Commentary: North Carolina GOP legislators promote ignorance for partisan gain

If social scientists who study inequality agree that white people enjoy more favorable treatment, relative to Black people, in the labor market, schools, the health care system, and the courts, and if this pattern of advantage is well documented by solid research, should a group of non-expert legislators be able to keep this knowledge from students because it might cause discomfort?

Anyone who cares about helping young people accurately understand how the social world works will say “no.” Education inevitably challenges prior beliefs, and confronting new information is always fraught with the potential for discomfort. Moreover, what is taught in schools should be based on real knowledge, arrived at through careful study, and not on the myths one political party would like to promote to advance its interests.

Yet this is what North Carolina Republican legislators are trying to do. Instead of attending to long-running problems of inequitable school funding in the state, these legislators are using schools to pursue a distracting culture war. The distraction, no surprise, is from the economic policies—tax cuts for corporations and the rich, deregulation of big business—that hurt middle- and working-class people.

Yet the damage to education can be very real, as portended by North Carolina House Bill 187, misleadingly titled “Equality in Education.” The bill, now under consideration in the state Senate, was passed by House Republicans (68 to 49) on March 23rd with no Democratic support. One part of the bill forbids public schools from promoting the idea that “particular traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs should be ascribed to a race or sex or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex.”

It’s hard to tell exactly what this vague language would permit and forbid, but wary administrators and teachers might take it to mean that teaching about white privilege is out of bounds. If a bill along these lines were to become law (it would have to survive a likely veto by Governor Cooper), K-12 students in North Carolina will suffer from indoctrination by omission.

Republication legislators are right, however, about one thing: confronting the reality of white privilege can be unsettling, especially when white students believe that anti-Black racism has not benefited them. I saw this discomfort many times over the years when I taught NC State students about inequality in U.S. society.

The students who bristled the most when learning about white privilege were usually white male students from working-class families. These young men disliked the idea that anything had been given to them because they were white. I knew where they were coming from, in part because a generation earlier I was in the same boat and felt the same way.

Yet over the course of a semester, I was able to help these students understand why white privilege can be hard to see, why recognizing white privilege doesn’t mean white people don’t work hard for their achievements, and why guilt is not called for.

White privilege can be hard for white people to see, I said, because we all tend to compare ourselves to others who are like us—our “reference group,” to use the sociological term.

So when white males think about whether they are privileged, they compare themselves to the white males around them and decide that, no, they have no advantages relative to anyone else. What they almost never do is compare themselves to Black men or Black women. Privilege becomes visible only when, through study and conversation, we gain access to the experience of different others.

Of course, the white male students in my classes had worked hard to get to college and make their way toward graduation. Acknowledging white privilege didn’t mean denying this. Rather, the point was that the equal efforts of non-white students often met with lesser rewards because of subtle processes of discrimination.

This point about differential reward for hard work was not made simply as an assertion; we read studies that examined how these processes operate in real life. By the end of the course, most of the skeptical white students were convinced; they came to see how racial inequality is reproduced in ways they hadn’t recognized before.

What helped get the point across was another concept that some right-wing legislators would like to ban: intersectionality, which instructs us to consider how race, class, gender, and sexuality are connected.

When white male students from working-class backgrounds learned that their struggles stemmed from being working class rather than white or male, this made all the difference. Upon grasping this, much of their resistance to seeing racial privilege evaporated.

Likewise, any guilt induced by learning about white privilege tended to fade when white students saw privilege as arising from a system that was in place long before they were born. Not having created the system, there was no point in feeling guilty, they came to see, about how they were caught up in it. Students were then left to wrestle with the problem—given their belief in fairness—of what to do about the unfair system they had become aware of.

Was psychological strain part of the learning process? In some cases it surely was, as students rethought, revised, or discarded their previously unexamined ideas about race, social class, and achievement. I suspect that, at some level, part of the motivation behind right-wing efforts to quash honest teaching about racial inequality is to prevent this kind of liberatory education from happening, as it tends to make people less receptive to divisive culture-war tactics.

Given the history and contemporary reality of racial inequality in the U.S., to keep students from learning about white privilege is to sell short their ability to tolerate discomfort on their way to deeper understandings of the social world. It is to trade the chance to create a better world tomorrow for the sake of partisan political gain today. That not only sells students short, it also undermines the potential of humane education to promote democracy and a more egalitarian society. But perhaps, for defenders of inequality, that’s precisely the point.