Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education

In the face of relentless attacks on antiracist education, a much-needed reckoning with the roots of this latest wave of censorship and an urgent call to action to defend education.

In just the last few years, scores of states have introduced or passed legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about structural racism and other forms of oppression. Books have been cut from curricula and pulled from school library shelves. Teachers have been fired and threatened with discipline.

As longtime organizer, writer, and high school teacher Jesse Hagopian argues in Teach Truth, what's at stake is the freedom to tell the truth, the ability of students to understand the world they live in, and the preservation of knowledge systems that expose injustice. By exploring the roots and reach of the censorship movement, Hagopian shows how these efforts to suppress truth serve to uphold racial capitalism and silence the histories that threaten entrenched power.

Yet the struggle for a liberatory education has a long history in the United States, from the days when it was illegal for Black people to be literate, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to Black Lives Matter at School today. Teachers, students, and their allies are already building a movement - in the classroom, on campus, and in the streets - to defend antiracist education.

Jesse Hagopian is a member of the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee and teaches Ethnic Studies at Seattle's Garfield High School. Jesse is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, the co-editor of the book Teaching for Black Lives, and the editor of the book More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing. Jesse is a recipient of the 2013 "Secondary School Teacher of the Year" award and the Special Achievement "Courageous Leadership" award from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences. In 2015, Jesse received the Seattle/King County NAACP Service Award. Jesse serves as the Director of the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award.