Have you heard?North Dakota passed a law to ban teaching “that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.”
Instead, teachers must say that racism is “merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice.”
The right-wing claims that anti-racist education makes white children feel guilty. In fact, North Dakota demands that we teach that racism is caused only by individual white people — rather than by centuries of white supremacy. That’s a perspective designed to make white children feel guilty. And the flip side of this is to blame individual people of color for economic and political inequality.
If you are not a teacher, we need you to speak out in defense of those who are.The mainstream and progressive media are not giving these draconian bills and the McCarthy-style attacks on teachers nearly the attention they should.
The right-wing attacks are well-funded and getting huge media attention. Write an op-ed or letter to the editor, express your support on social media, and/or go to your local school board meeting. (Here is how.)
Today's assault on critical race theory and antiracist pedagogy by the right-wing is unintelligible without the insights offered in Fugitive Pedagogy. Givens tells inspirational stories of Black educators who faced down intellectual abuse and physical violence. They created counter-narrative curriculums — “a literary genre inaugurated by runaway slaves . . . Black curricular imaginations of the post-Emancipation era . . . informed by a fugitive literary culture with antebellum roots.”
The fall issue of Rethinking Schools features Renée Watson and Linda Christensen on using poetry to deeply ground the curriculum in students’ lives.
In another feature article, Zinn Education Project team member Cierra Kaler-Jones describes her work with young Black women to gather loved ones’ oral histories.
The fall editorial highlights individual and collective resistance to right-wing anti-history education legislation.
There’s also an article by high school teacher Jessica Rucker about putting the hip-hop industry on trial. And there’s more.
Teach Climate Justice
Share Your Story, Receive a Book
How do you teach Climate Justice?
The Zinn Education Project Teach Climate Justice campaign offers free lessons and teaching activities about climate change and what people can do about it. We want to hear from teachers who have used Zinn Education Project resources to teach about climate change in any subject.
We also recommend The Mystery Woman in Room Three by Aya de León, a new young adult novel on immigration rights, climate justice, the Green New Deal, and youth activism. Available for free download at Orion Magazine.
