“Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival,” Donald Trump railed at a rally in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. “We have no choice, the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down — and they must do this — lay down their very lives to defend their country.”
This is more than political theater — it’s a clarion call to enforce, by any means necessary, what can only be called “post-truth schooling,” a system where ideological conformity replace inquiry and objective truth as the foundation of education.
Trump has made his second-term plans for post-truth schooling clear: He vows to cut federal funding to schools that require vaccinations or that engage in discussions on topics such as race, gender and sexuality. He seeks to drive out any educator from the profession who teaches these issues by creating “a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values.” Trump described his plan to control college accreditation as his “secret weapon” against critical race theory (CRT), and pledged to tax, fine and sue “excessively large private university endowments” to collect “billions of dollars.”
We live in an era of post-truth schooling, where historical realities have been outlawed and young people are being trained to accept that those who present honest accounts of the past should be punished. Nearly half of all children in the U.S. public school system are subject to laws requiring teachers to deny the reality of systemic racism. Florida’s official state curriculum declares slavery was of “personal benefit” to Black people. The state even threatens teachers with prison for harboring banned books. It has also banned AP African American History.
These laws aren’t limited to “red states”; in California alone, these policies that ban teaching about systemic racism impact around 110,000 students at the local school district level. The American Library Association reported record censorship across the U.S., with over 4,200 book titles targeted for banning in 2023. Many educators have received death threats and scores have been fired or pushed out for teaching about racism or gender identity. Fear of retribution has led two-thirds of teachers to self-censor on topics such as race, gender and sexuality.
While dubious debates over CRT are ubiquitous in today’s political discourse, the real threat to education is uncritical race theory — the de facto philosophy underpinning post-truth schooling. Uncritical race theory (URT) is the term I have developed to describe systems of belief that deny or minimize the reality of systemic racism, ultimately reinforcing existing racial hierarchies of power. URT takes different forms: denying racism’s existence outright; reframing it as an affliction suffered primarily by white people; or discarding systemic analysis in favor of simplistic narratives of individual bias. Often embraced by both liberals and conservatives, URT suggests that if individuals would simply stop acknowledging race and adopt a “colorblind” approach, racism would disappear —rendering anti-racist education and efforts to dismantle institutional racism unnecessary or harmful.
To fully grasp URT, we must look at its implementation. The right-wing Civics Alliance’s “American Birthright” curriculum, funded by deep-pocketed ideologues, exemplifies how URT obscures history by weaving a gilded veil over the past to mask uncomfortable truths. The American Birthright social studies standards state: “Some educators are so caught up in pedagogical ‘theory’ that they have forgotten that facts come first. Some activists in our schools … are so antagonistic toward our culture, without recognizing what they owe to it, that they seek to erase our worthy history of liberty from the curriculum.” The uncritical race theorists at the Civics Alliance want to train youth to see the U.S.’s “worthy history of liberty” as the only natural and objective way to view history, while dismissing any critiques of racism as “political” or merely “theoretical” — ironically only substituting their own political theory for the critical perspectives they reject.
Uncritical race theorists demand a sanitized telling of history where the United States was delivered by the stork — and they would prefer students don’t look any further into how the country was made, lest it offend delicate sensibilities; after all, many of the post-truth schooling laws explicitly ban teaching anything that may cause “discomfort.” In the same breath that uncritical race theorists use to decry cancel culture, they call for the canceling of any book or educator — without even blushing — that diverges from the orthodoxy of American exceptionalism.
Nearly half of all children in the U.S. public school system are subject to laws requiring teachers to deny the reality of systemic racism.
Trump’s education agenda, in line with Project 2025 — a policy blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups to reshape education policies and federal governance — seeks to cement these distortions and limit what students can learn about the U.S.’s past.
During a June 2024 speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Trump dismissed concerns about George Washington enslaving Black people by claiming, “You know, they thought he had slaves. Actually, I think he probably didn’t.”
Therein lies the essence of URT: a calculated farce that prefers comforting delusions over the cotton-picking truth that George Washington “owned” 123 enslaved Black people, adding 153 to the household through his marriage to Martha. For Trump and his acolytes, dishonesty about U.S. history is essential, because if students understood the country’s foundation in genocide and enslavement, they might question today’s unequal distribution of resources and power.
As a teacher of 20 years, I’ve guided my students in examining the country not only from Washington’s perspective but also that of Ona Judge, an enslaved Black woman who bravely escaped his labor camp. I’ve always encouraged my students to think critically — to question everything, including me and their other teachers — and to grapple with the role of race in U.S. history as part of that inquiry.
At stake is not merely the lens through which we view our past, but the moral and intellectual foundation of the society we aspire to create. Post-truth schooling, fueled by uncritical race theory, aims to dull the capacity of young people to think critically and challenge systemic inequality. For example, in the foreword to Project 2025, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation calls for “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “sexual orientation and gender identity.” This memory-hole policy supports one of uncritical race theorist’s primary goals: to make teaching the truth about systemic racism and oppression impossible because there will be no one left who has learned it — and therefore no one will remain to teach it.
Fortunately, resistance to this dystopian vision is springing up already. Parents, caregivers, educators and students who still believe in critical thinking are empowering young people to ask bold questions and imagine a liberated future. Many thousands of educators are defying bans on honest education by practicing what Jarvis Givens has called “fugitive pedagogy” — teaching the truth about Black history. June 7 will mark the fifth annual National Teach Truth Day of Action, where hundreds of educators, students and parents will rally around the country to oppose post-truth schooling and advocate for the teaching of honest accounts of history. In addition, Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, an educator in Washington, D.C. underscored the urgency of this fight when she signed the Zinn Education Project’s pledge to teach the truth, stating: “The road to freedom hinges on the youth knowing the raw and rugged truth about the systemic ills of this country. Through truth, our young people can imagine and fight for a new world where we are ALL free.”
Trump’s campaign of lies during his first run contributed to the Oxford Dictionary declaring “post-truth” its Word of the Year in 2016. In 2025, let’s work to ensure that “resistance” — not “post-truth schooling” — becomes the defining term of our era.
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