History repeats itself. And so editorials repeat themselves.
Last September, we wrote about Tennessee state Rep. Yusuf Hakeem rightfully calling out the state’s GOP legislative leadership for sidelining his bill to provide more Black history instruction in Tennessee schools. Instead, Hakeem’s fellow lawmakers omitted his bill from the agenda of a summer education study committee. After all, they’d already – just a few months before in May – passed a hurry-up surprise bill prohibiting any publicly funded school from teaching “critical race theory.”
In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past year, critical race theory is a college law school premise that has become one of the GOP’s newest dog whistles. The rightwingers claim it promotes division among races, classes and genders. Not only does Tennessee now ban critical race theory teaching in K-12 schools (where it isn’t taught, anyway), it allows the state to yank school funding if a teacher in a school is found to teach it. The draconian law now has teachers afraid to mention anything about race, even to teach history.
Now Hakeem is back with a revised version of his 2021 bill that requires the teaching of Black history in public schools, now focusing only on grades 5-8. With that small beginning, the Chattanooga Democrat believes he has a clearer path to winning approval.
It’s a good choice. Because too many of Tennessee’s white lawmakers didn’t seem to understand the difference between teaching Black history and teaching critical race theory, Hakeem narrowed the focus of his bill to just deal with African American studies.