Higher Ed’s Hottest Topic

In one of his last acts as president, Donald J. Trump issued an executive order that prohibited all government contractors and subcontractors from providing diversity training grounded in the belief that “America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country.” Among the concepts deemed off-limits were those that declared:

• One sex or race to be superior
• People to be inherently consciously or unconsciously racist or sexist by virtue of their race or sex
• People should be discriminated against because of their race or sex
• Ascribing character traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status, or beliefs to a particular race or sex
• People’s moral character is determined by their race or sex
• A person’s race or sex makes them responsible for past transgressions of that race or sex
• People should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of their race or sex
• A commitment to hard work is inherently racist or sexist

Blocked by a federal judge, the executive order banning training that emphasized systemic or structural racism, implicit or unconscious bias, cultural appropriation, microaggressions, intersectionality, white privilege, and sexism was rescinded by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.

Nevertheless, eight Republican-led states have banned the inclusion of critical race theory or antiracism pedagogies or The New York Times’s “1619 Project” in K-12 classrooms.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Cultural conflicts invariably play out within public schools. Think of the early-20th-century conflicts over the teaching of evolution or the midcentury restrictions on the teaching of Marxism, the late-20th-century disputes over Ebonics and the national history standards, or the early-21st-century controversy surrounding the Common Core.

At stake in each of these controversies was teacher autonomy versus the community’s right to dictate what goes on in school.

But there are specific reasons why critical race theory has provoked particular fury not only among some Republican legislators but among many “heterodox” pundits and certain groups of white parents, including many at elite prep schools.

• Because of its explicit political commitments. These include a commitment to undoing policies and power structures that reinforce, produce or contribute to racial disparities.
• Because it supposedly disparages America and loathes and shames white people. Dismissed by critics as little more than guilt-tripping, the therapeutic approach to antiracism, epitomized by Robin J. DiAngelo’s White Fragility, seeks to confront white people with their implicit or unconscious biases and privileges, treat them as heirs to historical oppression, and challenge them to overcome the anger, fear and guilt that inhibit constructive cross-racial dialogues. Not surprisingly, such an approach has prompted resistance and anger.
• Because of its purported attack on core liberal principles. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, which advocates the inclusion of CRT in the classroom, declares that “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” CRT’s scrutiny of language, texts, attitudes and behavior for bias is sometimes regarded as an assault on free speech and free expression and an egregious form of shaming and silencing, and its emphasis on equity is sometimes treated as an attack on merit and rigorous standards.
• Because of a belief that it encourages polarization and tribalism. Many critics believe that it makes more sense to treat disparities and inequalities as products of the complex interaction of an array of cultural, historical and socioeconomic factors than as the product of systemic or structural racism out of a belief that otherwise it oversimplifies tangled realities and encourages social division and group antagonism.

Yet, if there’s any topic that a liberal college education today should include, it is race -- as well as other forms of bias, discrimination and systemic inequality.

Students would do well to learn about how the concept of group differences and race have evolved; how religion (especially the supposed curse of Ham), the Enlightenment and “modern” science in the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries contributed to notions of biological superiority and inferiority; how racist ideas served to justify and rationalize inequality and discrimination and became embedded in public policies; how conceptions of race differ cross-culturally; and how biologists and geneticists think about the concept of race today.

Students also would benefit from learning about past and current struggles against racism and sexism, including the social, intellectual, legal and political movements that sought to break down existing structures of hierarchy and dominance.

You might say, quite rightly, that race permeates today’s college course catalog. After all, most humanities and social science and other departments offer a host of classes that address race and racial inequalities.

• Many anthropology classes examine that discipline’s role in formulating ideas about race, explore cross-cultural differences in perceptions of human diversity and critically evaluate the discipline’s engagement with race and racism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
• Many biology and health science courses examine human genetic variation and the impact of environment on human development, including predisposition to disease and treatment responses.
• Many history classes might explore the origins and the development of the concept of race and racial prejudice, the relationship between racism and colonialism and slavery, and manifestations of racism in the form of laws, public policies and acts of violence.
• Many political science classes examine how race has been encoded in law and public policy.
• Many sociology courses explore how race structures society, distributes resources and shapes identities, and the intersections of race with class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, religion, language and poverty.

But by failing to address race holistically, by parceling out the study of the biological and genetic, cultural, ethnographic, historical and social and economic dimensions by department and discipline, by relegating the study of race and racial disparities to various silos, I doubt that many students truly have an opportunity to grapple with the subject in its full complexity.

So what would I recommend? I’d favor a course or course cluster that would address the following key topics:

• How differences among people, the nature of premodern ethnic identity and citizenship and belonging were conceived before the emergence of early modern conceptions of race and how they were represented in art and literature.
• How the Spanish Inquisition contributed to a growing emphasis on purity of blood as a marker of identity.
• How the European enslavement of Black people beginning in the 15th century and European colonialism transformed biblical exegesis and led to the search for religious justifications of racial slavery and the subordination of Blacks, including the supposed “curse of Ham.”
• How the development of taxonomies and ideologies of race during the Enlightenment and the subsequent growth of secular scientific racism during the 19th century, which came to be linked with Darwinian natural selection, genetics and new notions of heredity, contributed to the emergence of eugenicist ideas and various theories of natural or biological superiority and inferiority.
• How whiteness, in the United States, was linked to economic, political and cultural standing, and was gradually broadened to include new ethnic groups.
• How, during the early and mid-20th century, anthropology and other social science disciplines began to treat race as a social and discursive construct and floating signifier without biological significance.

Today, of course, race, whatever its biological, genetic and physiological significance, remains a powerful social category. It continues to exert a powerful (and at times pernicious) impact on popular thought and discourse, social structure, public policy, politics and disparities involving wealth, income, education, housing and other facets of life. Racial identities, racial classifications and racial prejudices remain defining characteristics of contemporary American society.

Race remains, then, a biological concept, a social category, an ascriptive attribute and a political classification. It continues to serve as a key attribute of people’s subjective identity, a lived experience and a source of privilege and social disadvantage and of affiliation, belonging and exclusion.

In addition to influencing the conditions under which individuals live, it contributes to people’s mind-set, assumptions and preferences. It also serves as a basis for group solidarity and political power.

It’s not a subject that we should ignore or relegate to the margins.

Since few colleges and universities will adopt the integrated, multidisciplinary approach that I support, what can we do, as individual instructors, to most productively teach about race and racism in ways that will promote understanding and encourage constructive dialogue?

Here are a few suggestions.

1. Adopt an inquiry-based approach. An inquiry approach invites students to pose, investigate and answer questions. Encourage the students to devise questions about race and racism that they are eager to answer and let them research the questions and present their findings to the class.
2. Use primary sources. Nothing brings a subject to life better than the original, unfiltered sources. In addition to confronting the arguments of past thinkers head-on, students acquire key skills. They learn how to read a source closely and critically, evaluate the source’s bias and perspective, and place the source in its proper context.
3. Teach the controversies. Problematize the subject around key controversies and debates. Make sure to ask why earlier people, as intelligent as us, embraced ideas that we find despicable.
4. Emphasize change over time. A historically informed approach that stresses change over time can help challenge essentialism and the demoralizing assumption that improvement or progress is impossible.
5. Broaden the lens. Supplement the Black-white binary with other examples of racially motivated bias, discrimination and violence.
6. Stress resistance and agency. One way to empower students and to overcome a “victim” mentality is to emphasize the reality of resistance and resilience in the face of oppression, persecution, exploitation and violence. I have also found it empowering to remind students that among the most striking themes in U.S. history is the outsize influence of relatively small and seemingly marginal groups in shaping every facet of American culture, from music, cuisine and language to our ideals of freedom.
7. Stress change, not shame. If we want our students to engage with difficult histories, question stereotypes and caricatures, truly listen to other students’ experiences and perspectives, and subject deeply rooted assumptions to critical scrutiny, it’s especially helpful to familiarize them with how earlier thinkers grappled with similarly tough issues.

This nation is at an inflection point.

We live at an inflection point demographically, culturally and ethnically, and, yes, racially. Nonwhites now make up a majority of kindergarteners. Interracial and interethnic marriages have increased fivefold since 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia statute banning marriages between Blacks and whites. Immigrants today account for 13.7 percent of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share in 1970 and nearly as high as the record share in 1890.

No one can predict with any certainty what these developments will mean for the future of race in America, except to say this: the nation’s racial composition differs profoundly by age, with those over 55 far whiter and less ethnically diverse than those younger.

This country’s future will hinge on its ability to embrace the rapidly emerging reality of a much more racially diverse population. Teaching about race in an integrated, holistic manner strikes me as one of the most productive steps that colleges and universities can do to advance that transition.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.