The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Attack on Black History, with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jelani Cobb

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Across much of the country, Republican officials are reaching into K-12 classrooms and universities alike to exert control over what can be taught. In Florida, Texas, and many other states, laws now restrict teaching historical facts about race and racism. Book challenges and bans are surging. Public universities are seeing political meddling in the tenure process. Advocates of these measures say, in effect, that education must emphasize only the positive aspects of American history. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter who developed the 1619 Project, and Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, talk with David Remnick about the changing climate for intellectual freedom. “I just think it’s rich,” Hannah-Jones says, “that the people who say they are opposing indoctrination are in fact saying that curricula must be patriotic.” She adds, “You don’t ban books, you don’t ban curriculum, you don’t ban the teaching of ideas, just to do it. You do it to control what we are able to understand and think about and imagine for our society.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 1963, James Baldwin gave a speech to a group of teachers, encouraging them to grapple more honestly with the realities of American history. Baldwin said this, You must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only only in the classroom, but in society. You'll meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance.

There is no point in pretending that this won't happen. Sixty years after Baldwin's speech, it is still happening. An escalating backlash against the teaching of black history. Dozens of states have proposed measures to restrict teaching the history of race and racism. In Florida, new state history standards specify, for example, that enslaved people might have benefited from slavery. Florida schools must now teach students about the, quote,

benefit of slavery when teaching black history. The controversial new education standard passed by the State Board of Education earlier this week. This follows Governor DeSantis' so-called Stop Woke Act, which forced the rewriting of education standards there in Florida. At the same time, book bans are at an astronomical level. In New York City, for example, one school recently purged books dealing with black life and other subjects. Hundreds of books had been left with the trash outside PS-55 in Staten Island. They were about black history, immigration.

Conservatives argue that they're protecting children from feeling bad about their race and from what they consider liberal indoctrination. This is happening state by state, school district by school district, and it's rarely in the headlines. So to get a handle on the significance of what's happening, I sat down with Nicole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter, who first developed a 1619 project. And with the New Yorker's Jolani Cobb,

Jolani is a longtime staff writer, and he's the dean of Columbia University Journalism School. Now, let's be clear. When speaking about black history, it includes everything from the history of ancient African kingdoms to the teaching of modern innovation. So, Nicole, let's start with you. when you were in school in the 80s and in the 90s, what were you learning and what was missing?

Well, I wasn't in school in the 80s because I'm too young for that. Just kidding. That's painful. You know, when I was in school in the 80s and 90s, I just remember learning very little about black Americans, about slavery. certainly we learned almost nothing about the period between slavery and the civil rights movement. And I remember Ida B. Wells was one of the figures. We knew she was a journalist, but we didn't learn that her journalism was around lynching. And it wasn't until high school that my high school offered a one semester Black Studies elective that I really received any real education about African people on the continent of Africa.

and then the contributions of Black Americans to the larger society. Even in global studies, we spent most of our time in Europe and a very little time in the other continents of the world. So it was a very narrow education and gave me a very narrow view of who had contributed what to our society and our world. Well, you know, the interesting thing is that even though we were in very different parts of the country,

You know, aside from, you know, roots, which I remember being discussed in class, there really wasn't very much. And if we were thinking about this in kind of maybe culinary terms, the main course, the entree was going to be history that it wasn't referred to as white history. But de facto was white history because the only people who were actors, and agents in world affairs were white people. And, you know, if we talked about African-American, in the culinary metaphor, we'd be garnish, you know, kind of sprinkled in, you know, occasionally. What we did not have was any systematic understanding of the ways in which the introduction of human beings who were reduced to the status of chattel slavery and the ensuing multi-century

struggle for equality, the way that that became a fundamental engine in American history. The civil war pops up out of nowhere, and then a century later we have people marching, singing, we shall overcome. And there was no connective tissue that made any of that really legible to us. Well, now, in our time, we have the following happening. and any number of states are shutting down or reacting against just the kind of education that we all would have been craving 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Florida requires schools to adopt certain curriculum standards regarding the teaching of specified events in American history, particularly focusing on patriotism, civic literacy, and the evils of communism and totalitarianism. Mississippi, Iowa, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, and on and on, have legislation that betrays an anxiety about, a fury against the improvement of the kind of situation that you have described from 20, 30 years ago.

Specifically, what is happening in the schools, Nicole, specifically, that you're seeing? How would you describe the problem? Well, one, I just think it's rich that the people who say they are opposing indoctrination are in fact saying that curricula must be patriotic, anti-communist. And even some of these places are introducing curriculum from Prager You. What is Prager You just to explain? It's a right-wing online, quote-unquote, university. You know, they had a video where a cartoon animated,

Frederick Douglass was basically saying that slavery, you know, we had to have slavery in the United States. And it was a good thing that was abolished, but it was necessary. But what that does is it gives lie to the argument that what they're trying to do is keep students from being indoctrinated, that what they're trying to do is ensure students are learning an accurate history. We know that what we learn in social studies has seldom been about putting forth an accurate rendering of history, but really trying to shape our collective memory and understanding of American exceptionalism. So what we're seeing is a response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the sense that racial justice was going too far,

that curriculums were changing in a way that were decentering this white narrative. And I think part of it came from just understanding that in a quote-unquote culture war, when you talk about students, then you begin to get people to focus on emotion and not facts and reason. The whole board understands that we are asking them and pleading with them and demanding that they remove critical race theory from our school. I'm going to send my child to school and she's going to be taught about the color of her skin. It makes to ensure that children are not shamed, blamed, or otherwise singled out for action. We must not be afraid to embrace the message of the founders of the United States. Just because I do not want critical race theory taught to my children in school

does not mean that I'm a racist, dammit. And this idea that all of a sudden, all of these white children who are being taught, by the way, by 80% white women teaching force were being indoctrinated into the belief that white people were guilty. But it's also pushed back against kind of a larger phenomenon that was happening where black people and people of color were having a larger impact in the electorate. So all of these things were kind of colliding in an effort then to make the culture war about what was happening in the classroom and the sense that white people were losing something. And the last thing I'll just quickly say is, you know, there's a reason that these

bans, that these book bans, that these legislative bans, that these curriculum bans, target black history specifically. And that's because black history by its very existence is political, because every narrative about American exceptionalism is defied by the very presence of black people here. We didn't choose to immigrate here. We didn't come here looking for a better life. We didn't enjoy any of those freedoms. And so to tell our history truthfully is to, as some Republican legislators said would be to make people hate America. That's what they said. If they learn this accurate history, students may hate their country. And I don't agree with that, but that's the fear. It makes me remember the core of your remarkable essay in the 1619 project when you're

describing your father and his intense patriotism and love for America, but how complex it is. Absolutely. And that's been the funny thing about all of this is the democracy, I say in the 1619 project is the most patriotic thing I've ever written. And in fact, when I look back at it now, I'm like, maybe it was too patriotic. That people would read that and think that this was

somehow trying to be destructive to America. I think comes from a deep, deep discomfort of the belief that white Americans are exclusively the hero of the American story and that they could not see the type of critical patriotism that black Americans have always had to have. They couldn't see that as being their story as well.

Because when we tell the stories of white historical figures, that is the story of America. But when we tell the stories of black historical figures, that's only the story of black people. And, of course, that has never been true. Jelani, it seems to me that there are some core figures in this movement. Tom Cotton from Arkansas, Josh Hawley from Missouri,

Ted Cruz from Texas, of course, and Rhonda Santos from Florida. What is the ideology behind what they're saying about the teaching of history in the schools? Where does it come from? What is its origin? I think in the most modern incarnation,

there's a concern, especially in the aftermath of George Floyd's death in 2020, that, you know, the schools had, you know, given people this kind of critical sensibility about the United States. that the universities were too liberal, that the entire kind of ballast upon which the current

order rests was being undermined by these ideas. On a more, I think, fundamental level, however, these are debates about power. The first historians who looked at the history of people of African descent were doing so as a means of undermining the rationales for Jim Crow and slavery. The argument, the white supremacist argument, was that these people have no history and that they've contributed nothing to the tide of civilization. So if you disprove that myth, then you undermine the basis that says that you are not allowed to vote, that you have to attend these inferior segregated institutions and so on. And so that is what this debate has been about. The irony, of course, here is that if you think about the language that you cited in, you know, that legislation,

Much of it is, you know, language that you would agree with, you know, you can't teach anything that would inspire children to feel ashamed or to feel, you know, contempt for their community of the group that they belong to and so on. And in a colorblind sense, that makes perfect sense. The fact of it is, though, is that it's a pernicious inversion of the logic of Brown versus Board of Education. When we think about that 1954 decision, which rested upon the doll test that Kenneth and Mamie Clark deployed as part of the plaintiff's case and showing the deleterious effects of white supremacy on the psyche of black children. We found that black children knew that they were different, that they had lower status, say, two out of three. of the children rejected the brown dolls as being negative and bad, et cetera. And they showed that the way that education was carried out in this country was doing the work of white supremacy, instilling a sense of inferiority in the minds of black children,

and thereby violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. That's a chain of logic. We're now saying people who are saying that we have to get rid of black history because merely telling this history has that same effect on white children. So it's a one-to-one inversion of the logic that led to the end of segregation in the first place. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book that's banned quite often lately, and in his essays as well, he has a crucial idea. And the idea is that there's a really false distinction drawing.

too often between black history and American history. Ellison wants to tell us that those two are inextricably bound up. They're the same, in a sense. Why is it important, or is it important, to carry on that distinction any longer? You know, David, one of the ironies here is that, you know, there's a profound degree of historical illiteracy in this country. We don't know the history of the country very well at all. At all. As a matter of fact, I mean, you can go to the most diehard Democrat and ask them about the origins of the Democratic Party, and probably 85% of the time you'll get crickets. You go to the most diehard Republican and ask where the Republican Party comes from and how it got to be what it is now, and you'll probably get the same

a number of crickets. The irony here, though, is that to the extent that we engage with American history in any systematic way, we do it in February. and that when I go out and give lectures in Black History Month, when I go out and give lectures about the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment, that's happening under the rubric of black history, but that's also constitutional history. That's the history of democracy. There's a history of the United States in the 19th century. There are all of these forces and dynamics that are implicit within that moment. And that's when we get it. Black history is the point at which we actually engage with understanding what the country is about at all in a public way.

I'm talking with Jelani Cobb and Nicole Hannah-Jones about Black History and American history. And we'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking on the program today with Nicole Hannah-Jones and Jolani Cobb. Hannah-Jones is the New York Times Magazine, reporter who developed the 1619 project, which looked very closely at the role that slavery played

in our history. I'm speaking to it with Jalani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker. We gather to talk about the attack on black history across the country from people who say, in effect, that we really ought to emphasize only the positive when it comes to our own history. But the measures that they take go well beyond the elementary schools, the Florida Department of education, blocked an AP course on African-American studies, calling it inexplicably contrary to Florida law. Decisions about tenure are becoming openly political, something that Hannah Jones experienced herself, which we'll get to. In many ways, conservative leaders are pushing for a great deal more control over intellectual freedom in higher education. We'll continue our conversation.

as a history lover and a lay historian who has traveled the world talking about history, other countries, their citizenry just know their own history and their history in the larger context of the globe exponentially better than the United States. And part of that, I think, is we're just always a forward-looking culture. We just, we don't value it in the same way. That's part of our ethos as Americans. but it does mean then trying to contextualize these moments that we're in. It's very challenging because we don't even have to talk about not having a shared understanding of black history.

We don't even have a shared understanding of American history. So I think that that's very true. I think that that separation is necessary just because in any generalized history, you can only get a certain level of depth. So, you know, I believe in women's studies, black studies, black states, studies, Asian studies, just because it gives you more depth. But I don't believe in a complete segregation of those histories in the way that they are often taught. And where black people are included in what we consider a generalized history, Jolani called it, you know, the parsley,

right, the garnish. I call it the asterix. And it's generally to explain something that is happening amongst white Americans. But the truth is, if you think about it, when we're teaching about the development of the nation and we talk about the triangle trade, right? This is a story of black people, even though we don't teach it that way. When we talk about the American Revolution and who has the power and the education to write the laws of this new country, you're talking about black people because those are all people who have gotten their power from the institution of slavery, the Missouri Compromise, right? The Kansas-Nebraska Act. These are all things that are having to do with slavery. But we're

we're almost talking about them as if slavery is not what is undergirding the entire history of our country until 1865. And again, we're only talking about these as kind of distinct histories of white people making laws or having conflict and black people just existing in the background somewhere because we have to talk about these things. So, of course, what I argue in the 1619 project is you just, you cannot understand your country if these histories are not intertwined. because they are. Before we even become a country by 150 years, African people are being influenced and influencing what will become the United States. But the idea that people are up in arms about something that is not being taught, it's kind of goes back in kind of the history of American hysterias and how we have ginned up at various times, you know, alarm and fear about any number of things, you know, communism being one. Catholicism at another point and, you know, all of the kind of things that we can go back in American history. But, Geline, you were a co-author of an open letter, I think with 800 other scholars and

administrators in African American Studies. What were your concerns and what was the outcome of that letter? So that was around, you know, Florida's restrictions on the AP African American Studies course, which had essentially gutted that curriculum and interfered with the teaching of the actual racial history of this country. And there were all sorts of abundant ironies that came out of this. If I was to use one example, in 1951, Harry T. and Harriet Moore were a black couple who were organizers.

Harry Moore fought for equal pay for black teachers, got over 100,000 black Americans to register to vote. And as a consequence of their actions of trying to register black voters, their home was firebombed on Christmas, 1991. Harry and Harriet Moore were assassinated in Brevard County. They were both killed. FBI investigations pointed to the KKK for the murders, but no one was ever charged. In the 1990s, in response to this, the state of Florida, recognizing its own culpability, having fired both Harry and Harriet more from their jobs as teachers, you know, because they were organizing black voters. As a bit of penance, the state of Florida added their home to the historic registry. The end result now of the legislation that we've seen passed in the Florida legislature is that that the state of Florida legislature is that,

the Moore's home can exist on the historic registry, but Florida schools can't tell the children why that home is on the historic registry. Or at least the legislation makes it really unclear what a Florida teacher could say about the Moors and their murders. That is the state of affairs that we were protesting and saying that this kind of incursion into the curriculum was one unduly politicizing this work. And second, was only facilitating the kind of repetitions of the worst that we've seen in our past. That was what we were thinking about when we created that letter.

The result of it has not really been, you know, much by way of DeSantis and his Board of Education. Nicole, what role does media narratives play in perpetuating or countering attacks on black history? For instance, the battle over critical race theory. some news organizations repeat claims that CRT, critical race theory, is being taught to primary and middle schoolers, which seems to be, it just seems to be flat out false. What is the media doing well and what can it be doing a lot better? Sure. So I have been very critical at the way that media has helped legitimize what essentially is a propaganda campaign. And we need to call that what it is, right?

We know the actors. The actors are very explicit. They don't camouflage what they're doing. In fact, one of the biggest actors, of course, Chris Rufo regularly goes on Twitter and says, this is what we're going to do. He said he was going to make turn critical race theory into a term that made white Americans think about indoctrination, their white children being treated as the oppressor. I mean, he lays it out.

And then he lays out his strategy, which is we keep pushing this until we get some mainstream media to pick it up. And then the rest of mainstream media feels that they have to now pick it up or it will look like they're being biased. So these folks have studied, I think really the flaws in media and have exploited it. So what happens is this desire to be balanced then actually means we obfuscate the truth. The first thing we should have done as journalists that said, okay, show me in a classroom where this is. is happening. Provide evidence that this is happening. Let's define what critical race theory is and what it isn't. And instead, we, we allowed bad faith actors to really define the terms in a way that I think has been very harmful because that's how propaganda works. Attempted bans were against 1619 specifically. Then they came back with critical race theory. Now, of course, they're coming back with DEI. And we just keep making kind of those same mistakes again and again. I also just want to add that when we think about something like critical race theory, when we think about what should and shouldn't be taught in the classroom,

part of what we did as a failure in media is to ask, what is the role of an education? And is it wrong to teach a theory? Is it wrong to teach things that every parent wouldn't agree with? I mean, that is actually the role of an education. Nicole, are there any good examples of solid reporting on this? Who's doing it really well? Some of the most important reporting that came out of this,

it was a journalist named Nicole Carr at ProPublica. And she was reporting on the Moms for Liberty, which, of course, mainstream media treated moms for liberty as a legitimate grassroots parental rights group. But if you study history, you know, parental rights has been one of those race-neutral terms that has been used historically for race-specific movements. And she actually showed that this was a white nationalist movement. But this was something that most journalists didn't want to call out the fact that nearly

everybody in Mons for Liberty was white, that they were pushing a narrative of America that could certainly be seen as nationalists, that the books they were targeting were specifically black books and books of other marginalized groups. So we have been aider than abettors of what's happened. Jolani, in countries such as China or Poland, for example, there are laws that state which topics can be taught and not taught. Is what's happening in the United States around the teaching of black history uniquely different from other countries? Are we a nation that takes extra steps to control the narrative somehow? So I think there are a couple of things here.

One is that we, on the global stage, have enjoyed the reputation for freedom of inquiry in the United States. And at the same time, you know, what we've actually done is kind of create an environment in which we're saying these topics can be, you know, available for conversation and exploration. These topics cannot. And, you know, not coincidentally, as we've seen corresponding to this movement, has been also a push back against tenure. And, you know, the idea of tenuring professors at, you know, institutions, if we think back, we know that one of the ballasts upon which tenure rests, the modern system of tenure rests at American universities is the McCarthy era, in which people were being pushed out of their positions, people were being hounded, you know, out of professional life, that people deployed all manner of kind of dog whistles and, you know, innuendo against people to destroy their ability to earn a living or to pursue their careers

as intellectuals and academics. What we're seeing now with the push against tenure as part of this campaign, the effort is to create a landscape that will allow state power to determine what people can and cannot say, or even avenues in which people can or cannot inquire or intellectual questions which are suitable for examination and those which are not. And so none of that is compatible with the vision of freedom and the way in which the United States articulates its vision of itself nationally or internationally, I think, for that matter. I just wanted to add something to that. So all of us as writers, as journalists in this conversation here, understand how important narrative is, right? Narrative is what determines what policies get supported. Narrative determines how we think about policies. And so we have to understand the context of this. It's not just what can a college student, which to me is it's absolutely insane that we would be legislating what grown adults who have decided to go to college need to be protected from in the classroom. I think that should speak to how insaneness has gotten. But we have to understand that what they're really trying to do is determine thought. How can we imagine, our world. What do we understand about our world? I think we need to understand. You don't ban books. You don't ban curriculum. You don't ban the teaching of ideas just to do it. You do it to really control what we are

able to understand and think about and imagine for our society. You are both at universities. Jelani is a dean in the journalism school at Columbia. And Nicole, you're the nightchair of race and journalism at Howard University, I wonder if how this issue is playing out at Columbia and Howard. So, you know, I think there are a few different kinds of contexts here for this. Public universities have generally been more susceptible to this pressure than private institutions have been. At Columbia, we've seen a whole array of people, you know, are very concerned about this. but we've been relatively insulated. I will say one thing, however, which is that I have seen personally with academics whom I have spoken to, people not apply for jobs at certain universities.

I think that we're seeing a kind of brain drain or I don't even know what the term would be because it's not that people are necessarily leaving, People are refusing to even apply, in some instances, to openings at these universities. And I think that over time, that will become another dynamic here. Yeah, you know, I'd actually, I think I'm going to speak less on Howard or more on how I got to Howard, which is exactly because of this thing that we're talking about. I went through the tenure process at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and had my tenure blocked by political appointees to the board of trustees, not academics, I was approved for tenure by the university because of what a wealthy donor considered to be my political views

and a dislike of the journalism that I did. So we're looking at places where the university system used to be, you know, this was a pride of a state. The crown jewel, University of North Carolina was a crown jewel of the university. system in North Carolina. We've seen tenure taken away at Georgia, and even my home state of Iowa, which was known nationally as the crown jewel of educationally, right? We all grew up taking the Iowa test of basic skills, and the university system there was the pride of the state. But it is this stance of wanting to attack, even their own institutions. Well, it leads me to this question then, for both of you. Is Christopher Rufo, is Rhonda Santis and Ted Cruz?

at all, are they winning overall in this battle? I think it's like asking if Jill McCarthy was winning. He was winning for a while. Exactly. I think that he was able to do something that benefited himself politically and benefited a particular kind of reactionary inclination that he had tapped into. But the net effect of it for the rest of the nation and for the well-being of the democracy, democracy was overwhelmingly negative.

And so I think these kinds of scare tactics that are politically profitable, you know, we've seen this playbook in many other instances, you know, and they benefit only the people who have the microphone, the people who are at the university, the people who are learning at these institutions, the ecosystem that the university builds up around it, the national prestige and international prestige of these institutions, all of that suffers as a result of this. That is the critical question for us to ask is who ultimately will win and when we're just, because of where we are in this country, we've always been a polarized country, but we are particularly polarized, that we are going to have such a difference between states in terms

of what rights you have, what rights you have, what, what rights are protected for you? What are you able to learn? What are you able to think about? Because some of us may feel that we're in a safe state, but there can be no safe state as long as we see these anti-democratic authoritarian practices spreading in other states. Eventually, it's going to come for us, too.

Nicole Hannah-Jones, Jolani Cobb. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. Nicole Hannah-Jones is a correspondent for the New York Times, magazine, and she holds the night chair in race and journalism at Howard University. Jelani Cobb writes for us at The New Yorker, and he's the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Boyle. Alton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul,

and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.