Sitting Around Grandma’s Table: Scholars Discuss the State of Education

Personal Reflexive Statement

This interview brings scholars together to discuss recent attacks on the education system and to share thoughts on activism and justice. It’s a frank conversation that engages in complexities around conservative ideologies and strategies for change. All the participants, Natasha Warikoo, Dave Stovall, and Victor Ray, deeply care about social change, and I am grateful to them for offering their analyses to help navigate this historical moment.

I also owe the title of this article to Dr. Dave Stovall, who mentioned it during our conversation. It perfectly encapsulates this article, not as an interview, but closer to a conversation with kin. The title is reminiscent of experiences when we were young and sitting, listening, learning – a kind of orature and communication by which wisdom is passed down generation to generation, often around grandma’s table. Learning does not happen solely within designated social institutions, and I am happy to share this conversation full of wisdom with you.

Opening: Been Here Before

STRONG: I want to begin this conversation with the concerted movement to roll back rights, the violent and racist attacks on our students and colleagues, and the uncertainty about the future of higher education. How can we situate today’s backlash using a historical lens?

The theme that came across first is to understand the moment that we are in. Stovall started his answer to the question by saying: “We’ve been here before, right?”

STOVALL: We’ve seen this in particular iterations. This is not so different from the anti-war protests of 55 years ago. This is not so different from earlier efforts to organize around socialism, in the thirties and forties. Anytime there's been some major shift in public consciousness, there's always going to be backlash from conservative power, right?

Stovall emphasized that conservatives historically targeted areas that they think they can win.

STOVALL: This thing around education, it’s always been front [and center] in the United States and now this battle around how we think about what is included/excluded is under the false pretense of things like parental rights, grooming, or wokeism. Or whatever bullshit that DeSantis can think of.

WARIKOO: I remember recently at a conference Randall Kennedy saying that any time there has been any small progress in terms of racial equity, there has been a backlash, this claim of “reverse racism”. He said that even when the discussion of emancipation began among Whites, there were some saying, “Well, this is actually an attack on White people.”

Ray brought in the topic of interest convergence to help explain this phenomenon.

RAY: You know, I finished my book on critical race theory, and I was like, why is this happening right now? And I turned to Derrick Bell’s notion of interest convergence to think through the current moment. One of the things that Derrick Bell said about interest convergence was that White folks knew for decades before Brown v. Board that segregation was immoral. The immorality of segregation was part of the point. But what actually convinced White people to get rid of state sponsored segregation, was not just the Civil Rights Movement, but it was fear of Cold War propaganda undermining the US position globally.

And so, I thought about who Christopher Rufo and DeSantis are looking to now. They’re not afraid of the Soviet Union and the communist threat. They’re looking to White Christian nationalist movements in Hungary, and authoritarians in Russia and Poland.

So, I think that we are in a period of what Derrick Bell would call interest divergence in which some White folks are trying to force diverging interests, right? They're trying to force us apart, and they don't have the kind of international check on their power that the Cold War provided for conservatives in the US in the past.

Ray continued with connections to Leah Gordon’s book From Power to Prejudice.

Gordon’s book looks at the suppression of ideas about structural racism during the McCarthy era. One of the things that's super interesting about the book is that she argues that McCarthyism didn't just attack communists or socialists, but it also suppressed race scholars who had a structural analysis that might not have been socialists but still looked at racism as structural. She says that McCarthyism led to the mid-century rise of individual ideas of prejudice and racism that became dominant across the social sciences. Many of us are still fighting against these individualist notions of racism.

When you look at folks like Rufo or DeSantis, they will admit there’s individual racism out there. And they'll admit there's individual racists. And they’ll say: “We are not ‘that.’ We condemn that.” And then they're passing laws that ensure structural racism continues while banning or outlawing scholarship and ideas that examine structural racism. My worry is about the suppression of ideas about structural racism. We've seen this happen in the past with reactionary movements, and current reactionary movements are building on this history.

One and the Same

STRONG: There are many simultaneous reactionary movements happening in K-12 and higher education at this moment. How do you see the connections among policies/practices to stop conversations on “critical race theory,” gender, and sexuality across K-12 and higher ed?

The conversation highlighted how all these reactionary movements and the attack on progressive policies are one and the same.

STOVALL: I think they are one and the same in terms of the intent, right? They'll look a little different in terms of what will be banned, but it's all one and the same.

This has always been the attack space, right? They couldn’t do it as well [in the past] because of the Vietnam protests, and the Black freedom movement in the 60s. They wanted to revisit it in the 80s – and remember the 80s allowed that financial downturn for poor folks because it's important, that’s where you see this split. There’s a financial downturn for poor folks, but now the rich get exorbitantly richer. So now when you think about that, what they wanted to happen in schoolhouses was to say, well, look, these can no longer be the bastions of what they consider to be liberal rhetoric, right?

This rhetoric around the US hangs issues and concerns, and even within it, because I think it's important to name liberals too, right? Because liberals have a belief of bad people, good systems, right? Whereas more radical thought says, bad systems, and people engaging in those bad systems, and now we get what we get because of that bad and problematic system.

So, this attack on K-12 and higher ed, I think we should always consider to be one and the same. The rhetoric is the same as far as what they want to erase and the idea of American exceptionalism.

Warikoo agrees, emphasizes the defunding of higher education.

WARIKOO: There has been this really troubling move where education has become the dominant vehicle for the Right’s political agenda in a way that is so much bigger than in the past. And it takes all these different forms. These are all related. The discrediting of higher education allows for the justification of the defunding of public higher education. Defunding has been going on for the last four decades. But this sort of justifies it…they’ve latched onto these fears that many conservative Americans have and use these fears that these parents have to really push against a racial justice agenda. Using this fear of family influence to push out gender education. Fear of children’s emotional health and well-being to stop the discussion of the history of racism in this country. Even fears of Asian Americans about discrimination in college admissions and using that to push an anti-affirmative action agenda. There are all these ways that fear gets used. And then there’s a pivot! You fear Asian American discrimination, so we’ll end affirmative action. And there’s no connection there! People don’t see this warped logic. But it’s very powerful. Parents, if they care about anything, no matter what their political identity, or whatever their level of education, care about their kids’ education. I think that’s why education has become so powerful politically. I think it’s a particularly stark moment for education.

RAY: Attacks on education undermine the ability for folks to get independently verifiable knowledge outside of the rightwing frames that reactionaries control.

Their goal is to undermine the scientific consensus about the reality of structural racism. And what they're doing more broadly right now is undermining empirically verifiable information and making it harder for people to understand the world around them, which supports a reactionary political project.

What’s the Justice Condition

STRONG: Can you discuss how sociologists can work toward integration and harness the “educative power of sociology,” given the challenges of this particular political moment? You might reflect on the specific sociopolitical, institutional, or personal and professional context in which you work.

STOVALL: When I saw that question Myron, I was a little confused by it. You know, a lot of times when you see terms like integration, we're not talking about a kind of harmonious relationship, right? It’s still out of the maintenance of a power structure - to Victor’s earlier point around convergence. You know, mainstream White society only moves towards racial justice to the extent that it stays in power, right?

So now where are the spaces where people are asking questions of their conditions and looking to change that, right? What is the justice condition that has been determined by people who have longitudinally experienced the injustice? Now, to that end, how are we determining injustice?

How do we analyze that structurally? And then what do we now say around those structural concerns and now thinking about what it means to actually engage yourself in very plain terms? To see it not as an integration issue, but an issue of a justice condition.

How are we now working with others to determine that justice condition and then working to build it right now? That’s a question that a lot of academics are not trying to mess with, right? So like, let me stay in my little cubicle. Stop fucking with me. Right?

But I think it’s really important at this moment. We are being reminded: the roosting chickens are telling us we have not paid attention to the conditions of people on the ground, because now we are sharing the same space. Your PhD and your tenure will not save you. You are in this boat. You have to get it together and your best bet is to work with those folks on the ground who are experiencing that injustice.

WARIKOO: Yeah, I really appreciate that reframing, David, of, you know, let's focus on what is the justice condition. What does that look like, and how do we have a shared understanding of that and then work towards that?

I think most sociologists know that as a field we do a much better job of studying problems. You know what doesn't work in society and we do a terrible job figuring out solutions.

What can we do?

What small steps can we take?

What needs to happen?

You know, I think studying positive change is one way to look at that. How, when, and why does social change and justice, the justice condition, come about? I think we need a renewed attention to what is the educative power of sociology as Prudence Carter talked about in her ASA 2023 presidential address. What does that look like?

I think it's so important, like here at Tufts, almost all our sociology majors, they co-major with civic studies, which is all about social change. And I think it’s because they're like, “Yeah, we get it. We want to understand all these issues in a way that sociology can really teach us, but then we want to figure out: what do I do?” I think that’s really important, and I feel like we should be doing that in sociology. They shouldn't have to go to a different department.

This is not a knock on my department at all. This is the field, right?

I really appreciate Myron you talking about teaching, because I think it’s so much a part of what we do, and it’s a way that we really have impact. Teaching students to think, to use data to answer questions. I think that is really powerful. What does that look like in terms of our role as people in the world?

We have to remember our humanity. We live in this world together.

What are we going to do?

But I also see lots of different models. I think it’s incredibly powerful to highlight the different ways that people are trying to have an impact. In a recent Sociology of Education forum, Mary Pattillo talked about how she pushed for a diversity-related course requirement at Northwestern. Eve Ewing talked about creative ways of doing sociology. You can see sociology in her comics and her work on community organizing as well. And there’s work on government issues; for instance, the student loan forgiveness work that Dominique Baker talked about. Nancy Lopez talking about her work with the census. Or, partnerships with school districts like Ruth Lopez-Turley has done so well in Houston. Also, people who do more public writing and speaking to media. There’s so many different ways to do this. I think it's really important to figure out as individuals, what's the role that we're going to play?

Ray continues this line of thought by discussing the myriad ways to get involved.

RAY: There’s a ton of problems in the world. Get together with a group of like-minded people and organize and do the things that you think will make the world better. And, you know, a lot of them are going to fail. A lot of them are going to feel like maybe this wasn't the right thing, but just keep doing them.

Now, I want to go back to the teaching and the education for a second because it is a big part of our job. The majority of us take teaching very seriously, and it is the most interaction with a public that most professors will have during their career. I want us to think seriously about the fact that the Right would not be attacking teaching if it wasn't effective and if they didn't understand its power.

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020…I had been teaching for about 8 years. I had been teaching classes on race and ethnicity, and after Floyd’s murder the students came into those classes hungry, in a way that felt different. Students really wanted to understand what was going on. The Right knew that, and they started attacking classes like mine.

We have the ability to shape how people think in a very deep and profound and empirically correct way. We have the evidence in a way that folks claim racism is an individual error don’t. I say this because we don't have to lie about reality like Rufo does. They are literally, in many cases, outright lying, and we’re not lying.

Our work is peer reviewed. You could go interview the same people we interviewed. Go do the same ethnographies we've done, and you're going to find the same thing that we have. Our work is verifiable.

Funding Inequality

Conversation shifts to education in HBCUs and how some Republicans have shown support for HBCUs instead of proposals for free community colleges.

STOVALL: I’ve been reading this book that's about to come out. It talks about HBCUs, and it supports James Anderson’s stuff around the educational facts in the South, when he talks about the ways in which HBCUs were created. I think when we talk about teaching - back to the earlier question - it's really important to present to students the ways to actually make and interrogate layered phenomena. So, when you talk about HBCUs, it’s really important to know they were constructed as substandard institutions. The success rate that they have was in spite of the Morrill Act that created them. So, you have a contradiction.

This thing around those Republicans and the Morrill Act, ironically, was a huge piece of the Republican Party to create land grant institutions. This is an old argument. Scalia (Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) broke this down. Scalia said you might want to think about supporting those students at your Harvards, Princetons Yales, and now put that money into HBCUs. That's the old federalism argument. Now the contradiction comes up, and it’s a heavy one. I think we have to really start to interrogate this.

To this day, if you think about folks who have PHDs in education, the Black folks who have a PhD in education, 40 percent of them graduated from an HBCU. So, you can think about that type of success rate, right? But now when we talk about how these schools have categorically and systemically been underfunded, the argument that folks are making is - we got this thing with HBCUS, let’s continue to underfund it and then say: “Hey, we seeing y’all didn’t jump on this. We’re the party of opportunity, but you got to take it when we give it.” You have to think about those layers and what it means for people, long term.

RAY: So last week the Biden administration released a letter that said - I'm pulling from an article in The Atlantic here - that over the past 30 years, states have underfunded HBCUs, land-grant HBCUs, by hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, in some cases. They cite Tennessee State: if it had been given money on parity, it would have 2.1 billion in additional state funds. So this argument that we already have HBCUs, so we don't need to fund community colleges doesn’t make sense because HBCUs are underfunded.

So, I agree with David that community colleges and HBCUs have done a ton in spite of the underfunding. They are overperforming relative to colleges that got billions more than them over however many years. I write about this in my work. They are structurally designed to enforce educational inequality in terms of a lack of monetary parity for education. I think it's important to keep both those things in mind.

WARIKOO: I want to point out a resource on this question. Adam Harris’s book The State Must Provide really goes through the history of HBCUs: the funding, the differentiation, and the commitment to racial segregation from these states over and over and over again. And what they did to maintain segregated higher education.

I also think community colleges also do amazing things. When you look at the per pupil spending and you look at the social mobility that happens, it is so different from many of the very well-off private colleges.

Again, it’s the same thing with the HBCUs - to recognize the systematic defunding of our community colleges and what they do. They are amazing in terms of student experiences and what they are able to do – and imagine what they would be able to do with adequate resources.

RAY: I want to shout out the community college I started at: Borough of Manhattan Community College. Also, The Atlantic article I was referring to was by Adam Harris.

Partner With the Ground

STRONG: What role, if any, do you think academic organizations should or can play in responding to the backlash?

STOVALL: I think information sharing is key. And to Natasha’s point, this idea around how to engage with resources. One thing I always appreciate about sociologists is that they put the methods in the back of the book. That’s a general practice – to show that you actually did things.

Academics need to pay more attention to the ground, right? The ground is where the movement happens. What those organizations should be asking is: what is our responsibility to what's happening on the ground? How are we supportive, collectively, of a larger justice condition, although be it unpopular?

I’ll give you an example of this right now. American Studies Association, Critical Ethnic Studies [4 years ago] and the American Anthropological Association [just recently], they just joined the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign and when I saw that, I was like OK, folks not playing. Those are spaces that are heavily unpopular in terms of now being falsely associated with being anti-Semitic. I spoke to Roderick Ferguson when he was head of the American Studies Association where he explained it in a really important way. He talked about the role of researchers is to always have a critique of the state when people have experienced injustice.

So, if we don't have a critique of the state, then how do you actually ever change conditions, right? No one is innocent, and no one is absent of critique right now. I think with these academic organizations, they got to stop doing the genuflecting amongst themselves at the conferences.

Instead, what are ways that they are connected to the ground? I really appreciate your [earlier] point, Victor, when people figure out what they can do, then it changes how they do it. Because now the dedication is different - you have become purposeful because you have dedicated yourself in the way that you can.

I think this is really important and this is a challenge to organizations, and I've been saying this since grad school. Everybody comes to the conference like, well shit, it’s hella stuff happening on the block. How are we making the connection here? I will always think about what Pedro Noguera would always say about the American Educational Research Association, AERA. He would say: damn, man, 15,000 educational researchers in one place and still can’t figure school shit out. Those organizations are not the mechanism by which to enact change. They can support it, but they are not the mechanism.

I think it's really important to think about dissemination and connecting to spaces on the ground. A good friend of mine would always say: your article will not save you, but your commitment to write the article will save you. Thinking about what it means to do this work during really troubling times.

RAY: I think there’s several things these organizations can do. These folks target individuals; organizations like the American Sociological Association can suggest universities not punish individuals for teaching about critical race theory in their classes. They can back people at times when it's important. When the Right floods the university with complaints, I think hearing from an organization that says we support this person and their work is important.

Organizations can also organize collectively to write, to help shape public opinion. I know organizations like PEN America, which is a free speech organization that supports writers, has organized with several former university presidents and professional organizations, to push back against book bans and the anti-CRT stuff. I also think, as a membership organization, sometimes members don't think that this kind of response is what the organization should do and there's pushback. Leaders need to anticipate potential pushback and figure out how they're going to answer those things.

In a very basic way, these folks are banning CRT or banning gender studies - these areas contain core sociological ideas. Sometimes, people might think this is not going to impact me and my teaching, but if you are teaching about structural racism, the social construction of race, gender identity, it's going to affect your teaching. Even if you’re teaching about class, it's going to affect your teaching. So, it’s in the interest of the members of the organization to push back against any law that gets in the way of what we teach in the classroom or violates free speech or our academic freedom.

WARIKOO: I just pulled up the ASA [American Sociological Association] website just to see what has been done recently, and I see a statement opposing the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. I see a statement supporting academic freedom after New College of Florida. I think those statements are powerful. I think it is particularly powerful when in collaboration with other professional organizations.

David, I think you're right that we can’t look to these organizations to be the heart of social movements. However, I think they can support people, as Victor said, who are being targeted. I think those statements can be very powerful, in part because they are infrequent and because speaking as a collective, as an official organization, can be really impactful.

Referring back to becoming a target.

STOVALL: I think this is something that again, history hides a heavy set of things. When you have named White supremacy - it’s form and function and how it impacts everyday life - you must instantaneously expect for the opposition to come. That's what it means to exist under White supremacy, right? As soon as you have named it, they will come.

You have to think about the ways that we can actually protect each other when we know this is coming, The thing is, people get caught with their guard down, and they miss the whole point that Derrick Bell was making: look, as soon as you say it, you gotta know they are coming.

A lot of academic folks are not trained in that way. I think this is the thing to put in our ether and our understanding, right? It’s something that, you know, folks may refer to as our grandmother's wisdom. You better expect this to come. So, don’t open your mouth if you don't expect the smoke.

I came up with an organizer who would always tell me the only thing you should ever respect about White supremacy is its capacity to kill you. Other than that, it’s bullshit. You have to be clear about how folks have positioned themselves, and now we'll move against you. This is the time to be very collective in our work. We have to figure out ways to support each other because the attacks are not new, nor will they slow down.

RAY: When we were talking earlier about what you can do and doing public work - if you do this work, you are gonna get threats. You just are. It's the nature of the work. It is unfortunate.

You need to think about what that means. You need to understand your tolerance.

You need to understand that people are gonna try and push you past your tolerance.

I never say don’t do it. I say do it but have your eyes open. And if you can’t deal with that or you don’t have a strong support network that's going to help you, you’re not in a community of folks who are going to help you out when this comes. Not if, but when it comes, then you know that might not be the route for you.

Not Static Categories

STRONG: People are at different points and understandings in their activism, which we can generally categorize as reform, radical reform, and revolutionary; what suggestions do you have for action depending on people’s entry point? Where do you place yourself and why?

RAY: I don’t think those are static categories, right?

What I mean by that is, you know, there's a movement right now that says talking about critical race theory or even defunding, not abolishing the police, is revolutionary, right?

I had this experience when I was in grad school. I was arguing with the professor, as you do in grad school, over whether what they considered radical or impolite protest worked, or whether reform within the system worked. I said, “I think the Civil Rights Movement proves that sometimes pretty radical things work.” And they were like, “but Dr King was nonviolent.” And I said, “They killed him. And folks were getting killed in the South for looking White people in the eyes.” So, what is consider radical or revolutionary is context dependent, and it's often dependent on a particular policy.

My partner [Louise Seamster], has been working on student debt relief for many years now. There are folks who consider debt relief a radical policy. I consider it reform. I would consider abolishing student debt revolutionary. But I consider the policies that the Biden administration put forward to be minimal level reform for folks who’ve been ripped off for quite a long time.

I think radicalism or reform is context dependent. I don’t think I have a single answer for that.

STOVALL: I try to embrace a radical imaginary, but it could still be reformist. I think one of the things when you try to engage things like abolition, it pushes you to really start to think about what is possible.

There’s a historian here in Chicago named Lerone Bennett, who always says: be realistic, demand the impossible.

We got stuff here in Chicago that people said would never happen. The state of Illinois has essentially gotten rid of bail. You got a former teacher-organizer, who didn’t have to compromise his ideals who became the mayor. So there is possibility - if you are willing to face your detractors head on. But you must be organized. I think that's critically important.

I agree with Victor that there’s a lot of amorphous nature to those 3 categories. I think with myself in trying to embrace a radical imaginary, I'm always asking the question: how can the largest grouping of people experience something that will do right by them? Where is that and where does that play itself out? How is that grouping of people and the folks who are aggrieved and dismissed from systems – how do we always keep them in the center of our analysis when you're talking about structural change? I think those are key things when you're talking about radical imaginary and trying to engage in the justice condition.

You may fall somewhere on that scale in different spaces, but be willing to at least start to think about - not concerns of society, but for folks who have experienced the injustice.

WARIKOO: Yeah, I love what both of you said, and I wrote down that quote, David: be realistic, but demand the impossible. I think that's where I land. We have to be pragmatic.

I’ve gotten really interested in local politics and state politics and really trying to understand, OK, how does the policy process work in these local contexts? What are the avenues for change?

Not [focusing] on this broad kind of national policy scale, because I think that incremental change can be very powerful. I think we have to be pragmatic, but we also have to sort of imagine what radical reform looks like We need that kind of vision in our minds. We have to think about what the steps are that we can take to work with others in the community to try to move towards that.

I also agree it’s different in different domains. I think we also change over time. I spent my career studying education but increasingly am now thinking about housing as central to equity in a way that I thought of education in the past. I think we change over time as we learn more and grow intellectually and through lived experience.

STRONG: Thank you. That’s a wonderful place to close this conversation. It’s been great to be in community with you. Thank you all so much for your time.