Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

Teaching White Supremacy reveals in great detail the battle over historical memory in public schools and how the white elite has devoted extraordinary resources to perpetuating racist ideas in each generation through the K-12 curriculum. As Yacovone notes, in 1932 the NAACP warned that public schools are a “breeding ground for bigotry and prejudice” and “textbooks are often germ carriers of the most vicious [anti-Black] propaganda.”

Yacovone documents the timeworn playbook guiding contemporary legislators in their campaign to censor teaching truthfully about racism and other forms of oppression in U.S. history.

Just as important, Yacovone’s book should be read for the scholarship and organizing by African Americans throughout the 19th and 20th century to teach against white supremacy and with a vision for a more just society. Those stories of resistance permeate the book and offer strategies and inspiration for those defending the right to teach outside the textbook today.

ISBN: 9780593316634 | Pantheon Books