TEACH TRUTH

Hagopian, a veteran educator, outlines the assault on antiracist curricula in this nonfiction work.

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, James Whitfield—the first Black principal to serve at Texas’ Colleyville Heritage High School—penned a thoughtful email criticizing systemic racism and calling for his community to unite against ignorance and hate. While the message was embraced by many, it drew the ire of a local, unsuccessful candidate for the school board, who then launched a campaign that painted Whitfield as a left-wing radical hellbent on indoctrinating students. The campaign worked, and Whitfield would shortly thereafter be suspended, and later let go, from his position. This book highlights the stories of educators like Whitfield, who bravely defy pressure to remain quiet on issues of racism, while surveying state and national efforts to censor educators attempting to teach Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ histories endorsed by a consensus within the scholarly community. These “truthcrime” laws, a term coined by the author, ban “divisive concepts” and other vague categories that target marginalized histories. Promotors of “uncritical race theory,” per Hagopian, emphasize historical and contemporary narratives that deemphasize racism “as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias” as they reject institutional analyses that point to systemic power imbalances. The author provides a compelling account of how a politically and economically powerful minority have been able to enact book bans and curriculum censorship. He also celebrates individual educators like Whitfield who have stood up for antiracist educational practices despite public bullying campaigns against them. In so doing, the author highlights strategies other educators can use in “truth teaching,” such as encouraging critical thinking skills that prompt students to view sources from a myriad of perspectives. An educator with more than two decades of experience in public schools, Hagopian is the editor or co-editor of multiple books on education and social justice. The text’s inspirational anecdotes spotlighting teachers who have defied public pressure to teach antiracist lessons are undergirded by the author’s solid foundation in pedagogical best practices and supported by more than 500 research endnotes.

A well-researched case promoting the value of antiracist education.