Thanks @brennacgray for this thoughtful and important addition to the conversation. Critique is at the heart of what we do. I've certainly been disappointed to see attacks on folks' teaching abilities and ethos in response to their legitimate questions. That can't be it, y'all.
I just want folks to think about the good work that's going to be destroyed in service of short-term Twitter points. Please don't tell people who are legit concerned about a clearly questionable entity to "learn how to teach" when they point out those concerns.
I'm rooting for Sean to succeed. But I have serious concerns about CH, some of them drawn from personal experience. Both of these things are true, and I can hold them both together. If we extend Sean the benefit of the doubt, then the CH criticism has to get that benefit, too.
Senior VP for State and Local Partnerships at the @CollegeBoard, while leading efforts to destroy education on the state level. I don't think that's mission-driven work, y'all.
I find it interesting that the historians who have denounced 1619 have used the one line about protecting slavery being the chief motive of many revolutionaries to characterize the whole thing, which is...much more than that. It's almost like they didn't do all the reading. 1/4
And Rakove's argument is basically "I disagree with NH-J and Woody Holton because reasons," and while there's a historiographical debate to be had here, the fact it's animating such a vehement denunciation of the entire 1619 Project-covering *all* of US history-is telling. 2/4
The 1619 Project refuses to center whites in the story it tells of whatever expansion of freedoms occurred in the US. "The good ones" take a back seat, and scholars who address slavery via a "not all whites" approach can't abide that. The story of freedom is not a white one. 3/4
And the mushy centrists who gave these people oxygen share the blame for this. Your performative "listen to both sides" schtick helped give us new White Citizens' Councils. Great work, everyone.
"Well, speaking as a liberal, maybe if you intolerant antiracists didn't make these parents feel guilty about being white, we wouldn't have had these laws. If you really think about it, maybe it's wokeness that's the bigger threat to our schools"
I was told several months ago, by a prominent self-proclaimed defender of free speech and open debate, that my use of "fascism" to describe the school-board putsches was overwrought.