Jan 31
High School Students Are Not Going to Stop Thinking Critically
Responding to Attacks on Antiracist Teaching
By Dr. Brendan H. O’Connor, Dr. Vanessa E. Anthony-Stevens, Rebekka Boysen-Taylor, Philip J. Stevens, Carmen Stevens, Rosalyn Gardner, Juan Miller, and Jackson Taylor
“Stop Critical Race Theory!” read the campaign signs for Tom Horne, anti-ethnic studies crusader and newly elected state superintendent of public instruction for Arizona. Horne claims to be baffled by critical race theory’s questioning of “the foundations of … enlightenment rationalism,” since he believes “we are all … brothers and sisters under the skin.” He also claims that no “liberals” have been able to enlighten him (Horne, 2022).
We’ll give it a shot. In Horne’s view, “race is irrelevant to anything (sic).” It wasn’t irrelevant to the framers of the Constitution, though — whose enlightened rationalism counted enslaved Black individuals as three-fifths of a human being — nor to the enlightened politicians who broke treaty after treaty with the Indian tribes they had pledged to treat as sovereign nations. It’s not that antiracist teaching is against enlightenment rationalism or the Constitution. It’s that the groups to which many of our students (and many of the authors) belong were historically treated as subhuman and excluded from the world of “enlightened, rational” people.
If this were merely an artifact of the distant past, Horne and his ilk might have a point. But this history continues to affect students of color today, in ways that demand a continued reckoning with injustice, rather than a convenient forgetting, even though the latter would be less likely to offend White politicians’ delicate sensibilities.
Teaching about race is essential for civic engagement. Without acknowledging the ways that race has shaped, and still shapes, the everyday lives of Americans — for example, in educational opportunities, health outcomes, access to affordable housing, and employment discrimination — we cannot hope to educate citizens who are capable of addressing the challenges our country faces. However, legislatures in Arizona and Idaho, where we teach and learn, have recently attempted to weaken K-12 and postsecondary civic engagement by restricting teachers’ ability to discuss “controversial” topics in our classrooms (Idaho House Bill 377, 2021; Pitzl, 2022). What counts as “controversial” is in the eye of the beholder; still, we know it is coded language for conversations about race. Copycat campaigns across the United States evoke the boogeyman of “critical race theory” in seeking to censor teaching about race, racism, and diversity in public schools (Pollock et al., 2022).
Politicians’ version of “critical race theory” is a caricature. It is at odds with how social scientists have made sense of “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006), or the existence of racial disparities in the absence of avowed racist beliefs or de jure policies. The language of the bills focuses on individual students not being made to feel responsible for racial injustice, on individuals not being “inherently racist or sexist,” and so forth, rather than the historical and social realities that have resulted in persistent forms of disenfranchisement for people of color. Still, the question is not whether such bills reflect the tenets of critical race theory accurately, but how they function to marginalize students of color and antiracist teachers in majority-White contexts.
Attacks on antiracist pedagogy are an example of threat inversion, a concept that language policy scholar Richard Ruiz (2006/2017) developed to account for political narratives that position powerful groups as needing “protection” from marginalized groups–for example, the English Only movement, or the ways that Indigenous languages and cultures were painted as threats to the “American” way of life in the American Indian boarding school era (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006).
Understanding how these contradictory narratives work–transforming students of color into threats to the established order and white students and well-being–is important. Even more important, however, is shining a light on the practical theories that youth in schools develop as organic intellectuals striving to understand what “race” means for them and others today. Day in and day out, youth in schools are grappling with their place in the inverted threat narrative and the banal persistence of whiteness and Eurocentrism in the curriculum.
Rebekka and Vanessa have led a multiyear effort in Idaho to address race in middle-school curriculum, including three years of classroom research on race talk (2017–2020) and the forming of the Rural Youth Research Collaborative (2022). In 2021, the passage of House Bill 377, entitled “Dignity and Nondiscrimination in Public Education” (threat inversion alert), put Idaho on the map as one of the states whose White-dominated state legislature has codified teaching about America’s history with race as un-American. It is common to hear White teachers, students, and parents in Idaho express that race is irrelevant to their daily lives (Anthony-Stevens et al., 2022). For White students in the research collaborative, fears of being denied accurate historical information and ambivalence co-existed with expressions of discomfort about race. For students of color, grappling with race was a high-stakes proposition, involving interactions they could not always avoid and in which they nearly always had to defend themselves.
Here, we share stories of four Idaho high school students from the Rural Youth Research Collaborative of how threat inversion translates to daily practices of silencing race talk. Their stories are profiles in courage, to borrow a phrase from President John F. Kennedy, in contrast to the cowardice of politicians who would prefer to pretend that race no longer shapes youth’s experiences at school. They underscore that the real threat to historical understanding and critical thinking lurked in mundane denials of access to diverse knowledge and histories.
Carmen (10th grade, San Carlos Apache) likened a curricular unit on the founding of the United States to a camera lens that zooms in on a single object. As Carmen recalled, lessons privileged the European colonists’ perspective without paying attention to what was happening around them and who else was involved in, or affected by, the founding of the United States. The unit, in her view, was “treating the colonists like heroes, like they’re the ones who got us here today.” Slavery was discussed “a little,” but certainly not the extent of its brutality and “all the terrible things they [did].”
Native Americans barely came up in American History “unless they were in a war with someone.” Even then, said Carmen, they were represented merely as “little helpers” who were “there for the money” — as European accessories or allies, readily erased from history class. In an earlier course, Carmen’s teacher assigned her to the pro-Columbus side of a simulation-style debate over whether Columbus should be tried for crimes against humanity — with little awareness of why it might not be appropriate to put an Apache student in that position. Carmen’s experience being asked to debate the moral basis of Native people’s attempted extermination dangerously oversimplifies complex histories of power, colonialism, and racism and alienated her from critical engagement with the content.
Juan (11th grade, Hispanic/Colombian) was excited to learn about the African American Civil Rights Movement and the march on Selma. He was disappointed when the teacher glossed over the chapter of American history he was most eager to research and he had to wait until the following year to do his capstone project on the Black Lives Matter movement. Jack (10th grade, White), likewise, commented that diverse perspectives were relegated to the end of the school year, and that contributions of Americans of color were seen as extra or an add-on, rather than central to the understanding of American history. He recalled a teacher who displayed an image of Frederick Douglass and quipped, “I don’t know who this man was, but I think he was pretty important.”
Roz’s (12th grade, African American) story testifies to the vulnerability of students of color when speaking up in race-related discussions, as students’ objections to historical erasure are easily brushed aside. On one occasion, while Roz’s music class was listening to “Surfin’ USA” by the (White) Beach Boys, her friend pointed out that they had cribbed the melody from (African American) Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The teacher breezily dismissed the comment, opining that the Beach Boys had merely taken the song and made it better, shutting down an opportunity to discuss the contributions of people of color to American popular culture. In response to such experiences, as Timothy San Pedro (2015a, b) has documented, students of color may deploy silence as a shield or a weapon to counter this vulnerability or resist the way they are framed in official curriculum. Whatever the utility of this strategy, all students’ learning is unquestionably poorer when voices like Roz’s are silenced or dismissed.
These daily denials of critical thinking close down opportunities for all youth to explore local articulations of “race” and take issue with the whitewashing of our shared history. Voices of youth undermine the threat inversion narrative. Speaking up about our experiences, even when we don’t know all the answers, is vital to giving voice to all Americans, not just some of us, in diverse classrooms and social settings. Whatever politicians dictate, youth will continue to bear witness to the relevance of race and racism to schooling, even and especially when teachers are discouraged from supporting them. In doing so, they nudge us closer to a critical democratic vision of what schooling could be. They also urge us to remain hopeful as we work toward a future when Americans will reach across racial boundaries to work for racial justice and the common good, rather than trying to avoid a reckoning with the history of racism at all costs.
Dr. Brendan H. O’Connor is a a linguist and anthropologist of education who works broadly on issues of language, culture, and identity, primarily with reference to Latinx and immigrant youth in the US.
Dr. Vanessa E. Anthony-Stevens is an educational anthropologist who works on issues of culture, power, and identity in learning and education policy, primarily with Native youth and families, teachers, and Tribal Nations.
Rebekka Boysen-Taylor is a a teacher, teacher educator, and educational researcher working in youth studies, rural education, inquiry education, culturally responsive teaching pedagogy, and social studies education.
Philip J. Stevens is an anthropologist of education who researches western education environments through Apache cultural values.
Carmen A. Stevens is a high school sophomore in Idaho. They are an artist and intercultural communicator.
Rosalyn Gardner is a high school senior in Idaho. They are a creative writer and dancer.
Juan Miller is a high school junior in Idaho. They are interested in sports and becoming an activist.
Jackson Taylor is a high school sophomore in Idaho. They are interested in writing and film production.
