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The manufactured conservative controversy against antiracist education isn't stopping these Black authors
The backlash against the teaching of Black history in public schools has gained momentum-in the form of book banning and objections to what conservatives have misdentified as Critical Race Theory.
While a CBS News poll found that more than 80 percent of Americans do not believe "books should be banned from schools for discussing race and criticizing U.S. history, for depicting slavery In the past, or more broadly for political ideas they disagree with," what's happening is the polar opposite. Republicans have continued their crusade of censorship in the classroom, despite widespread agreement on this issue spanning the political spectrum and spread across all racial groups.
PEN America, a nonprofit working to protect freedom of expression in the U.S., reported that since January 2021, "156 educational gag-order bills have been introduced or prefiled in 39 different states, and 12 have become law in 10 states."
ESSENCE spoke with some who are on the front lines, striving to ensure that our nation stays true to its ideal as "the land of the free."
"As a historian-book bans are not new. Abolitionist literature was banned all across the South in the lead up to the Civil War," notes world-renowned, award-winning scholar İbram X. Kendi, Ph.D. "Accurate teachings of the American Civil War, even slavery, were typically banned in many states during Jim Crow. Obviously, I was hoping I'd live in a time, in a nation, where we'd be willing to face truth-but of course I'm learning that people are trying to keep the truth and keep history away from young people, and it's both enraging and distressing."
Kendi's work has been at the center of the right-wing misinformation campaign and book-banning backlash. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo essentially concocted an uproar over a niche school of legal thought called Critical Race Theory, created by scholars of color in the 1980s. Rufo conflated the theory with Kendi's popular books Stamped From the Beginning...