Paul Fanlund of the Capital Times utilized the expertise of UW–Madison’s Gloria Ladson-Billings for a recent op-ed he penned that is headlined, “Racist bogeyman and the ‘limits of liberalism.’”
Ladson-Billings is a professor emerita in the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and the president of the National Academy of Education.
In his column, Fanlund notes a pattern he has observed on the political right: “Those who traffic in racial division gin up outrage and then feign hysteria over one after another bogeyman, most recently that teaching the history of race in America makes white children feel bad.”
A few years back the target of this outrage was the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Fanlund explained, whereas now it is the critical race theory — and in particular, whether it should be taught in schools.
To define critical race theory, Fanlund referenced a recent interview Ladson-Billings gave on National Public Radio, where she explained it as “a series of theoretical propositions that suggest that race and racism are normal, not aberrant, in American life.”
Responding to the worry that teaching about the centrality of racism in American history might “make white kids feel bad,” Ladson Billings told NPR that “the Little Rock Nine, they were feeling bad too,” referring to Black students who integrated a previously all-white Arkansas high school.
“I think about the young woman who integrated the New Orleans schools for us. These brave people were willing to fight against racism in a very direct way, put their own bodies on the line,” she added.
Ladson-Billings said what she is hearing about critical race theory these days “bears no resemblance” to the work she’s dedicated herself to studying for the past 30-plus years.
Fanlund then posed two questions to Ladson-Billings for his column: First, how do she and other Black leaders stay committed and not grow cynical or despondent (as they continue to encounter racial animus and attacks)?
Ladson-Billings responded that she takes the long view. “I am old enough to remember the hate that was spewed at Martin Luther King,” she said. “Now there is practically no major city in the country that does not have a street named for him.”
The same is true for (prominent African-Americans) Malcolm X, Paul Robeson and Muhammad Ali, she added.
“One of the hopes I have for Joe Biden is that he could do stuff that Barack Obama never could,” Ladson-Billing said. “I’m not kidding myself as to why he can do it and Obama could not.”
Fanlund also asked her about white liberals and racial progress.
“I use this phrase with students — the limits of liberalism,” she said. “Most of them (liberals) will express what I think of as good democratic values, but they are only willing to go so far.”
Ladson-Billings pointed to how as president Bill Clinton “felt it politically expedient to support right-leaning positions on welfare and crime” as an example of these limits.
“You get invested in society and there are certain elements you don’t want to lose,” she said. “Everyone is for the most part self-interested. You can only go so far before people start seeing it as an erosion of something they have or have access to. There are those limits that we can’t seem to get past.”
She summed up the attitude as follows: “I’ll do X and Y, but please don’t ask me to do Z.”
To learn more, read the full article at madison.com