In the face of relentless attacks on antiracist education, an urgent call to defend students’ freedom to learn the truth about our history and the struggle for a better world.
In recent years, numerous states and school districts have enacted policies or laws mandating teachers lie to students about systemic racism and oppression—policies that impact nearly half of all students in the US. Thousands of books have been banned from schools. Teachers face termination, attacks, and disciplinary action. In Florida, where the official state curriculum declares slavery was of “personal benefit” to Black people, possessing a banned book can result in up to five years in jail.
Jesse Hagopian, a long-time organizer, writer, and K-12 teacher, shows how the playbook being used by the right today has roots in McCarthyism’s Red Scare and Lavender Scare. At stake is our ability to access systems of knowledge that challenge injustice. Yet the fight for liberatory education has a rich legacy, from resistance to anti-literacy laws for enslaved people, to the Black Lives Matter at School movement today.
Teach Truth is a call to defend honest education for our students, showing how we can reclaim suppressed history by creating beloved classroom communities and healthy social movements.
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.
