In the face of relentless attacks on antiracist education, a much-needed reckoning with the roots of this latest wave of censorship and an urgent call to action to defend education.
In just the last few years, scores of states have introduced or passed legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about structural racism and other forms of oppression. Books have been cut from curricula and pulled from school library shelves. Teachers have been fired and threatened with discipline.
As long-time organizer, writer, and high school teacher Jesse Hagopian argues in
Teach Truth
, at stake is our democracy, not to mention the annihilation of entire systems of knowledge that challenge the status quo. As Hagopian shows by exploring the origins, philosophy, and manifestations of these attacks, the Right’s effort to regulate knowledge is an attempt to maintain its power over the American capitalist system, now and into the future.
Yet the struggle for a liberatory education has a long history in the United States, from the days when it was illegal for Black people to be literate, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to Black Lives Matter at School today. Teachers, students, and their allies are already building a movement – in the classroom, on campus, and in the streets – to defend antiracist education.