Black Resistance in Textbooks: An Analysis of Black Resistance in American History Textbooks in North Carolina
Authors: Robinson Jamya 
Published: June 2022

On June 24, 2021, the Republican House Rep. of Indiana, Jim Banks, proclaimed, "We are in a culture war, and we are winning,” in a memo to the Republican Study Committee, the most prominent conservative caucus in Congress (Zanona 2021). In this memo, Banks calls his fellow Republicans to enact legislation prohibiting any discourse on race and racism in public schools that is not shrouded in false notions of colorblindness and post-racism. At least 28 states have denounced critical race (CRT) in classrooms and passed legislation primarily banning any "discussion, training, and orientation that the U.S. is inherently racist as well as any discussions about conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression" (Ray and Gibbons 2021).The Anti-CRT movement is a response to the recent emergence of anti-racist programs, literature, movements, and organizations including the 1619 project and the Black Lives Matter Movement in addition to more intimate and interpersonal conversations, aimed at dismantling structural racism as its existence in U.S. institutions, organizations, and industries. All strategies represent a different approach to resisting racism and inequality as a societal norm that is embedded into the culture and structure of U.S. society. This era is a part of a long history of resistance, especially among Black Americans to end cycles of inequality and racism in the United States. I aim to explore how this history of Black resistance is depicted in American history textbooks even in the face of state-sanctioned knowledge and schooling. This study derives from an interest in understanding how we come to learn about resistance and liberation and a general desire to understand the role of education in dismantling structures of power and ending cycles of oppression. To understand the persistence of inequality in a society whose "economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races", as explained by Eduardo Bonilla Silva, I ground this study in critical race theory mainly in an educational context because it asserts that despite school desegregation and the inclusion of Black history in mainstream textbooks, school inequality along racial lines still exists (Bonnilla Silva 2015; Crenshaw 2011; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Tate, 1997). I focus this study on schools as sites for ideological production because of the level of in-depth socialization and time spent in school during a person's average life span. During this period, students use books, worksheets, etc. to learn foundational knowledge and concepts as the formal curriculum requires. However, nested in this formal curriculum is a "hidden curriculum" that transmits implicit and explicit ideas and images about race; these depictions significantly impact students' racial attitudes and their understanding of their nation's history, racial groups, and racial hierarchies (Griffin and Bollen 2009). Because of this, I position schools as racialized organizations that produce and reproduce white cultural norms by oversimplifying or censoring the historical narrative in textbooks. I argue that the formal and hidden curriculum exemplifies the principle that whiteness is the credential. In Victor Ray's piece, A Theory of Racialized Organizations, he argues that whiteness as a credential is the process of "legitimizing hierarchies and expanding White agency" is a key component of racialized organizations, thus reinforcing racial ideologies in the organization but also in society as a whole (Ray 2019). Prior research has criticized textbooks for their Eurocentric, one-dimensional, or problematic historical narrative of ethnic and racial minorities and other marginalized communities in the United States (Brown and Brown 2010; Commeyras and Alvermann 1994; Loewen 2007; Meyer, Bromley, and Ramirez 2010; Morning 2008; Pearce and Lee 2021; Roberts 2013; Rosalee A. Clawson, Elizabeth R. Ke 2000; Weiner n.d). As a result, I intend to extend the Brown and Brown study of resistance in textbooks to identify which types of Black resistance are being highlighted in American history textbooks and add the literature on resistance and education in the study of sociology to highlight the role of schools as perpetrators of racial ideology and acknowledge the importance of public demonstrations like the March on Selma and everyday covert forms of resistance such as the Natural Hair Movement as strategies to dismantle the racial hierarchy.