David Remnick: In 1963, James Baldwin gave his 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 in the classroom, but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won't happen."

60 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.

Speaker 1: Florida schools must now teach students about the, "Benefit of slavery when teaching Black history". The controversial new education standard passed by the State Board of Education earlier this week, and this follows Governor DeSantis's so-called Stomp Woke Act which forced the rewriting of education standards there in Florida.

David Remnick: At the same time, book barns are at an astronomical level. In New York City, for example, one school recently purged books dealing with Black life and other subjects.

Speaker 2: Hundreds of books had been left with the trash outside PS 55 in Staten Island, they were about Black history, immigration, and--

David Remnick: 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. To get a handle on the significance of what's happening, I sat down with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter who first developed the 1619 project.

With the New Yorkers, Jelani Cobb. Jelani 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. 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?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Well, I wasn't in school in the '80s, because I'm too young for that. Just kidding. I know.

David Remnick: That's painful.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: 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. 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.

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 a larger society. Even in Global Studies, we spent most of our time in Europe, and very little time, in the other continents of the world. It was a very narrow education and gave me a very narrow view of who had contributed what to our society and our world.

Jelani Cobb: Well, the interesting thing is that, even though we were in very different parts of the country, aside from roots, which I remember being discussed in class, there really wasn't very much. If we were thinking about this in maybe culinary terms, the main course, the entree, was going to be a history that wasn't referred to as white history, but de facto was white history because the only people who were actors and agents and world affairs were white people.

If we talked about African Americans in the culinary metaphor, we'd be garnished, sprinkled in 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. Then a century later we have people marching, singing, "We Shall Overcome." There was no connective tissue that made any of that really legible to us.

David Remnick: Now, in our time, we have the following happening. Any number of states are shutting down or reacting against just the 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 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?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: 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 PragerU.

David Remnick: What is PragerU just to explain?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: It's a right-wing online, "university", they had a video with a cartoon animated. Frederick Douglass was basically saying that we had to have slavery in the United States. It was a good thing that was abolished, but it was necessary. What that does is it gives lie to the argument. 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. What we're seeing is a response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, this sense that racial justice was going too far, that curriculums were changing in a way that were decentering this white narrative. I think part of it came from just understanding that in a "culture war", when you talk about students, then you begin to get people to focus on emotion and not facts and reason.

Speaker 3: Who would understand that we are asking them and pleading with them and demanding that they remove critical race theory from --

Speaker 4: I'm going to send my child to school, and she's going to be taught about the color of her skin.

Speaker 3: -- to ensure that children are not shamed or blamed or otherwise, singled out for actions --

Speaker 5: We must not be afraid to embrace the message of the founders of the United States.

Speaker 6: Just because I do not want critical race theory taught to my children in school, does not mean that I'm a racist damn it.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Then 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, are being indoctrinated into the belief that white people were guilty. It's also pushed back against a larger phenomenon that was happening, where Black people and people of color, were having a larger impact in the electorate.

All of these things were colliding in an effort then to make the culture war about what was happening in the classroom in the sense that white people were losing something. The last thing I'll just quickly say is, there's a reason that these barns, that these book barns, that these legislative barns, that these curriculum barns target Black history specifically. That's because Black history by its very existence is political because every narrative about American exceptionalism is defined 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. It is how our history truthfully, 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.

David Remnick: 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.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Absolutely. 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. 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 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. 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.

David Remnick: 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 Ron DeSantis 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?

Jelani Cobb: I think in the most modern incarnation, there's a concern. Especially, in the aftermath of George Floyd's death in 2020, that the schools had given people this critical sensibility about the United States that the universities were too liberal, that the entire 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 white supremacist argument was that these people have no history and that they've contributed nothing to the tide of civilization. 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. 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 that legislation, much of it is language that you would agree with.

You can't teach anything that would inspire children to feel ashamed or to feel contempt for their community or the group that they belong to and so on. In a colorblind sense, if 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.

Kenneth Clark: We found that Black children knew that they were different, that they had lower status. Two out of three of the children rejected the brown dolls as being negative and bad, et cetera.

Jelani Cobb: 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 seeing 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. It's a one-to-one inversion of the logic that led to the end of segregation in the first place.

David Remnick: 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 drawn 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?

Jelani Cobb: David, one of the ironies here is that there's a profound degree of historical illiteracy in this country. We don't know the history of the country very well at all.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: At all, yes.

Jelani Cobb: As a matter of fact, you can go to the most diehard Democrat and ask them about the origins of the Democratic Party. 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. 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. That-

David Remnick: Black History Month.

Jelani Cobb: -we 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 the democracy. That's a history of reconstruction. 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. 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.

David Remnick: I'm talking with Jelani Cobb and Nikole Hannah-Jones about Black history and American history, and we'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking on the program today with Nicole Hannah-Jones and Jelani 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 too with Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker. We gathered 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.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: 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. Part of that, I think, is we are just always a forward-looking culture. 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. I think that that's very true. I think that separation is necessary just because in any generalized history, you can only get a certain level of depth. I believe in women's studies, Black studies, Asian studies, just because it gives you more depth. I don't believe in a complete segregation of those histories in the way that they're often taught and where Black people are included in what we consider a generalized history.

Jelani called it the parsley, the garnish, I call it the asterisk and it's generally to explain something that is happening amongst white Americans. 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. 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, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. These are all things that are having to do with slavery, but we're almost talking about them as if slavery is not what is undergirding the entire history of our country until 1865. Again, we're only talking about these as 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. Of course, what I argue in the 1619 Project is you cannot understand your country if these histories are not intertwined because they are. Before we even became a country by 150 years, African people are being influenced and influencing what would become the United States.

Jelani Cobb: The idea that people are up in arms about something that is not being taught, it goes back in the history of American hysterias, and how we have ginned up at various times. Alarm and fear about any number of things. Communism being one, Catholicism at another point, and all of the things that we can go back in American history.

David Remnick: Jelani, you were a co-author of an open letter, I think with 800 other scholars, administrators in African-American Studies. What were your concerns and what was the outcome of that letter?

Jelani Cobb: That was around 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. There were all sorts of abundant ironies that came out of this. If I was to use one example, in 1951 Harry T. and Harriette Moore were a Black couple who were organizers.

Speaker 7: Harry Moore fought for equal pay for Black teachers, got over 100,000 Black Americans to register to vote.

Jelani Cobb: As a consequence of their actions of trying to register Black voters, their home was firebombed on Christmas 1951.

Speaker 7: Harry and Harriette Moore were assassinated in Brevard County.

Jelani Cobb: They were both killed.

Speaker 7: FBI investigations pointed to the KKK for the murders but no one was ever charged.

Jelani Cobb: In the 1990s, in response to this, the state of Florida recognizing its own culpability, having fired both Harry and Harriette Moore from their jobs as teachers because they were organizing Black voters, but 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 the Moore's home can exist on the historic registry, but Florida's schools can't tell the children why that home is on the historic registry.

David Remnick: Or at least the legislation makes it really unclear what a Florida teacher could say about the Moores and their murders.

Jelani Cobb: 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 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 much by way of DeSantis and his board of education.

David Remnick: Nikole, 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, it just seems to be flat-out false. What is the media doing well and what can it be doing a lot better?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Sure. 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. 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 turn critical race theory into a term that made white Americans think about indoctrination, their white children being treated as the oppressor.

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." These folks have studied, I think, really the flaws in media and have exploited it.

What happens is this desire to be balanced then actually means we obfuscate the truth. The first thing we should have done as journalists is say, "Okay, show me in a classroom where this is happening. Provide evidence that this is happening." Let's define what critical race theory is and what it isn't. Instead, 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 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? Is it wrong to teach a theory? Is it wrong to teach things that every parent wouldn't agree with?" That is actually the role of an education.

David Remnick: Nikole, are there any good examples of solid reporting on this? Who's doing it really well?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Some of the most important reporting that came out of this, it was the journalist named Nicole Carr at ProPublica. 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, parental rights has been one of those race-neutral terms that has been used historically for race-specific movements.

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 Moms 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. We have been aiders and abettors of what's happened.

David Remnick: Jelani, 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?

Jelani Cobb: 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. At the same time, what we've actually done is create an environment in which we're saying, "These topics can be available for conversation and exploration, these topics cannot." Not coincidentally, as we've seen corresponding to this movement, has been also a pushback against tenure.

The idea of tenuring professors at 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 out of professional life, that people deployed all manner of dog whistles and 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. 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.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: I just wanted to add something to that. All of us as writers, as journalists in this conversation here, understand how important narrative is. Narrative is what determines what policies get supported, narratives 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 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 insane this 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.

David Remnick: You are both at universities. Jelani is Dean of the Journalism School at Columbia and Nicole, you're the Knight Chair of Race and Journalism at Howard University. I wonder how this issue is playing out at Columbia and Howard.

Jelani Cobb: 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 who 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 brain drain, or I don't even know what the term would be because it's not that people are necessarily leaving, it's people are refusing to even apply in some instances to openings at these universities. I think that over time, that will become another dynamic here.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: I think I'm going to speak less on Howard, and 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. We're looking at places where the university system used to be 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 education. We all grew up taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the university system there was the pride of the state. It is this stance of wanting to attack even their own institutions.

David Remnick: Well, it leads me to this question then for both of you. Is Christopher Ruffo, is Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz at all, are they winning overall in this battle?

Jelani Cobb: I think it's like asking if Joe McCarthy was winning.

David Remnick: He was winning for a while.

Jelani Cobb: 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. The net effect of it for the rest of the nation, and for the well-being of the democracy was overwhelmingly negative.

I think these kinds of scare tactics that are politically profitable we've seen this playbook in many other instances 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.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: That is the critical question for us to ask is who ultimately will win and when 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 are protected for you, what are you able to learn? What are you able to think about? 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.

David Remnick: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jelani Cobb, thank you so much.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thanks.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you.

David Remnick: Nikole Hannah-Jones is a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, and she holds the Knight 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.

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