Longtime organizer, educator and writer Jesse Hagopian’s latest book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, is an incisive deconstruction of current right-wing efforts to limit teachers from presenting accurate accounts of U.S. history to their students and to keep “controversial” books out of classrooms and libraries. The book offers moving and emotionally complex personal anecdotes that situate the author — whose ancestry includes people from Armenia and Africa — as someone whose dual lineage has been abridged, distorted and denied. Moreover, Teach Truth addresses the many ways that students, parents, unions, progressive activists and legal scholars are pushing back against educational gag orders, information suppression, and the doxxing and harassment of those who oppose conservative efforts.
Hagopian is a realist, albeit an optimistic one, and does not minimize the magnitude of today’s right-wing backlash. He writes that almost half of all K-12 public-school students are currently impacted by state and federal laws that forbid teachers from providing them with lessons about racism — including the horrors of slavery. The result, he writes, not only limits students’ understanding of the foundational impact of race on our development as a country but also sends a secondary message, suggesting “that the troubled world they see around them is the best that can be achieved and that inequality is natural and inescapable.” Lastly, Hagopian explains, in the rare instances in which racial bigotry is laid bare, it is typically presented as the result of personal biases rather than systemic flaws.
Hagopian stresses the importance of keeping the long view in frame.
Curricula that comply with imposed restrictions send a disempowering message to students, argues Hagopian, calling it “uncritical race theory.” Requisite to this is the denial of contemporary racism and the ways laws and social policies reinforce prevailing attitudes about power and human relations. He attributes uncritical race theory to the propping up colonialism, sanitizing social movements, and buttressing the often-subtle assertions of white supremacy in education and beyond. Allusions to the United States as a “post-racial” or “color-blind” society add yet another distortion.
As disturbing as this is, Hagopian stresses that the United States has been in similar straits before, and the book does a deep dive into the ultimately unsuccessful Red and Lavender scares of decades past.
During the post-World War II era, he writes, a great deal of anti-communist and anti-queer animus was directed at teachers, with state legislatures throughout the country scrambling to pass more than 300 laws dealing with “subversive” practices. “This includes 28 states that mandated loyalty oaths for teachers, 38 states that passed general sedition laws, and 31 states that prohibited membership in ‘subversive’ groups.” In some places, books deemed “offensive” were literally burned.
Still, Hagopian writes, “the eruption of the Civil Rights movement finally broke the handcuffs McCarthyism had cinched so tightly,” leading to the development of a mass movement to demand school desegregation, ethnic studies classes and expanded student rights.
Fast-forward seven decades and a propulsive right-wing backlash has emerged. It’s made significant headway: Hagopian reports that in addition to restricting history, English, and social-studies curricula, at least 160 educators have been pushed out or fired for what he calls “truthcrimes,” teaching the unvarnished truth about the United States’ evolution since the first enslaved people were brought into the country in 1619.
It’s a bleak finding, but Hagopian stresses the importance of keeping the long view in frame. The text reminds us that repression has always bred resistance, and the final section of the book, “Remembering,” offers a host of examples of contemporary organizing to stop the right. These efforts, he writes, range from the creation of banned-book reading groups to lobbying state lawmakers in support of the right to read, to supporting progressive school board candidates and organizing off-campus Black Lives Matter study groups that affirm the efficacy of teaching about race, class, gender identity, sexuality and social movements. Efforts like the annual Teach Truth Day of Action, coordinated by the Zinn Education Project; raucous protests at sites including the headquarters of The College Board; and Red, Wine, and Blue’s ongoing organizing workshops for suburbanites highlight best practices for opposing retrenchment.
These efforts pit the well-organized and deep-pocketed right-wing — and its allies in both the GOP and Democratic Parties — against progressive educators, students and community activists. And while it is obvious that the right currently has the upper hand, Hagopian does not believe it will prevail forever. Like the demise of the Red and Lavender scares of the 1950s, he forsees today’s right-wing withering away once well-organized parents, students and activists demand high-quality, multiracial public schools.
“Our society is in a liminal space between uncritical race theory and the forming of a great resistance against the very concept of truthcrime,” Hagopian concludes. “Be assured when the next round of uprisings breaks through … truth teachers won’t just be watching or even teaching about this rebellion — they will be in the streets with their students forming a sea of humanity that will shipwreck all the fears, lies, punishment, and demagoguery of uncritical race theorists.”
Time will tell if this aspirational projection will come to fruition. Until then, while some teachers will undoubtedly self-censor or capitulate to the right, others will continue to push back in any way they can. They deserve our respect and support.
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Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education
By Jesse Hagopian
Haymarket Books; 320 pages
Jan. 14 2025
