Back then, we hadn’t yet seen the backlash against critical race theory, much less the subsequent assault on DEI. The dogma was so pervasive that the original conservative outlet that asked us to take on anti-racist education wouldn’t run the piece, deeming it “a bit too aggressive.” The essay was eventually picked up elsewhere and, while it’s a long piece, I think it’s worth revisiting the highlights today. With the benefit of time, readers can judge for themselves just how aggressive it really was.
The crux of the matter, as Addison and I wrote then, was that:
“Anti-racism,” for all its high-minded claims and surface appeal, proves to be, on close examination, a farrago of reductive dogmatism, coercion, and anti-intellectual zealotry that’s remarkably unconcerned with either improving schooling or ameliorating prejudice . . . Aspiring anti-racists are mounting a misguided assault on the very mores and habits of mind that undergird liberty, equality, and healthy communities.
As we observed at the time, “It’s safe to say that nothing in education today has the same cachet as being, in the words of KIPP, ‘actively anti-racist.’” Bettina Love, winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education’s Outstanding Book Award and co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, explained that “active anti-racism” is “the most important step” teachers can take. “Anti-racist teaching is not a teaching approach or method,” Love instructed, “it is a way of life.” Indeed, she asserted a need for specialists focused on the “undoing of Whiteness in education.”
The consequences for education were devastating. The anti-racist mantra excused classroom chaos (because discipline was an oppressive manifestation of white supremacy culture). It fueled grade inflation in the name of “equity” (because traditional grading was systemically racist). It was used to justify doing away with admissions testing in higher ed (because . . . oh, you know). Worse, it made it that much harder to address bad behavior, chronic absenteeism, or academic malaise by dismissing anyone who championed an academic culture of rigor and responsibility as malefactors of bigotry and white supremacy.
What made this movement so toxic?
