After having defeated the Coronavirus, completing the wall that Mexico paid for, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, reinvigorating American heavy industry, stopping California forest fires and the threat of global warming, and unifying a racially divided nation, Don Quixote de la Trump is using the full power of his office and his twitter account to rally his supporters and combat a new enemy, United States history. Among his list of second-term “priorities,” Trump wants schools to teach “American exceptionalism.” Accepting the Republican Party nomination, Trump told his legions “We want our sons and daughters to know the truth: America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” He pledged to “fully restore patriotic education to our schools."
In recent tweets, President Trump has threatened to defund California schools if they include the New York Times 1619 Project as part of the social studies curriculum and purge any reference to Critical Race Theory or White Privilege in federal government agencies including the Department of Education. In Trump World, if you don’t mention racism, like you don’t mention COVID-19, it will cease to exist.
The 1619 Project was developed by the New York Times and journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Its basic premise is that the history of the United States effectively begins with the importation of enslaved Africans into the British Jamestown colony in 1619. Since that time slavery and racism have distorted efforts to build a more democratic and equal society. Police violence against African Americans today, as well as housing, job, and educational discrimination and inequality are products of a system rooted in racial oppression and injustice. The disputed curriculum was developed by the Pulitzer Center based on the original Times documents.
Acting under the direction of President Trump, Russell Vought, Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, issued a memorandum directing all federal agencies to identify and eliminate any reference to “Critical Race Theory” in the federal government. According to Vought, “It has come to the President's attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda” and President Trump wanted it stopped. No mention was made of how it came to the President’s attention or what evidence exists that in sensitivity sessions federal employees are taught to hate America. With shades of the 1950s anti-communist witch-hunt, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos plans to scrutinize employee activities, including book clubs, in search of “Anti-American propaganda.”
Defending Trump’s purge of ideas he doesn’t like about race and racism in America, Vought insisted, “The President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States. The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed.” While the Trump administration can eliminate workshops, it is not clear how it will prevent federal employees from thinking and speaking to each other about racism and United States history.
The threat by President Trump and Education Department Secretary Betsy DeVos to defund California schools introduces a somewhat different problem for the Trump Administration. Federal law prohibits the Education Department from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” of the nation’s schools.
“No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.” - 20 USC 1232a: Prohibition against Federal control of education
An additional problem for Trump and DeVos is that professional organizations like the National Council for the Social Studies actively resist teaching propaganda like “America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world” and do acknowledge racism. Our focus as social studies teachers should be promoting critical thinking by students and active citizenship, two things that Donald Trump definitely fears. “Critical race theory” and “white privilege” are not generally part of the secondary school history curriculum. But now that Trump has introduced them into his reelection campaign, students and teachers should feel free to explore the validity of both the assertions made by the 1619 Project and President Trump’s tweeting finger.
For teachers, a good way to resist Trump’s war on history is to introduce students to the Zinn Education Project’s Teach the Black Freedom Struggle Campaign.
Follow Alan Singer on his new twitter site at https://twitter.com/AlanJSinger1.