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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. By now you've probably heard extensive discussion on critical race theory. We've talked about it on the show a lot, but it's come up in the new cycle again. Following up on his campaign promise to ban teaching the concept in schools, the new Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, has now signed an executive order to "end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory".

Now, while the order doesn't quite specify what concepts count as divisive, it does go on to say this, "Inherently divisive concepts like critical race theory and its progeny instruct students to only view life through the lens of race and presumes that some students are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, or oppressive and that other students are victims. This denies our students the opportunity to gain important facts, core knowledge, formulate their own opinion, and to think for themselves."

It goes on, "We must enable our students to take risks, to think differently, to imagine, and to see conversations regarding art, science, and history as a place where they have a voice" from Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, but whose voice exactly? According to PolitiFact, the widespread teaching of critical race theory and that state's education system isn't even happening, but that hasn't stopped Virginia and other states from trying to limit the practice.

The Brookings Institution tracks nine other states, Virginia is the one that's been most in the news, but nine other states too banning the discussion training and/or orientation that the US is inherently racist, as well as any discussions about conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression the way the Brookings Institution sums up what's being banned, even if it doesn't mention CRT by name in any of these states.

Joining me now is Brian Jones, director of the Center for Educators and Schools at New York Public Library and contributor to Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice. Brian, thanks very much for coming on WNYC. Hi.

Brian Jones: Hi, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can open up the phones. How did you learn about racism in school or how are you teaching it now? Do you think that our curriculum is a good model, a good place to have these battles? Do you think the curriculum that you either learned or that you taught or are teaching is a good model that should proliferate or one that should be avoided? 212-433-WNYC. What about this idea of divisive concepts or suggesting that some students are inherently victims and some students are inherently racist or otherwise oppressive? 212-433-WNYC.

Teachers, students, anyone else, but it would be great if we have people with any direct experiences of any of this, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Do you understand what this order from the Virginia governor actually bans that's currently being taught or actually being done in schools?

Brian Jones: I understand the governor set up a tip line where people can call in if they hear a teacher doing something. It seems like the effect of this is to have a chill or put fear into educators and school leaders that if they take up topics that have to do with racism and the history of institutional racism in the United States and things like that, that they will be accused of promoting "inherently divisive concepts". There's a lot of language in here just reading through the text of the order.

It sounds straightforward on the face of it that students should be able to think for themselves. He acknowledges students should learn about the history of slavery and segregation and treatment of Native Americans, and then holds up that king quote that conservatives are so fond of holding up about judging people by the color of their skin. Not by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character. It sounds like an invasive way of saying to people who want to talk about race and racism are themselves the racist, which is a famous trick of opponents of teaching Black history.

Brian Lehrer: When it gets to this idea or the language in Governor Youngkin's order that it would ban the, I'm trying to pick out the exact phrase here, ban teaching "that presumes that some students are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, or oppressive", it sounds like it's focusing not so much on the teaching of the history of slavery and how bad slavery was or to treat slavery as some kind of moral equivalent to no slavery or to cover up the racist history of the United States, but somehow it seems to be focused on teaching that some white parents apparently think is telling the children themselves that they are unconsciously racist just by being white or sexist just by being male. Do you think that's really what it's getting at and do you think that's a risk?

Brian Jones: I think that there is a way of doing any of this badly or ham-handedly. There's a way of doing it that draws attention to the way individuals relate to each other and helps us evade the systems or the institutions, but that said, I have two children in school, and I know from my own experience as a student and from their experiences as a student is that there is sexism between students, there is racism between students. I was bullied in school. People get bullied and teased and called sexist names.

I live in New York City, and one of the most diverse multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multilingual school systems in the country, and there is plenty that spreads between students, but of course, we would never want to put [crosstalk] in a box.

Brian Lehrer: I think Governor Youngkin would probably say if individual students are being racist, then they should be called out, but white students shouldn't be taught as a group that they are racist, or they probably go so far as to say as shouldn't be taught that we live in a racist country with that kind of broad label.

Brian Jones: Yes, but this is why. I work at the New York Public Library and I think my colleagues are pretty allergic to anything that's about banning books. Our preference is to advise people to read them. When you actually read what people in critical race theory, and as the governor says, their progeny, when you read their ideas, that's not what they're teaching. They're not teaching that all people of a particular identity are therefore racist, sexist, oppressive, or what have you.

Actually, what they're trying to get at is what you just said is that there's something deeper, more structural going on that affects the way we relate to each other, and they're trying to understand that and grapple with that. I think that's really where we need to land here that, no, we shouldn't put children in a identity box. Ironically, that's what the critical race theorists are trying to criticize, are these boxes of identity, and they're trying to expose the way that they're constructed, something that we as a society invent and create and recreate all the time.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that this is not actually going on, the thing that the governor is ordering in Virginia seeks to ban, and so this is a political SOP to some voters who vote based on white grievance of one kind or another, but it doesn't actually ban anything that's actually taking place in Virginia schools?

Brian Jones: Yes and no because critical race studies comes out of legal studies. The joke was, congratulations, if your third graders getting critical race theory, they're in law school. Yes and no. No, they're not getting actual critical race theory, but the yes of it that I think we do have to fairly acknowledge is that there is a social reckoning going on. There's something that's changing and the way that people are willing to and interested in discussing and thinking about our society and our history. We're coming up on Black History Month, which used to be something that only Black people celebrated. It used to be Negro History Week. It was something that was in the churches and the Black schools that Black writers and educators advocated for but were constantly silenced and was marginalized. Now that it's breaking out and we're having a new Renaissance of Black writing and thinking that's gaining a wide audience, I'm thinking of the way in which The 1619 Project has arrived in our society with tremendous force and has resonated in schools loudly.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think the teaching of The 1619 Project as a construct or articles from it or some of the basic articles from it would now be banned in Virginia? Because this is a conversation that America is having right now because of that series from the New York Times originally, now in a book, and it says, "Look, we have to look at American history as starting in a certain real sense in 1619 with the arrival of the first enslaved people." Because that was so defining in terms of so much of the country's history that has come since.

You can't just start with 1776, you can't just start with Columbus, start in 1619. That's one way to look at history. It's not the only way to look at history, but that's one meaningful way to understand the history of the United States. That, as one way to look at history, could not be taught in Virginia now, do you think?

Brian Jones: If we take the governor's words very, very literally, it actually could, but the spirit of this order and the opening of a tip hotline seems to suggest that it would certainly be banned. First of all, that's a book people should read instead of banning, that's another one people should read instead of banning. The opening essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the series. She talks about how her dad used to fly the American flag and she couldn't understand it. By the end of the essay, she comes around to understanding it and to embracing it.

Actually, as you described this new origin story, this new way of framing US history that's very critical to talking about the horrors of the Black experience, at least for the creator, it comes around to acclaiming of the nation and its ideals. There's something very brittle or there's a fragility here to saying that we can't go into this, we can't delve into these stories, we can't engage with this because it will make children feel bad as we hear in some places, or people won't have pride in the nation.

The irony is that many of the most prominent Black writers who are trying to take up these stories and tell them are people who believe very deeply in the nation's promise and going through this history is their way of making it real.

Brian Lehrer: Just before we take some phone calls, since the governor's order there does explicit ban the teaching of critical race theory, it's mentioned by name as an example of the divisive approach to education that the order bans, critical race theory is an academic theory. We've taken several deep dives into it on this show so people can understand more what it is, more what it isn't.

Do you as director of schools in education at the New York Public Library, director of the Center for Educators and Schools at New York Public Library, and a contributor to the book, Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice, do you have a shorthand definition for any listeners who might be out there thinking, "What is critical race theory"?

Brian Jones: Critical race theory, my understanding, I'm not a critical race theorist or an expert in it, but my reading of critical race theory is that it is an attempt by, firstly, legal scholars to understand why there has been so much racial disparity in the functioning of the country's legal system after racism, explicitly racist treatment was deemed illegal. How did that happen? They passed laws saying you can't segregate, you can't deny people equal access to public accommodations. They passed explicitly anti-racist laws.

Brian Lehrer: The Civil Rights Laws of the 1960s.

Brian Jones: Yes, and yet, in all kinds of ways, racial disparities and bad treatment and discrimination persisted, and persistent, in some cases, in law, but without an explicit sanction. They tried to figure out. They came together as a group of theorists and called themselves critical race theorists because they said, "Okay, something more deeply has to be at work here that these laws were not able to take care of it, and therefore, we're going to try to understand what that is."

Brian Lehrer: You think they couldn't teach that now in Virginia? Could a teacher not stand up in front of a classroom of high school students, say, and define critical race theory in the way that you just defined it? Because it is literally banned, it looks like, just reading the explicit text of this order.

Brian Jones: Yes. Apparently, is literally banned, but there are a lot of things that they're saying about it. Like, for example, I was talking to a group of high school students recently who were arguing this point and apparently had heard talking points about critical race theory. They said to me that, well, critical race theory teaches that all white people are racist. Critical race theory reinforces racism, reinforces the idea that race, as an idea, is an eternal construct that we're just stuck with.

When you read the opening text of the founding documents of critical race theory, it's very clear that actually, these are people whom among their ideas, they see race as something that is constructed, that's not an eternal feature of human society. Their focus is on racism and the way that racism recreates race and teaches us to see each other as people of different races. They're not trying to put people in boxes and saying, "All people who look this way are this, and all people who look that way or that," but that is the popular shorthand for what critical race theory is.

Brian Lehrer: As you described before, how wide swaths of discrimination that really disadvantage Black people mostly in this country continue despite the Civil Rights Laws of the 1960s. As we talk about the banning of critical race theory and other so-called divisive concepts by the governor of Virginia for the public schools in that state, talking about it with Brian Jones, director of the Center for Educators and Schools at the New York Public Library and a contributor to Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice. Tommy in Oakland, California, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tommy.

Tommy: Hi there. I'm calling, I listen to WNYC every day, went to grad school out in New York. I was just calling to say that I think that your guest, the director, I believe it's Jones is right about the critical race theory and right about the text of the law, but my frustration with these discussions that we've been having almost a year and a half now, so I think it's missing the forest for the trees. There's just three groups to this whole social-cultural conflict is the DEI training--

Brian Lehrer: Just for background, you told our screener that you have taught at the college level and the high school level, is that right?

Tommy: Yes, and specifically about race. I know critical race theory quite well, I know other theories of race quite well. I think that what's happened in this discussion is that people have missed the forest for the trees in that there's the people who do the trainings, the people who teach history and histories of race, and then people who are invested in denying the multicultural, multiethnic history of the United States and the oppression that comes with it.

That's part all in the wake of the George Floyd protest and the wake of the Black Lives Matter protest, so I think that focusing on the law and what the law can do and can't do is focusing on the tip of the iceberg as it peeks through the hole of the Titanic. There's something much bigger going on. I think they're trying to make it seem like there is a reasonable expectation of X, Y, Z being taught is really myopic in a lot of ways. I can take my response off the air.

Brian Lehrer: Brian, do you get where he's going with that?

Brian Jones: Yes, absolutely. I think we all understand that even though the specific language of the law is slippery and almost difficult to parse what is actually being banned here, I think we all understand that this is part of a wave of laws. The caller is exactly right, this is part of a wave of laws and bans that now are in some like 14 states. I see one estimate, maybe this is covering a third of the nation's students, maybe that many, there's a chill for teaching Black history. At the New York Public Library, we have this Center for Educators in schools and our goal is to try to equip educators with great resources for waiting into to all of these kinds of topics.

Our approach is not to tell people what to think, but to give educators and their students' great resources for teaching, for getting into the real histories. Part of the New York Public Library is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which is an amazing resource. We just passed our Tour of Schomburg's birthday and I highly recommend if your listeners don't know looking up the Schomburg Center as well for getting incredible resources.

Brian Lehrer: We just had the director of the Schomburg Center on the show last week. Susan in Sea Cliff, you're on WNYC. Hi, Susan.

Susan: Hello. Thank you so much for your program, it's always very enlightening. I would just like to add to the conversation or broaden the conversation. It's very frustrating to me

that we're so myopic, the previous caller stole my word, but we're so myopic about American culture and we only see it from a very close lens. I think that this whole discussion about race should be broadened to be a pan historic and global topic. It didn't begin in the United States in 1619, it didn't begin only on these shores, it has been a part and parcel to human history and discourse all along in different various forms.

It's Black on Black, it's religious, it's all kinds of things. I think that some of the angst about what we're teaching children in the United States today could be softened and contextualize to include a global perspective and go back further to Egypt, to Africa, to China. It's happening everywhere all the time, ee've never been able to shake it.

Brian Lehrer: How much do you want to soften the particularity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the persistence of it here while other Western nations were banning it, and the impact on the people who live in the United States today?

Susan: I think soften is a word that has certain context, but it's not the right word. What I mean is to broaden it, to see it more clearly, you have to see it more broadly. You have to look at things up close, but you also have to take a step back. When you become cellmated as we are now in this argument, take another step back and broaden the view to include what human behavior is. History shouldn't be taught in a silo, history is a combination of things that include human psychology, sociology, economics.

History is all of those things rolled in together. I think it would be great to be in a classroom learning about critical race theory and then looking at it within the context of what's happening in the current events headlines discussion.

Brian Lehrer: Susan thank you very much. Unfortunately, we're out of time for this segment. Obviously, this is just the latest in many, many, many, many discussions that we have and people should have about race and how we understand race. Not just about how it's taught, which is the particular focus here because of the news from Virginia but to do something like what both of the last two callers were talking about. Really having these conversations about what relationships are, about what history has actually been that has led to wherever we are right now and ongoing and ongoing and ongoing.

If you want to say one last thing, you can. Brian Jones, director of the Center for Educators and Schools at New York Public Library and contributor to Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice. The last thought in 30 seconds.

Brian Jones: I guess my last thought is that I don't think they can pass all the laws they want. This is an information age and I think these laws and these bans aren't going to age well. I think they're not going to be able to unring this bell. People want to reckon with the nation's real history and I think they're going to.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, we made this a content conversation, not a legal conversation, but there are also now lawsuits against the Virginia governor's order. It may well be found unconstitutional, but time will tell given the federal court system that we have right now. Brian, thank you so much.

Brian Jones: Thank you.

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