A Florida Public School Teacher on Black History

with Charles Love and Donique Rolle

Like it or not, race is a social reality in the US, and children must be taught how to deal with it. We can shelter them from it for a time, but eventually they’re going to want to know why their skin color is different from that of a friend’s, and why it seems to matter to so many people. Most of us probably want to tell them that skin color doesn’t matter, and in one register that answer is correct. But in another, far more complex register, hiding the reality of race’s legacy in the US constitutes, after a certain point, pedagogical malpractice. You can hold off on explaining slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement for a while, but not forever.

We, as the literal adults in the room, have not managed to come to a shared understanding of race’s place in American life, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that our collective disagreements manifest in fierce debates over how African American history is handled in the classroom. My guests this week, education activist Charles Love and Florida public high school teacher Donique Rolle, both think there are ways to teach students about African American history responsibly and accurately without reproducing the rancor and ideological posturing that mark our present moment.

Donique argues that teachers should present facts and leave out the theory. In her experience, students’ natural curiosity will lead them to ask questions about what those facts mean, and then teachers can guide students in forming their own answers through research, analysis, and debate. That approach seems to me a sensible alternative to treating education as indoctrination and to viewing students as political subjects. Outside the schoolroom, the race debate is as heated as it’s been in decades. Do we really want to throw our young people into the fire?

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GLENN LOURY: Now Donique, you are, you said, teaching African American studies in public schools in Orlando, Florida? 

DONIQUE ROLLE: Yes, African American history in public schools. Which is a big difference. And I think that has confused a lot of folks, the difference. Because African American studies is an analytical approach to history and to black experience. But I teach African American history or black history, which is, to me, a night-and-day difference. And I teach ninth graders in public school. 

I just was gonna ask you to say a little bit more about the difference in your mind between African American studies on the one hand and African American history on the other. Would you? 

DONIQUE ROLLE: Like I said, I think it confuses a lot of people when you hear African American studies and African American history. Folks just assume it's the same, and it isn't. So African American studies is more, like I said, an analytical approach to what we call “the black experience,” to history. There are a lot of truths in African American studies, but it's also met with conjecture and a lot of opinion. And I think sometimes with African American studies, the truth and opinion get mixed in together. If you don't know history, if you don't know African American history or black history, you would think the opinions are the truth.

And then when you talk about black history or African American history, it's simply facts. You cannot argue with facts. We know slavery existed. We know that black people were dehumanized during slavery. We know that Jim Crow existed. These are facts. But with African American studies, you can argue about things like reparations or whether or not you think American descendants of slaves deserve reparations. You can argue in African American studies about whether systemic racism exists today. But in African American history, you can't argue whether systemic racism existed during the Jim Crow era, because it did. There are facts, there's proof. There were laws written for black people that held them back. But you can argue today in African American studies whether or not it still exists for black people. So I think that is the difference and many people just combine the two, 

It sounds to me—correct me if I'm wrong—like African American history takes the critical race theory out of African American studies.

DONIQUE ROLLE: Absolutely. In Florida, I keep hearing people say, “We need CRT. Why is Florida getting rid of CRT?” Well first of all, in Florida schools, we teachers don't technically teach CRT. However, you have teachers have that background, and so their pedagogy is in the style of CRT. But if you're teaching facts, if you're teaching straight black history, you don't need CRT. It's not something that's needed, because history cannot be debated. It is facts. It happened. You can't compare the two. I mean, I think you can learn from the past, of course. 

One of my colleagues compared slavery to the NFL. And I'm like, what? I don't understand. And then she made an analogy about how the players are treated. I guess the physical training of the players and how the coach makes so much money. I'm like, but the players make millions. Slaves didn't make anything. That's not even a thing. 

So when people talk about teachers teaching CRT, I think they mean that would be an example of her pedagogy, her style of teaching. But if you're teaching black history, if you're teaching facts, you don't need CRT. You don't need African American studies, because, again, you cannot argue with facts. 

Okay, I'm gonna just try this. A person might say, facts don't speak for themselves. They require to be interpreted and narrated. It's true that facts are facts, but history is not simply a compilation of facts. History is, a person might argue, developing a narrative about the past. It's like telling a story about the past. You can't escape that, no matter who you are, what your political or theoretical disposition might be. Everybody is, one way or another, going to fit those facts around some kind of narrative frame, and they're going to tell a story. 

“America is a great country.” Would you not allow that to be said in your classroom? “African Americans are a marginalized people who have had to fight against the oppression and domination.” These are not exactly facts, although they are true statements about our history, a person could argue. What would you say to that, to the critic who wants to preach about black history, not just list the facts? He wants to get the students oriented in a certain frame of mind. Is that something that you would not want to see in your classroom?

DONIQUE ROLLE: I think you can definitely talk about the marginalization of black people, and I think you can talk about that that existed in slavery, that it existed in Jim Crow, and some may even make the argument that it exists today. I will allow those discussions. I want those discussions to happen, but I would not push that on students. I love debates in my class, so that would be a great debate to have. And I would have debates that were similar to that. But I think the difference is I would allow the students to engage in that, and then they would have to find sources to back up their point. And the person that has the sources and backs up their points, I think that's great. They're applauded. And if we want to do a winner and a person that didn't win, we can do that. But I definitely applaud those discussions. I welcome those discussions. I don't shut down those discussions. Like you mentioned, you can definitely make those claims, but you have to prove it.

CHARLES LOVE: Yeah, I want to briefly just say, that's a really smart way to approach it. You're right, you need to add some context and something around the facts. But the problem is, the difference with those who are claiming CRT, or whatever they want to call it, is that they're purposefully teaching it that way. So they're in their classroom. As they lead from the front of the class, they're saying, these are facts. You and I and many others write and talk about the problems with the 1619 Project. 

Kevin [Kruse]'s essay about traffic. There's an essay called [“How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam”]. Have you ever been in a traffic jam in Atlanta? Did you know that that's tied to slavery? So there is no nuance there. There's explicitly saying everything, every gap that we see today, can be drawn to slavery. And people understand these things, as you say, through story.

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So I'll give you one quick one. My son was six years old in first grade. This is last year. It was MLK Day. They had a lesson at school about MLK. He came home, we're sitting down for dinner, and I asked him to turn the light off, and he said,
”Why? Because I got brown skin and I can be a slave?” He got that from the MLK lesson in first grade. So I would like anyone, any proponent of CRT, 1619, purposeful African American history to explain to me how that lesson benefited him or is a net positive for anyone in America to be learning today.

DONIQUE ROLLE: So this is right. And the issue I have with some of those things is some of my students are middle-class, upper-middle-class. One day, one of the girls asked me, “Ms. Rolle, am I oppressed?” And I just thought, oh, that's interesting that she asked me that. And I said, “Why do you ask me that?” This was a couple years ago, actually, and it was when the George Floyd situation happened and everyone was saying, “Black people are oppressed. We need to do something about the systemic racism that's happening.” Her mom's a doctor. Very Cosby Show situation happening with her. Her dad was an an engineer, and she just assumed she was oppressed because she was black. Tamika Mallory and all those people told her she was oppressed. So she asked me, and then I said, “Well, what do you think?” And then I gave her an example of what oppression looked like, taking her back to things that we've studied. And then I said, “Well, what do you think?”

And then she was like, “Ah, I don't feel like I am.” But you can tell she was very torn, because she was told that she was. You have lessons like that happening in schools. And then you have the media telling them one thing as well when their life does not depict what other people are saying to them.

GLENN LOURY: Okay, excuse me for saying this, but it sounds like exactly what I would expect to hear on Fox News, critiquing critical race theory as an indoctrination of our young people in the public schools, and we have to get control of that. I'm going to give you now, Charles and Donique, the opportunity to disassociate yourselves, if you would like to, from the label of being black conservatives as far as education of our young people is concerned.

CHARLES LOVE: Man, it's funny, as much as I write and speak about how I try to maintain a distance from a political standpoint. But once you're giving me a chance to disassociate myself from conservatism, from a standpoint about what's being done in education, I don't think I can. I'm gonna have to own that and just take the arrows that may come, because I've seen enough of what the alternative can do. I won't do that.

I think that In many cases there is—I know this is another thing that'll get you in trouble—but everything now is subjective, and however you feel, it's about what you feel and your truth. I mean, there are some truths. And I think what Donique just explained is a perfect example of someone who's living a totally different life from what they're being told life is like. But because they're told that, [the student] think[s], “They wouldn't make this stuff up. It's in the media. It's people I respect. It's my teacher. Even though I don't feel it, it must be true. So I must augment my reality a bit to fit the narrative that's being told about me.”

One of the things that I will say that's not left or right-specific: The biggest problem with how Black America is portrayed is that, they come from a different angle, but I find far too many left and right come from an assumption of blacks in this negative light. So someone on the left will say, “Oh, we have to help these poor black people, because they're all uneducated, poor, and in prison.” And someone on the right will say, “Yes, they're uneducated, poor, and in prison, but part of it has to be some agency. They have to pull the boots up and they have to put some work in and they have to own some of their stature and some of the work that needs to be done to get them out of that.”

All that may be true, but we're ignoring the fact that most of us don't live [like that]. So I'm screaming, saying, “Hey, most of us aren't in that stereotypical box that you're putting us in” You say “crime.” Crime is bad. There is obviously a disproportionate number of blacks committing crime. But violent crime still two-and-a-half percent. So I like to scream, “We are the 97 percent!” What about all the rest of us—rich, poor, middle-class—who are black, who aren't committing violent crimes? Either way it goes, there's a perception that that's what black life is like. And I don't know any black people that say, “I would trade that in to be white, to be other, to be whatever.” So I think that's part of the problem, too. While I'm maintaining my conservatism, I will argue that there is a problem with how blacks are depicted.

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