Teaching Truth with Jesse Hagopian

In which Dan chats with Jesse Hagopian about the urgent need to teach truthful history in America's classrooms. Jesse is the author of the excellent book Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education and he's an eloquent speaker on the need to push back against right-wing whitewashing. Jesse and Dan talk about the return of colorblindness, the gentrification of history, and why grassroots action is the only way out. 

As always I welcome comments and questions on BlueSky @dankearney and on Instagram @_dankearney_

If you're in or near Los Angeles this summer, check out Learning Adventures Workshop with Dr. Gary Stager on June 30.

New podcast alert! Tune into But I Won't Do That, an irreverent look at the music, lyrics, and videos of some favorite pop hits.

Mentioned in the episode:

Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education by Jesse Hagopian
"Oklahoma education standards say students must identify 2020 election 'discrepancies'", NPR, May 14, 2025
Zinn Education Project -- lots of incredible resources and lessons for teaching truth

Music: "Sunflower" by Soyb (Youtube Audio Library)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey listeners, before we get to today's episode, I wanted to share a couple of quick announcements. Friend of the pod Gary Steger is hosting an event here in Los Angeles this summer. If you're going to be in LA or Southern California, check this out. Learning Adventures Workshop, Monday, June 30th at the Brentwood School here in Los Angeles. Learning Adventures is an approach to teaching and curriculum development that elevates project-based learning in the context of modern resources, tools, computational technology, and pedagogy. Register today by using the link in the show notes. And second, I'm excited to tell you about my new podcast project completely different from this one. But I won't do that is an irreverent look at the music, lyrics, and videos of some favorite pop hits from the past 30 years. With my co-host Becky Jansen, we break down songs like Lionel Richie's Hello and The Beach Boy's Kokomo, and have lots of champagne and laughs along the way. Hope you can join. But I won't do that. Check out the link in the show notes. Now on to the show. Today's episode is all about telling our students the truth, not fabricated conspiracy theories like the yarn they're trying to spin in Oklahoma, but hard truth. And hard truth is under assault in this country, in America's classrooms. I've just read an outstanding book on the urgency of this moment, so I contacted the author.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

My name is Jesse Hagopian. I have been a teacher in the public schools for over 20 years. And uh I am now working at the Zinn Education Project, leading the Teaching for Black Lives campaign around the book I co-edited with that title. And uh I'm an editor with Rethinking Schools magazine and a founding member and steering committee organizer of Black Lives Matter at school.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

A few years ago I talked with John Friedman from Pan America about the rising tie of censorship in America's schools and libraries, and the surge of divisive concepts bills in state houses. That, as it turns out, was the tip of the iceberg. From the federal level on down to the states, to local municipalities and parent organizations, there's a concerted effort to muzzle the teaching of black, brown, and queer history in this country. You know, American history. Jesse's book is full of examples of teachers who found themselves attacked for committing what he calls a truth crime. If that sounds Orwellian, believe me, that's exactly how he intends it. Look, if you even remotely give a shit about how students are learning about America's past, this episode and Jesse's book are for you. We talk about the return of color blindness, the gentrification of history, and why grassroots action is the only way out. So the book, uh the most recent book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Anti-Racist Education. Great book. Very uh lucid, incisive writing. I love your use of metaphors throughout. Uh, I wanted to start though with a story you tell at the beginning of the book about Morgantown, Mississippi, and your family and a very personal connection to the subject matter. Uh, I wonder if you could start by talking my listeners through that story and how it relates to the larger work you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yeah, the process of writing this book was transformational for me. You know, I began writing in 2021 as all of these what I call truth crime laws began being passed to criminalize teachers who wanted to teach the truth about black history. And so I knew I had to write a book to help explain the movement that we were organizing to fight against these laws. Um, but I didn't realize what this book would become because just a few weeks into beginning to write this book, my dad discovered which plantation our family had been enslaved on in Morgantown, Mississippi. And he had been working for years doing genealogical research to try to find out more about where we'd been enslaved, and it was a stunning revelation for us, and we knew immediately we had to get down to Mississippi and to feel the earth that our ancestors had toiled on. And unfortunately, uh the Delta variant of COVID first surged and we had to cancel our trip, and then we bought tickets again, and my dad had a stroke, and we had to cancel the trip again, and then I got COVID, which turned into long COVID, and we had to cancel our trip again. And my brother has a fear of flying, so he was thinking he would not even be able to go, but eventually we all overcame our health challenges, and we we all got down there in the spring of 2023, and you know, I begin the book Teach Truth with the letter that I read aloud at the gravesite. We were fortunate enough to be introduced to a man who was the historian of this very small little town in an unincorporated uh area of Mississippi, and he showed us the specific place where the Lenoir plantation had existed, and we were able to stand next to the gravestone, the last headstone that existed of where our ancestors buried each other. And at that site, I read aloud a letter that was our family's tribute to our ancestors, and so I begin the book with those words, which is a tribute but also a promise to them that I would never lie to children about their experience there, and that I would tell the truth about their experience being enslaved and their beautiful resistance to it.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

I think it's um either Hassan Kwame Jeffries, I think, or Brian Stevenson, the Equal Justice Initiative, who've one of those two. I there's a clip I use of them in class uh talking about the power of place and what was it like being there at the site of that former plantation? As you said, you went there to touch the earth. What was that experience like?

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Yeah, it's it's hard to put into words. It was certainly one of the most moving experiences of my life. Um to be standing there in the heat and humidity and know that there was no refuge for them, that they would have to have worked from sunup to sundown on that very plot of land that we were standing on uh was painful. And it was painful that there was no marker. You know in Germany there are markers all over the country that show where Jewish people were kidnapped and murdered. Um you know, a very important historical testament to a great crime that occurred against Jewish people, the Holocaust. Um you know, there was a genocide perpetrated against African people as well. And the um Atlantic slave trade and the enforcement of slavery in the South is one of the great crimes against humanity, and yet there is no record of it in almost any place that you drive around in Mississippi or in the South. So it was very difficult for us to find where this plantation was, and there's no marker. Um but we eventually uncovered the truth, and so there's certainly a great pain standing there knowing that their story uh has been purposefully erased by this country, and uh that this country has tried to disremember the contributions my ancestors made. Uh, but there was also an incredible elation at having finally found this land and being able to see it with our own eyes and feel it, and being there with my dad and my brother, who we are all the products of an incredible resilience of our family. My great-grandmother Laura Lenoir and my great-grandfat my great-great-grandmother Laura Lenoir and my great-great-grandfather Thomas Lenoir were enslaved there. And you know, uh Thomas was enslaved there until he was uh twenty-one. Laura was enslaved nearby until she was around thirteen. And after emancipation, they were both uh traveling and and met each other um outside of that area, and they actually were able to get some land, and my dad recently found the obituary for my great-great-grandmother, Laura Lenoir, wow, in a in a black newspaper in Mississippi, and the obituary states that she had fifteen children, and all fifteen of her children went to college, and it's just a stunning revelation for us, and we know that everything we have is a product of the incredible spirit of Laura Lenoir, who made sure that her children were going to survive. My great-grandfather, York Alonzo, was one of those children who went to college and he became a teacher, and then he became a principal, and he married a teacher named Ivy Darensburg, and they uh began organizing schools across Louisiana and Mississippi, and they um built numerous schools and programs and provided uh educational opportunities to black children who wouldn't have had it, and being able to connect with that legacy on the land there uh is the greatest gift I'll ever have.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

It's incredible, it's visceral human uh resistance to this erasure that you talk about, um, which your book focuses on a lot. And your book also has a lot of um uh Orwellian language, I guess we could use, right? Uh as you describe the the uh the resistance to truth telling. Uh and and one word you used already was truth crime. What's truth crime?

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Yes. Well, we need to start calling these laws what they are, right? Uh the the uh right wing wants to use euphemistic language to hide uh the fact that they want to lie to children about US history, right? So they want to say that um these laws are um uh about keeping white children from feeling uncomfortable, right? So they they talk about these laws as discomfort laws, but we need to call them what they are.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Wait, but actually, okay, sorry to interrupt you, Jesse, but you know, you brought up Germany, which has leaned into its painful history. Why the why the willingness to be uncomfortable there and the complete resistance to it here?

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Well, I'll I'll say this that actually Germany does have markers up around the country to show the sites of the Holocaust, but uh a lot of people think that those have always existed, and in fact, they weren't put up until the 1980s. And so, you know, it took it took a long time and it took struggle of people to say this needs to be done, and so um we need to learn from that, and we need to build our own struggle here instead of erecting monuments to um Confederate genociders, we should mark the places where the great crimes against humanity occurred uh so that we can learn from that and refuse to allow it to happen again. And and to do that, we need to be honest about the type of history that is being delivered to children instead of calling these discomfort laws uh or anti-CRT laws. We should call them what they are, truth crime laws, which ban discussions of systemic racism, gender oppression, or other critical topics, right? And so truth crime laws aim to criminalize educators who are committed to teaching the truth. And the ultimate goal of the truth crime laws are to make it impossible to commit a truth crime because there's no one there left who learned the truth and therefore no one able to teach the truth. And uh, when you deny students the ability to learn about systemic racism, you deny them the ability to learn about America because America was founded with slavery, right? There's few people that would argue that there wasn't slavery at the beginning of this country, right? So if our country was founded with slavery, how can we not say that systemic racism was part of the founding of this country? Are we saying that slavery wasn't racist, right? This is so absurd. This is so outrageous. Um, and so we have to acknowledge the fact that today in America, almost half of all children that attend the public schools go to a school where their teacher is mandated to lie to them about U.S. history, to say that systemic racism was not part of the founding of this country. And that there's no other language that we should use other than calling that a truth crime law. They're trying to turn teachers into truth criminals for teaching basic truths that the genocide of Native Americans occurred and that the enslavement of Africans occurred.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

And you have so many examples in the book of these laws, the way textbooks obscure. I mean, back to your point about the founding principles of America, one of the examples you use is an Ohio law that states that teachers can only say, or teachers cannot say anything connecting slavery to America's founding principles, because slavery is only a deviation, their word, from America's founding principles, when it was part of America's founding. So it's hard to see how it was a deviation.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Exactly. And you know what? I also trace a long history of these kind of laws in the book. You know, we hear a lot of times today that what Trump is doing is quote unprecedented. And it it's definitely scary, it's definitely fascistic. Um, but I wouldn't call it unprecedented because these types of laws that we have today that are banning the truth, that are banning black history, that are denying black children access to uh their own culture have a long and ugly history in this country. In 1740, the first anti-literacy law was passed banning black people from being able to read and write. And that was as a direct result of the Stono Rebellion. Uh a man named Jemmy led an uprising. An enslaved uh African went plantation to plantation with a banner that read Liberty, exclamation point, collecting enslaved people to fight back. And when the South Carolina militia put down the rebellion, they not only wanted to murder every last one of these rebels, but they wanted to murder the ability of them to ever write that word liberty or even think that word again. And so the anti-literacy laws began passing. Uh, but I what I find um most interesting is that they had to pass the anti-literacy law again and again and again because black people kept breaking the law, because they would sneak off plantations and teach each other clandestinely how to read and write, because they knew that education could lead to liberation. You could forge traveling passes and sneak off. Um, and so black people organized hush harbors and pit schools and uh, you know, refused to submit to these anti-black education laws. During Reconstruction, black people built the public schools. There were not public schools, I would submit, before black people built the public school system. There were common schools in the North, but how public can we call those when many excluded black children? And in this in the South, there wasn't even any semblance of public schools. So even poor white children weren't allowed to go to school. And after the Civil War, black people uh started this idea of public schools that would be free and open to all. And they built these schools, and they were such a threat to white supremacy that the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations burnt down over 600 black schools during Reconstruction, and some black communities had to rebuild those schools two, three times. Right? This is the legacy of the American education system that informs the current struggles. During the civil rights movement, black people built freedom schools, and the Klan again bombed those freedom schools in Mississippi during the Mississippi Freedom Summer, right? Um so I think that we need to understand that the abolitionists that built schools for black children and the black folks that snuck off the plantations, that's the lineage that we come from when we are fighting these. Truth crime laws today that are banning our ability to learn about history. And those who burnt down black schools, well, that's the lineage of people like Christopher Rufo and Donald Trump who want us to lie to children.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yeah, while you were speaking just now, I was thinking about the stone about Stono. Speak about that with my own students, and we read. I mean, there's such power in reading the primary sources of these times. You know, you can just get around so much of the filter. And they students, they're they see right away that the banning of reading and writing that jumps right out of them. And then once they see that, they keep seeing it in everything else. They see it in Douglas. And I'm thinking about Douglas, and I'm thinking about the power of his writing, particularly compared with you point out, I think was the Prager U version of Douglas. This sort of like uh I'll let you describe it, but Prager U has a basically like an animated Douglas.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Unbelievable lesson. Uh it it will shock anybody who knows anything about American history because on this animated series from this right-wing uh quote education website, um they have a cartoon where two white children are watching uh TV and they see Black Lives Matter protests and people calling to abolish the police. So they travel back in time to meet Frederick Douglass to ask him what an abolitionist is, and they go back to the year 1852 um to meet him. And what's incredible about that is that they they put words into Frederick Douglass's mouth that he never said, and they have Frederick Douglass saying that uh America was founded on justice because the founding fathers knew slavery would eventually go away, and um they have him praising the founding fathers, and to have Frederick Douglass doing that, not just any year, but the very year that he delivered one of the most powerful speeches in US history called What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, where he delivers probably the most scathing attack on America that's ever been uttered, where he calls America the most hypocritical country in the world. Uh, you know, the uh country that uh is guilty of the most crimes of any nation in the world. And of course they leave that out of the Prager Uh propaganda for for children.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

That's a propaganda. I mean in the 1852, 1850, after the compromise of 1850, right? That's one of the most stressful, it's probably the most stressful decade for the abolitionist movement. I mean, it's unbelievable. It's almost almost daring you with the choice of that year. The gentrification of history you write about. I love that turn of phrase in textbooks and things like Prayer You. Um, I also feel like, does it kind of feel like colorblindness is like making a comeback? I feel like there's just seems to be this. You bring up the uh the the MLK quote, you know, that quote that loves to get it gets trotted out every February because hey, you know, we're just here to judge people by the content of their character. Okay, that's why and and that unbelievable quote that I I wish I had heard before. Um was it was it a Fox News host who claimed he forgot for a little while Obama was black?

SPEAKER_01 26:05

That was unfortunately, that was an MSNBC host. Oh no. Right? And and I use that quote to point out that both the far right and liberal media um have this overlap of this idea of colorblindness, where they both, you know, it's actually liberals who have have led the way championing this idea that we should build a colorblind society. And then conservatives have jumped on that and said, yeah, we should. We should build a colorblind society, and that means we should not teach anything about black folks. Right? And uh what uh what I do in the book is I say, you know, there's there's important overlaps to see between the ideologies of uh both conservatives and liberals when they when they move into these sort of colorblind narratives. And so instead of just using these terms conservative or liberal to describe uh education policy or views about race, um, a more descriptive term is uncritical race theory, because there are uncritical race theorists um on various parts of the political spectrum, right? People who believe that we should uncritically accept the current racial power structure, and that if you investigate the current racial power structure at all, that makes you racist for talking about race. And um so I believe that another important reason we need to use this term uncritical race theory is because they are charging any teacher who teaches about black history as being a quote critical race theorist, right? And one of the the things they say is wrong with that is that you're imposing your theory onto children, right? That that teachers who teach about racism or black history are imposing a theory of race onto children. And what I want to point out is that that only makes sense if you believe that teaching the status quo, teaching uh the the current racist power structure and uncritically is not a political act, right? And so I want to point out that imposing your theory of race on children that there is no racism is a theory, right? And and they're not getting rid of theory by attacking critical race theory, they're just replacing it with uncritical race theory.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

It's like white history is truth, black history is a theory.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Right. That's basically the level of sophistication of their arguments.

SPEAKER_00 29:09

And they even they use some of they try to flip the script a bit. You know, this um the Civics Alliance has this uh uh I don't know, K-12 Social Studies standards, which incredibly they call American birthright. And but in it they say that a focus on CRT or Black history is try they're trying to erase America's worthy history. So taking that erasure idea and absurdly trying to turn it back on people who want to teach the truth. Uh, it really is Orwellian, as you said.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

It is, it's breathtaking. And the the idea is that if you teach kids any negative aspects of the United States that you're quote erasing the worthy history of our nation, um it is ludicrous, it is anti-intellectual, uh, and it's racist. And we need to be able to understand that they have a theory of race. They just don't want you to name their theory of race, and they don't want you to investigate the origins of the theory of their race, uh, their their concept of race, because it would lead you back to ideas like eugenics that have been uh wholly debunked, um, you know, white supremac ideology that talked about the separate evolution of the races that we know is is not supported by any science. Uh and so they want us to think that their ideas are natural, they're normal, they're objective, when in fact they have uh a theory of race that has been thoroughly discredited.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

And when it comes to what's taught in the classroom, the decisions made, you discuss stakeholders in this book, a lot of different stakeholders. Where do parents fit into this? Parents' rights movement is all the rage, and as you say, well, that'll really only mean some parents when people say parents' rights. And and where do parents fit into how we talk about uh teaching truth or not teaching truth?

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Yeah, you know, as you pointed out, the right has seized on this language of defending parents' rights, and the part they leave out is that they're defending whites white parents and not just white parent rights, but white parents of cis hetero children. And uh they leave out the rights of black parents who have been fighting for a long time, right? Where were was Christopher Rufo and Donald Trump when the black mother in Texas found a textbook that said that slavery uh left out the word slavery and said that Africans were brought here to work uh on plantations and did not say that they were brought here in chains uh as enslaved people, right? Where were the rights of of that black mother to have the truth about uh her son's family uh taught, right? And so black families for a long time have been fighting for honest education in the public schools, and the right wing has been nowhere uh, you know, none of these uncritical race theorists have risen to help support their rights. Um, but I think that parents uh do have rights. I think that families and communities do have rights that are worth uh organizing and defending. And I think the collective right to know your history is a very important one. And uh, you know, the right-wing media like Fox News, they frame this issue as uh the attack on critical race theory and DEI is the product of a scrappy grassroots movement of parents who saw during COVID what their children were learning on the Zoom screen and were horrified that their kids were being shamed by social justice teachers, and they banded together uh to challenge uh you know anti-racist teachers. And the only problem with this narrative is it's a lie. And what actually happened was billionaires were frightened by the 2020 uprising. They saw the largest uprising in U.S. history, according to the New York Times, that said uh, you know, some 20 million people marched. And a lot of it was led by young people, and the young people were leading this movement not only in the streets but in the schools, and they were demanding black studies programs and ethnic studies programs, and they kicked police off campuses in over 50 cities, and the uncritical race theorists were were terrified that there was this sea change in consciousness, and that it wasn't just it wasn't just limited to black children, that it was becoming a mass multiracial movement. And because of that, billionaires invested their money into campaigns to attack anti-racist education. They funded groups like Moms for Liberty and then called it a grassroots group, uh, but really nobody would have ever heard of that organization if it even would have existed without billionaire funding, right? So, in the chapter of my book called The Political Economy of Truth Crime, I describe the various billionaires uh who have contributed to uh this AstroTurf movement. And what we need to do is support the actual grassroots movement, groups like Moms Rising that are organizing for the Teach Truth Day of Action and are fighting against book bands and fighting against curriculum bands, uh, and you know, groups of black moms who have been fighting for generations to have the truth be told.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Yeah, let's let's turn now actually to some solutions, and a lot of what you discuss in the book is feels very grassroots, very organic. You yourself seem like a very grassroots, organic kind of person, having read some of your work and redesigning schools, and I know your work in Seattle, uh, keeping some schools open, and and you cite great examples of teachers um, you know, teaching uh Zen education project material, students starting clubs, and basically saying we want discomfort in our conversations, we want it. So don't try to take it away from us. So is you know, when we look at solutions, as you say, the the right is moneyed. There's a lot of money there, there's a lot of propaganda there, and there's a lot of um avenues and and and media through which to push that message. So is grassroots enough? Will that will that be is that the ultimately the solution?

SPEAKER_01 36:41

Absolutely. It's it always has been as powerful and wealthy as the Confederates were uh in the South. My ancestors helped overthrow the slave ocracy in this country through grassroots organizing uh and and their resistance. You know, unfortunately it's mist taught that black people were the only people in world history that uh did not fight for their own emancipation and were were benevolently freed by an outside force. But what W.E.B. Du Bois reminds us in his uh epic classic book, Black Reconstruction, is that during the Civil War, the North was losing the war, and that it was actually only when uh finally in the middle of the war, Lincoln decided that if the North won the war, that the all the enslaved people would be emancipated. Uh and when that directive came through, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't actually free very many people uh because they were still under the jurisdiction of the Confederacy. But what it did do was give them a reason to fight for the North. And as soon as that occurred, what W. B. Du Bois describes as the largest general strike in U.S. history occurred, and black people put down their tools and fled to the North, and then they joined the Union Army and came back to those very plantations and fought against their enslavers. And it was the infusion of black soldiers that actually won the war for the North. And so black people fought and won our own emancipation. During Reconstruction, we built the public school system and fought and won for again for our own liberation. When they imposed Jim Crow segregation, we fought again uh with the civil rights movement and overturned that. And it's always been grassroots organizing that has had the power to stand up to the wealthiest, most powerful people the world has ever known. And it's gonna be that same force again. If we look at uh the fact that during the McCarthy era, thousands of teachers were fired all over the country uh because of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare, and what brought that era of McCarthyism to an end? What finally was able to wind down the hysteria and paranoia where all you had to do was call somebody a communist and they were fired? Uh, you know, it was the uprising of the black freedom struggle. It was the civil rights movement that finally broke through and showed people you could fight back. You know, the free speech movement at Berkeley College also helped to bring down McCarthyism in the in higher ed. And, you know, it was these sorts of grassroots uh organizing efforts that put an end to the attack on academic freedom and teachers who uh dared to teach about inequality. And so if we learn that history, then we have to see that again, today we're in a similar era as the Red Scare, where uh teachers are being fired for teaching the truth about uh race, gender, and sexuality. You know, I have a friend in Wisconsin named Melissa Temple who was fired because she sent out a tweet on her own time at home after school on a Friday that said she believed her students should be able to sing the song Rainbow Land, a pop song by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton, that does not even mention LGBTQ people, that just says we should all live in a world where we're free to be who we are. And then on Monday she came to work and there was a police officer and an HR representative in the office who escorted her out of the building and she never got to see her first grade students again, and she was fired, right? These are the sorts of McCarthy era stories that have returned with a vengeance. And if we want to put an end to that type of uh you know censorship and attack on anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ plus education, then we have to learn the lessons of what ended the last round of repression, and that was mass organizing efforts. And we're gonna have to build nothing short of a mass uprising the size of the civil rights movement or larger to challenge the power of the Trump administration and all of the corporations that have just fallen in line with his power. And frankly, the all-too common silence of Democratic Party politicians who cower and uh refuse to organize the scale of struggle that's required to stop creeping authoritarianism and fascism. Uh, when Trump refuses to abide by court decisions uh and threatens to arrest judges, we have to see the threat uh as very real. And we have to understand that our schools are not collateral damage on the way uh to rising fascism. They're actually central to the project of how you build fascism. You have to capture the schools so you can teach the children that this is the best our society can achieve, that this is the greatest country on earth and it should its its policies should never be questioned. Um, and that's why teachers are so dangerous to fascist regimes, because when they allow kids to think critically, to question our inequality, to question uh US history, then they allow kids to learn from history, and uh and that can lead to them finding out ideas about how to organize social movements to build a freer society. And that's what scares the uncritical race theorists, and that's why they are trying to ban us from teaching youth uh the history of social movements, because that's what's needed today to fight back.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

I love you're so eloquent, and uh, but you're also practical. And teachers or teacher listening to this, especially one of these states with these divisive concept laws, as you point out, they have teeth. This isn't like these laws aren't necessarily you know right wing platitudes. Uh you know, you're trying so what do you say to those teachers that are that are saying I want to teach this stuff, but honestly, I'm worried. I'm worried about what might happen.

SPEAKER_01 44:04

Yeah, I appreciate that question. You know, I was just meeting with a group of teachers yesterday in Tennessee who were saying, I can't believe that the book The Color Purple by Tony Morrison is banned. This is a classic book that is one of the greatest novels in US history that is gets at some very difficult themes uh that are so important for our society to grapple with race and gender and sexuality. Uh and um these teachers were talking about wanting to organize uh civil disobedience by teaching classic books that have been banned. And they know um that it could come with a ten thousand dollar fine, but they wanted to uh begin to raise the money to do it anyway, uh and have us uh have everyone chip in to pay off the fine. There are very real consequences, you know. In my book, I detailed the story of Amy D'Onofrio in Florida, the first teacher there who was fired for having a Black Lives Matter flag in her classroom. And mind you, the name of the school was Robert E. Lee High School, named after a genocidal maniac, uh, the the general of the Confederacy who led the Confederate army in the most uh murderous war in U.S. history that killed more Americans than all the wars combined. And yet we have a high school named after this white supremacist mass murderer. And so she believed that we needed to have a sign that allowed her black kids to know that this was a safe space in her classroom, and for that she was fired, right? We know that a black principal in Texas, James Whitfield, after George Floyd was killed, sent out an email to his community saying systemic racism is still alive and we need to come together as a community to solve that problem. And for that, he was pushed out of the uh out of his job, right? And so there there certainly are very real consequences, but when teachers come together, when they act collectively, then we stand a chance. And that's why I was thrilled to hear from these teachers in Tennessee who were thinking about this action. And I have the privilege of getting to work with study groups all over the country who are collectively reading the book Teaching for Black Lives, and uh are engaging in resistance every day. And so um these teachers are practicing what Professor Jarvis Givens calls fugitive pedagogy, and this has been a practice all throughout U.S. history of social justice and anti-racist educators, especially of black educators, who have to smuggle the truth about our experience into the classroom. And so these teachers are doing exactly what our ancestors did who snuck off the plantation into pit schools. Uh, they are bringing the truth into the classroom by collectively reading Teaching for Black Lives and then supporting each other to teach those lessons in the classroom. And I would encourage everybody to participate in the fifth annual Teach Truth Day of Action that's coming up on June 7th. We have so many resources for people to participate. If you go to the Zinn Education Project website and you go to under Campaigns to the uh Teach Truth campaign, you will find a tab that allows you to uh order a banned book box and will send you for free uh all these banned books with laminated cards that explain why it was banned and what children miss if they don't get access to that book. And you can set up a pop-up table outside of a library or an independent bookstore or at a farmer's market and uh pass out all the materials we have about these truth crime laws and about uh how people can get involved in in fighting back. And this these are the tools for building a grassroots effort today. Again, the the crucial point is that you're much safer if you do it collectively. And so starting a study group, maybe around my book, Teach Truth, or around Teaching for Black Lives, so that you can find out who in your district or in your school has your back, who is also in to these kinds of efforts, and then through the course of reading and processing and studying, you can begin to plan what kinds of actions you want to take to fight back against these laws.

SPEAKER_00 49:36

Incredible. Yeah, I'll be linking uh the Zen Education stuff in the show notes, along with your excellent book, Teach Truth. Um it's it's a must-read for history teachers out there that give a damn. Um I want to thank you for joining me and uh getting this word out there. Uh I do I do. I wanted to ask you, uh, what do you reckon uh Juneteenth's gonna be like this year?

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Oh wow. Yeah. I mean, isn't it the great irony that the same time Juneteenth becomes a federal holiday, it becomes illegal to teach where this holiday came from and why why it occurs.

SPEAKER_00 50:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:20

But I hope that Juneteenth is not only a celebration of black freedom, but also an eruption of struggle and protest to demand that we be able to teach the truth. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:36

Well, there's so much zero-sum mentality out there on the right right now, you know, that nobody I can't win if someone else is winning. And I really appreciate work like you lifting everybody. Uh, and uh, like I said, I'm gonna I'm gonna hype this book to anybody who will listen because it's excellent and it's and it's important right now. And Jesse, thanks so much for taking the time.

SPEAKER_01 50:58

Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

A huge thanks to Jesse for taking the time to talk, and I can't recommend his book enough. You don't have to be in education to get something out of this book. And uh I highly recommend it to anybody who cares about how students are educated in this country. His points about grassroots actions really resonated, and I encourage anyone interested in this topic to keep your eyes on local government. You know, here in Southern California, there's a town called Huntington Beach. And not that long ago, the city council created this independent, unelected commission that would look through children's books before they were put in the library, essentially taking uh control away from librarians. And as you can guess, they objected to a lot of books that had things to do with race and gender. So currently in Huntington Beach, there's two measures on the ballot in the upcoming local election to basically take away this commission. And uh, I'm hoping that people show up to vote yes for those measures. Uh, and that's the kind of action that you can take right now, keeping your eyes on local government is local government trying to uh institute control over education, over libraries to muzzle black, brown, and queer voices. And huge thanks to Jesse for his eloquent defense of this history and for his eloquent call for grassroots action. Uh, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Uh, check the show notes for links to Jesse's book and lots of other things. Tune in next time on what's the big idea? Stay safe out there, everyone.