I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School
During fall 2020 semester, we were given our curriculum timeline on the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War. I noticed the stories and books seemed to focus almost exclusively on slavery and racism. Those are appropriate topics that we always have taught, but the focus has become narrow, excluding many other aspects of our history.
You can see in this image of me in my classroom in 2019 that we taught about racism, including the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the novel
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, among others.
We did not need a new curriculum for students to learn about slavery and racism. We already did that, in great depth, relying in part on the writings of great African-American authors.
American history now is being retold exclusively from the perspective of oppressed peoples during the Revolutionary period through to the Civil War, and also in the literature of the Civil Rights movement. From my position in the classroom, it seemed that much of American history and literature was getting wiped out. No one of these new books, standing alone, would be problematic, it’s the new lack of diversity of perspective that is the problem. Although the 1619 Project itself has not yet been introduced, the historical perspective now has shifted to making slavery and racism the defining events of the founding and growth of America.
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Then sometime around January 2021, hundreds of new leaflet style booklets arrived, all poorly written, historically biased, inaccurate, and pushing a racial narrative. I noticed the book covers right away. They were odd. In some cases the book covers browned out the faces of historical characters like Lincoln to look black or brown, none of the books were recognizable, and all the booklets seemed to revolve around slavery or oppression.
Perplexed, I thought there was a mistake. I asked a teacher leader what was going on and he looked jokingly at me saying “Comrade, we were told to remove all classroom sets of reading material in order to make room for the incoming sets of books.” I laughed, assuming this was a joke. But it was not a joke, this was real and happening in my school, in my classroom.
In isolation and without historical perspective, the thematic message in every book was clear: White Europeans were and are evil and African Americans were and are victimized by white oppressors. Woven into this new curriculum was a school-wide social push to focus on Black Lives Matter support groups and other social justice identity groups.
Teachers were encouraged to participate in “white educator affinity groups” where we would be
given essays on how not to be a
white supremacist in the classroom.
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Internal professional development separating white teachers from black teachers? How is that inclusive? During these professional development sessions, black teachers were encouraged to share stories of racism and white educators encouraged to talk about what it means to be white. I can think of nothing more divisive than dividing us up by race.
Finally, for some students, standing for The Pledge of Allegiance was no longer something they did. We are not allowed to question why, and the truth is, I knew why. Already these young people were beginning to hate America. I was the only person standing and the only person that could be heard saying “liberty and justice for all”.
Midway through the academic year, some students started calling me “America” because I was white. These students, whom I love, were turning against me because of my skin color. I don’t blame them, I blame the racial narratives being forced upon them in school.
Several of my colleagues stated I had “white privilege.” I was quickly made to feel as though I was becoming the enemy. My black colleagues added more similar comments in passing, for example: “You have white privilege Bessinger, your gestures are a rich person’s gestures.”