Ross Douthat: What Progressives Want, and What Conservatives Are Fighting

The debate over how American schools should teach about race and racial history has reached a curious juncture, in which it’s becoming hard to tell what the argument is about.

On the one hand you have conservative state lawmakers taking aim at progressive ideas with scattershot legislation, whose target depends on which bill you read and how you interpret vague or sweeping language.

On the other you have progressives, until recently breathing the sweet air of revolution, suddenly denying that they are interested in anything radical at all. In particular, after conservatives began using “critical race theory” as an umbrella term for educational strategies they oppose, progressives began insisting that C.R.T. is either academic and irrelevant (just high-level graduate school stuff) or anodyne and uncontroversial (just a way of saying we should teach kids about slavery and racism).

So let’s try to give the debate a little bit more specificity. What is the new progressive agenda, and which parts have led to backlash? There are two answers, related but distinct, so this will be the first of two columns.

One answer is that progressives want to change the way schools teach American history. They want to finally exorcise the ghost of Lost Cause historiography, the romanticization of the Confederacy that still haunts textbooks in some corners of the South. Then they want to broaden the narrative of race beyond the Civil War and the civil rights era, recovering stories of African-American resistance under slavery and the history of racial subjugation from the 1870s onward, giving events like the Tulsa Massacre a special prominence.

This goal has been part of the new racial progressivism from the start: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s famous 2014 Atlantic essay on reparations, which reopened some of these debates, was as focused on the neglected history of Jim Crow as on any specific policy proposal.