYC’s studios, and expertly narrated by WNYC’s KalaLea.

Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, Item 1977.025.001

I don’t have to remind you that we recently marked the centennial of the race massacre that led to the destruction of the so-called “Black Wall Street,” the prosperous 35-block Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob of thousands, aided and abetted by the police and the National Guard, rampaged through Greenwood, leaving behind a heap of rubble where once a thriving town had stood, up to 300 dead (we’ll never know the exact count as Black lives didn’t matter), a thousand injured, and some 6,000 Black townsfolk penned up in the fairgrounds and other large sites. Nearly 10,000 people were left homeless as 1,256 homes were looted and burned down.

What followed the atrocity was…silence. Not a single person was ever arrested or tried for the racist rampage; the only individual to be compensated for his losses was a white pawnshop owner. White Tulsa avoided taking responsibility for its own history by thoroughly erasing the massacre from the city’s official history for most of the 20th century even as the events remained as a traumatic memory for its victims, one so painful that survivors rarely spoke of it to their children or grandchildren.

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The Past as Way Forward: Finding a “Useful History”

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Steve Volk, March 13, 2017

Reparation-and-ReconciliationA group of faculty, staff, and students sat down together the past two Mondays to discuss Christi Smith’s Reparation & Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Smith is a visiting assistant professor in sociology at Oberlin, and, of course, she took part in the conversation. Her book examines three colleges (Oberlin, Berea, and Howard) that early on placed interracial coeducation at the center of their institutional missions. The book examines what impelled the colleges to make this choice and why, by the end of the 19th century, all three eased away from that goal. By the turn of the 20th century, Howard dedicated itself to the task of educating the black elite, Berea focused on Appalachian whites, and Oberlin, finding itself, as with the others, in a competition for donors and students, sought advantage by marketing itself more as an elite Eastern institution, and less as an avatar of interracial progress.

There is much to relate about the book and the discussions it generated, but I will limit myself to three topics. While these issues are of particular importance for Oberlin, I have no doubt that they will be relevant for many other institutions which, prodded by student protests and national conversations, are seriously considering the role that race and racism played in their institutions’ history and how these factors continue to shape their present. Continue reading →