Since Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, made CRT a cause célèbre in mid-2020, scholars like Pargas and Professor Trevor Burnard, Wilberforce professor of slavery and emancipation at the University of Hull in England, have looked upon the debate about CRT that has roiled America with a mixture of bemusement and horror. Recently, the Florida Department of Education rejected 43% of the mathematics textbooks submitted to it because they offended the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, used “social emotional learning” pedagogy, and-or contained CRT or “social justice” topics.Ĭoncerned that the word “slavery” discomforts the state’s white students, the Texas State Board of Education is considering replacing it with the phrase “involuntary relocation”. The effect on textbook writing, a lucrative sideline for many professors, is already clear. ![]() Given the peremptory nature of Texas’ proposed law, it is likely that professors will shy away from certain research projects, lest even a whiff of CRT negatively affects their tenure reviews. The long lead times in scholarly publication mean that it is not yet possible to determine the impact of these laws on books and articles. Dozens of other states have outlawed teaching CRT in their schools, colleges and universities. Texas too outlawed teaching CRT in universities and will soon bring in legislation that defines the teaching of CRT as a cause allowing for the dismissal of tenured professors. In an attempt to halt the teaching of CRT in universities, Florida now requires its universities to survey students and professors on the political tenor of classes and declare their political beliefs. Twelfth-grade government and economics teacher Tatiana Ahlbum told the Tampa Bay Times that the trainers wanted the teachers to think that since the vast majority of slaves were outside America, slavery in America was “less bad”.ĭeveloped following the passage of the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act”, Florida’s curriculum is Critical Race Theory (CRT) free. Tweet The slide saying that “less than 4% of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was in Colonial America” at Florida’s 2022 Summer Civics Professional Development course could have been used in a lecture given by Damian A Pargas, professor of the history and culture of North America at Leiden University in the Netherlands and director of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg in the Netherlands.įor him and the other scholars who study slavery and race, and are based outside the United States, the 4% figure (or 5% that historian Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University cites) demonstrates the need for their project: the study of slavery, enslavement, ‘unfreedom’, the European slave trade and race outside the US.įor Florida’s teacher trainers, the fact that 96% of the men, women and children forcibly taken from Africa were held in bondage outside the American colonies – for example, in Jamaica, Surinam (today’s Suriname), Brazil and Guadeloupe – leads to a startlingly different conclusion.
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