Teaching Truth: The State of Anti-Racist Education in Washington

As the brunch crowd cleared out of a busy Chinatown-International District café, Jesse Hagopian was just warming up. Decades spent as a classroom teacher and anti-racist organizer showed in his conversation, peppered with buried history and delivered with the passion of a rally leader. 

“Young people are scared to go to school,” he says, describing a climate where students fear immigration raids, teachers self-censor and book bans ripple across the country. “It’s truly terrifying to see.”

Even left-coast Washington’s classrooms are caught between a constitutional commitment to educate every child “without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste or sex,” and the rising national tide of political attacks against anti-racist teaching. While Washington has avoided what Hagopian calls "truth crime laws" — the sweeping book bans and curriculum restrictions that keep teachers from presenting facts about structural racism and oppression in America — he says most Washington students aren’t learning what they need. 

“Education is not just about the grade that you get or the score you get on the test. That’s a vision of schooling that is about labeling and ranking and sorting kids,” he says. “We need a whole different vision of education that’s about empowering them. It’s up to us to make sure that all schools are allowing students to have the difficult conversations about the problems in our society so we can fix it.” 

Curriculum wars 

The nation has seen an explosion in legislation banning DEI efforts in education and restricting classroom discussions of race. In March, President Trump signed an executive order to close the U.S. Department of Education, laying off half of its staff, ostensibly to restore control of education to the states. Another executive order dictates curriculum, banning K–12 schools from teaching critical race theory — an academic framework not widely used in K–12 education that centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions — or “gender ideology,” on penalty of revoked federal funding and criminal prosecution. 

Hagopian follows these developments closely. Formerly a teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle, he directs the Teaching for Black Lives campaign at the Zinn Education Project, edits Rethinking Schools magazine, and organizes community coalitions in Seattle that advocate for education and for Black Lives Matter in Schools. His book “Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education” was published in January. 

“It’s up to us to make sure that all schools are allowing students to have the difficult conversations about the problems in our society so we can fix it.”

“Trump has vowed to defund any school district that allows students to honestly engage in discussions of Black history and systemic racism. That threat has not yet been enacted, but it looms over our schools here in Seattle and across Washington state,” says Hagopian. “He also recently froze billions in funding to the nation’s schools. Some of that money was released, but it shows that our schools here in Washington are subject to the whims of a president who ultimately wants to eliminate public schools and replace them with a privatized system of vouchers and charters.” 

In February, the U.S. Department of Education cut $600 million in grants to educators promoting “divisive ideologies” including “inappropriate and unnecessary topics such as critical race theory; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI); social justice activism; ‘anti-racism’; and instruction on white privilege and white supremacy.” These terms are often conflated and left undefined (Education Week provides an introduction to critical race theory) but for an educator like Hagopian, whose primary concern is quality education, it all comes down to preparing kids for adult life with accurate information. 

Anti-racist education 

“Anti-racist education is about identifying how systemic racism has been foundational to our country, identifying social movements that have challenged systemic racism; and allowing kids to engage in dialogue about systemic racism and the most effective ways to challenge it,” says Hagopian. Although some political factions deny systemic racism, the genocide of Native Americans, enslavement of Africans, and exploitation of immigrant workers in the U.S. are all well-documented facts. 

Most parents don’t want their children to be racist and do want their kids to have the critical thinking skills that are so important to adult success. So how did anti-racist education become so controversial? Hagopian believes that its detractors are being disingenuous. 

“Those who oppose anti-racist education like to say that critical race theory educators are indoctrinating students with their theory of society. They do this to hide their own theory of race that they would rather go unexamined. They want young people in this country to uncritically accept the status quo. We want them to critically examine how race has been constructed historically, and critically analyze how to challenge racism today,” says Hagopian. 

He continues, “The question isn’t ‘are our youth going to discuss racism?’ They’re seeing acts of racism and discussing it every day. The question is, ‘are we going to allow students to have these conversations in a safe space with a teacher that can provide historical context? Or are they going to be abandoned to navigate the racial landscape of this country on their own?’ I believe it’s incumbent upon our education system to prepare kids for the world that they live in, to help them identify the problems in the world and collective solutions to those problems. That means telling the truth about U.S. history and then allowing kids to think critically about what that means and how to address those problems.” 

Although history and social studies are obvious flashpoints, adults whose own education was “color blind” might not see how math class can or should relate to race. But according to Hagopian, anti-racism should pervade the whole curriculum. 

“When they don't see themselves in science and math and art, it’s hard to understand why they would want to invest the time and energy into that class. I think It starts with understanding the contributions that people of color have made to those academic disciplines and then identifying ways that academic discipline can contribute to an anti-racist project.” He gives the example of a colleague whose math students learn percentages by analyzing the city budget. They look at relative spending on social programs and policing and talk about what that means to the community. 

“Their young people are eager to show up to class on time because they know it relates to their lives, and they can use the concepts to help them build a better world,” says Hagopian. Replacing rote memorization and abstract concepts with engaging projects that allow students to see themselves as real-world problem-solvers benefits all children.

“Uncritical race theorists often charge us with wanting to shame white children. And that’s not why any of us got involved in anti-racist education at all,” says Hagopian. “I think what they really fear is that we’re teaching young white kids about John Brown, who gave his life to fight against slavery, about [Kentucky civil rights activist] Anne Braden; about Howard Zinn [Jewish veteran of WWII who wrote “A People’s History of the United States”]. We’re teaching them about white people who stood in solidarity with movements for racial justice and the history of multiracial struggle for justice and democracy. Those are not things that uncritical race theorists really want. They want to maintain the status quo of a very inequitable and systemically racist society. When we teach kids about the power of multiracial solidarity, magic is possible in the classroom and I’ve seen learning just come alive,” says Hagopian. 

The state of anti-racist education in Washington 

In many ways, Washington state is ahead of the curve on anti-racist education. Our state is not one of the 249 jurisdictions that introduced 870 anti-critical race theory measures in the last four years. State Superintendent Chris Reykdal has strongly opposed Trump’s threats to control schools through funding cuts and publicly defied orders to eliminate DEI programs. In Seattle, the state’s largest district, community groups successfully campaigned in 2020 for an Ethnic Studies department and last year blocked the closure of nearly two dozen Seattle schools. Hagopian explains, “School closures have historically been a net loss financially for Seattle public schools because we lose the per pupil funding of kids who leave the district.” 

“The question isn’t ‘are our youth going to discuss racism?’ They’re seeing acts of racism and discussing it every day.”

But Washington is not immune to the kinds of attacks seen elsewhere. Four Washington school districts have anti-critical race theory policies, and one Washington library was nearly closed entirely for shelving books on gender and race. “There was a teacher in the Tri-Cities area who was threatened – somebody sent a threat saying they were going to show up to school and make her leave the classroom,” Hagopian says. 

“One of the most chilling stats is not just that half of students go to schools where it’s illegal to teach the truth, but two-thirds of educators in this country have reported self-censoring around issues of race and gender out of fear of reprisals. Teachers here in Washington state have seen teachers pushed out of the classroom. You don’t have to ban them from teaching the truth because they have seen what could happen to them if they do. We have to counter that climate of fear with a climate of solidarity,” he says. 

Ultimately, though, Hagopian believes that complacency with the status quo is a bigger obstacle than political opposition. 

“The predominant way that students are mis-educated in Washington state is through lies of omission. Long before black history was explicitly banned, it was pushed out of the curriculum in corporate textbooks that never told our full story. The Union Army was losing the Civil War until Black people staged a general strike, and we don’t learn that. We don’t learn that formerly enslaved Black people knew that there was no emancipation without education and so they built public schools across the South. When we learn that the origins [of the education system] are from the Black freedom struggle, we look at this whole project of education differently. It’s not enough to just repeal truth crime laws or book bans. We have to transform education to make it about understanding the true history of this country that is too often hidden and whitewashed,” said Hagopian.