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Abstract

Several states and a presidential executive order have attempted to put formal restrictions on the teaching of racist forces in American history. A classic example of academic work highlighting racist historical forces—and target of a book ban—is Du Bois's seminal Black Reconstruction, which includes descriptions of historical processes that ironically (though not unrelatedly) provide insight into modern support for these knowledge criminalization efforts. Du Bois famously discusses a divide between White and Black laborers, describing a historically specific circumstance in which White laborers, while paid relatively low wages, received a bonus wage of sorts for being White. After the fall of Jim Crow in the Civil Rights Era, the benefits of the “wages of whiteness” became less visible. Rather than producing class solidarity, racial boundary-making persisted, resulting in a new circumstance in which many working-class White Americans simultaneously felt they deserved the privileges implicitly promised based on their racialization while simultaneously resenting what they perceived as a failure to receive those symbolic wages. This feeling was accelerated by the symbolically important election of Barack Obama as president and by the rise of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement. To explore this, we wrote a successful proposal to the American National Election Studies to include public opinion questions about the teaching of racial knowledge in schools. Our results reveal that White Americans are more opposed to schools teaching about racism than Black Americans, but that the opposition is highest at the intersection Du Bois draws our attention to: economically insecure White Americans. Opposition is also high among those possessing the modern racist views that the knowledge gained from learning about racism would challenge. The results have implications for understanding many dimensions of current racial politics and speak to strategies for achieving racial justice and addressing economic inequalities.

Keywords

W. E. B. Du Bois racial threat race and justice wages of whiteness criminalization

Introduction

On January 29, 2025, an executive order was released titled “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” It attempts to ban the recognition of racial privilege as well as teaching about historical and contemporary racist forces. It followed state-level restrictions, such as Florida's “Stop Woke” act, which also sought to restrict educators from teaching about race and racism.¹ In the place of teaching about racism, the executive order calls instead for “patriotic education” that presents an “inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America.”

Education and knowledge have always been sites of resistance and conflict (Ewing, 2025). These modern efforts are direct descendants of the anti-literacy laws prohibiting the teaching of reading and writing to Black Americans during the period of legalized chattel slavery (Carr & Yousfi, 2024; Russell-Brown, 2023, 2024). Many of the laws were passed not at the outset of legalized slavery in America, but during the mid-1800s during the rise of the abolitionist movement and among efforts to educate and uplift free and enslaved Black Americans.

Opposition to Reconstruction was driven in no small part by the successes of the Freedmen's Bureau in establishing an effective educational system—in most of the South, the first publicly funded public education for White or Black Americans. This knowledge comes from W. E. B. Du Bois's (1935) seminal Black Reconstruction, which is itself offered as a corrective to the patriotic education of Du Bois's day, a racist and factually incorrect accounting of the dismantling of Reconstruction efforts.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Du Bois's academic history of that era now finds itself on banned book lists in this renewed era of the criminalization of teaching about race and racism (PEN America, 2024). It is ironic—though not coincidental—that this volume provides insights that can help us understand these modern efforts to suppress knowledge. Perhaps most importantly, Du Bois (1935) helps us understand a basic and critical question: why is it that so many Americans support these efforts to suppress knowledge on race and racism?

Du Bois (1935) proposes what we interpret as a two-tiered threat model to understand how some White Americans felt towards Black Americans at the end of Reconstruction. Specifically, Du Bois (1935, p. 700) suggests that a “carefully planned wedge” was placed between White and Black laborers to prevent class solidarity and a “united fight for higher wages and better working conditions.” This wedge was a promise of a bonus wage associated with whiteness to supplement the otherwise low pay White workers received. At the time Du Bois was writing during the Jim Crow era, these “bonus wages” were easily viewable and, in many cases, codified into law: White people in the South, in particular, had differential access to jobs, schools, positions of authority, public spaces, and many other facets of social, economic, and political life.

After the legal dismantling of Jim Crow in the Civil Rights Era, the benefits of the wages of whiteness became less visible. Rather than producing class solidarity, racial boundary-making persisted (King, 1964; Muhammad, 2010; Zasloff, 2016), resulting in a new circumstance in which many working-class White Americans simultaneously felt they deserved the privileges implicitly promised based on their racialization while simultaneously resenting what they perceived as a failure to receive those symbolic wages. This feeling was accelerated by the symbolically important election of Barack Obama as president and by the rise of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement (e.g., Hochschild, 2016; Isom, 2023; Isom Scott & Stevens Andersen, 2020; Parker, 2016; Parker et al., 2009; Parker & Barreto, 2013; Smith, 2020; Taylor, 2016). In short, these efforts appear to be a racist backlash to attempted progress towards racial equality (Watson, 2023).

This history is critical to understanding what has been described as modern, symbolic, colorblind, or laissez-faire racist ideologies (Bobo et al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Sears, 1988). These ideologies tend to be rooted in an abstract liberalism that minimizes historical and contemporary racism to imply that existing racial inequalities are the product of the inherent superiority of White Americans (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Critically, this ideology tends to produce a resentment of efforts to address racial inequalities under the false notion that it is underserved. This ideology justifies and defends the preservation of white privilege.

In other words, we see a two-tiered threat model in which a racial threat posed by Black Americans to White privilege is engendered among working-class White Americans in order to protect against class solidarity posing a more fundamental threat to the socio-economic stratification that protects moneyed privilege. Thus, economically insecure White Americans may be particularly susceptible to targeted ideologies that serve to maintain white privilege—and moneyed privilege—but which are threatened by educational efforts seeking to challenge the inaccuracies or ignorance underlying them.

To explore this, we wrote a proposal to the American National Election Studies in 2023 to include a question about people's support or opposition to teaching about race and racism in school in their 2024 pilot study. Here we explore two broad questions. The first is: among whom is opposition to teaching about race and racism the greatest? We look here at the intersection Du Bois points us to: that of economic insecurity and whiteness. Second, we ask about the role of racial ideologies in explaining opposition to teaching about racism.

To develop the conceptual model, we begin with a history of the linkages between labor exploitation, racial separation, and education (drawing on Du Bois and others). We then turn to Du Bois's insights on racial separation and whiteness to develop our conceptual model for understanding contemporary opposition to education about racism.

Historical Background: Labor Exploitation, Racial Separation, and Education

From early in its colonial founding, America relied on exploited labor. In the earliest years, the bulk of this labor came in the form of indentured servants, predominantly from Europe. Soon, however, people brought against their will from Africa began to supplement and then supplant the indentured servants. A legal system, justified by a racist ideology, was developed to allow a substantially higher level of exploitation of the African slaves while preserving some basic rights for the European indentured servants (Kendi, 2017). This serves as the origins of a significant system of economic exploitation rooted in a racial caste system (Wacquant, 2003). By stealing the land from its indigenous inhabitants and exploiting farm labor from enslaved individuals, the United States constructed its eventually substantial economy (Baptist, 2016).

This economically important exploitation was justified through the construction of an ideology emphasizing Black inferiority and their believed natural place in the social and economic order. This was reinforced by restrictions placed on education. Education was conceptualized as an imminent threat: by introducing new ideals, individuals would resist their exploitation, which would threaten the economic and social structure of society (Du Bois, 1903; Russell-Brown, 2023). An example of this is the strict anti-literacy laws which criminalized education for Black Americans. These laws legitimized the false narrative of Black Americans’ inferiority and inhumanity (Carr & Yousfi, 2024).

The distinction between enslaved people and those under indentured servitude also helped establish a racial hierarchy. Notably, these higher status white laborers also did not have access to education, under the view of the ownership class that “it made their exploitation more difficult” (Du Bois, 1935, p. 641). These white laborers, however, were granted more legal rights than Black laborers and were deputized to police Black enslaved people (Du Bois, 1935, p. 12).

The end of slavery after the Civil War, of course, substantially disrupted this economic system of exploitation. Reconstruction was an era of growth for Black Americans. As part of the Reconstruction efforts, the Freedman's Bureau was created, which advocated for Black Americans rights and, critically, helped to establish widespread public schools for the first time in the American South. Education and knowledge can challenge the established order, threatening the institution of labor exploitation by suggesting alternative narratives and encouraging aspiration (Du Bois, 1903). Education as an instrument of freedom (Russell-Brown, 2023) has always been a site of resistance that seeks to uplift Black Americans. And therefore, the threat of education was a “privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black men” (Du Bois, 1903, p. 97). This education posed a two-part threat to the racial-economic order. First, as during Slavery, education was seen as an avenue which would threaten systems of economic exploitation. Second, education was a privilege for White Americans that would differentiate them from Black Americans.

The sudden seeming equality in social and economic position between poor white laborers and freed Black Americans posed a threat to the economic order. Du Bois (1935) suggests that class unity, through opposition to exploitation by capitalists, could unite White and Black laborers, which would present a stronger fight for higher wages and better working conditions. The theory of race was therefore supplemented as a “carefully planned wedge between white and black workers … who were kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest” (Du Bois, 1935, p. 700). This wedge of racial separation expands on the rhetoric of Black inferiority which was present throughout the chattel slavery era. The way race was operationalized during this transition period was through the “wages of whiteness,” which offered poor white laborers supplemental public and psychological wages in the form of race-specific privileges (Du Bois, 1935). This included public deference, titles of courtesy, leniency in courts, and, critically, access to public education. Thus, while poor white laborers remained in a position of relative economic exploitation, socially, they could be differentiated from their fellow Black laborers.

Thus, it was the success of Reconstruction in giving rights and social, economic, and political power to Black Americans, and the possibility of a united class of Black and White laborers, that posed such a serious threat to an economic system built on exploitation. Because of this immense threat, reconstruction was short-lived, and education restrictions returned (Russell-Brown, 2023). The dismantling of Reconstruction efforts was justified through coordinated efforts to tell a false history of this period that blamed the failures on corruption and the ineptitude of Black Americans, a phenomenon Du Bois (1935, p. 711) describes, in a systematic review of school textbooks, as the “propaganda of history.” Thus, education, often a tool of liberation, becomes weaponized as a tool for social control.

After nearly a century of the new system of economic exploitation and racial control, the fall of Jim Crow during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s presented another moment in which the possibility of equal rights for Black Americans threatened the economic order. The Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson with the Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954. This decision not only granted Black children equal access to public school education, it overturned “separate but equal,” eliminating legal educational segregation in the United States. More broadly, the Civil Rights Movement challenged some of the most explicit forms of the bonus wages of whiteness identified by Du Bois (1935): leniency in the court system, access to public spaces regardless of class, and workers chosen from their ranks. Education once again played a role in raising awareness of these inequalities and injustices. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded by an interracial group of students in 1942, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed by Black college students in 1960—both played major roles in the Civil Rights movement (McAdam, 1988). The Black Panther Party throughout the 1960s and 1970s sought to provide youth education that exposed these exploitative systems (Pope & Flanigan, 2013).

A primary mechanism for resistance to the Civil Rights movement was through the criminalization of their efforts, and the legal surveillance and harassment of their leaders (Beckett & Sasson, 2004; Bloom & Martin, 2013; Chambliss, 2001; Tonry, 2011). This was supported by new propagandized educational efforts, supported by nascent social scientific research, falsely emphasizing the inherent criminality of Black Americans to justify their racially discriminatory treatment (Muhammad, 2010). All of this represents a way of knowing through crime, where oppositional movements are publicly reframed through their criminalization (Carlson & James, 2022).

At the end of the Civil Rights Movement, a new “peculiar institution” emerges, continuing the dual roles of labor exploitation and racial control through the twin forces of racial-economic residential segregation and the rise of mass incarceration (Wacquant, 2003, p. 471). A new racist logic emerges to justify this new system (Bobo & Smith, 1998). This logic relies on an abstract liberalism that imagines a level playing field on which all Americans compete economically, intentionally ignoring the role of historical or contemporary racism (Bobo et al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2018). In this new era, although the benefits of White privilege are still easily shown in racial differences in social, economic, and political resources and power, de facto segregation and discrimination are less explicit and visible than the de jure practices that existed in the Jim Crow era. Thus, while this new racial ideology continues to maintain some level of racial separation, it may be less effective at the other functional dimension of the wedge Du Bois describes: mollifying concerns about the economic status of White working-class Americans.

As a consequence, a key dimension of this new racial logic is resentment (Sears, 1988). A belief that white Americans were being deprived of something they were owed was increasingly prevalent (Esposito & Romano, 2014), with a particular focus on perceptions that non-White Americans were unfairly and unjustly benefiting from welfare and affirmative action (Davis & Wilson, 2022, p. 450).

Affirmative action was an idea emerging out of the Civil Rights movement and first affirmed in executive orders by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the early 1960s (Katznelson, 2006). The idea was that historical and contemporary discrimination against Black Americans had to be actively fought in employment or admissions processes to achieve racially equitable outcomes. The consideration of race in college admissions—in at least a limited way and as one part of the process—was upheld by the Supreme Court (University of California Regents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 1978).

Inherent to this resentment is a deeply racialized conception of deservingness (Gómez et al., 2022). Although many Americans support affirmative action as an ameliorative to racial discrimination, many White Americans specifically are unswayed by this, and instead see affirmative action as a threat to white privilege—that such policies unfairly benefit minority communities at the expense of White Americans (Joshi, 2024; Mangum & Block, 2022). Thus, as in previous eras, Black access to education is portrayed as a threat to educational access rightfully deserved by White Americans, a component of the promised bonus wages of Whiteness.

In the 21st century, new forces emerged that challenged the racial and economic status quo. The first was the symbolically important election of the first Black President in 2008 (Myers, 2019; Parker, 2021; Parker et al., 2009; Willer et al., 2016), and the second was subsequent rise of a new racial civil rights movement in Black Lives Matter (Cobbina, 2019; Taylor, 2016). This appears to have elevated perceptions of racial threat among some White Americans (Drakulich et al., 2021; Drakulich & Denver, 2022). Economic privilege is one way that race is performed in American society (Sioh, 2018), where economic success has been historically used to construct white identity, while at the same time feelings of economic struggle challenge that identity. The Tea Party emerges as a counter-revolutionary movement, reflecting the abstract liberalism framing of modern racism (Engels, 2010; Parker, 2016; Parker & Barreto, 2013; Tope et al., 2015; Zeskind, 2012), and tapping into the sense of resentment over a feeling of dispossession of what is owed to White people—which Du Bois (1920) argues is everything and anything. All of this adds to the construction of a White victimhood (Engels, 2010; Hochschild, 2016; Wilson, 2021). The Tea Party, in turn, presaged the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement (Gervais & Morris, 2018).

Once again, education serves as a site of resistance and conflict. If education has the power to challenge the racist logics that justify and preserve inequalities (Johnson et al., 2023; Russell-Brown, 2023), it remains a threat to those who benefit from the inequalities. As a result, affirmative action policies on college admissions were overturned (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. V. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181, 2003), and new bans criminalizing knowledge (Filimon & Ivănescu, 2024; Johnstone & Lee, 2018)—such as the 2022 House Bill 7 in Florida and the 2025 presidential executive order on K-12 education—have emerged which mirror the anti-literacy laws of centuries prior (Russell-Brown, 2023).

Conceptual Model: Connecting Jim Crow to Anti-Woke Policies

Our core empirical questions are who opposes teaching about racism in school—and why. To answer these questions, we draw on insights from W. E. B. Du Bois. In his seminal Black Reconstruction, Du Bois (1935) famously discusses a divide between White and Black laborers, describing a historically specific circumstance in which White laborers, while paid relatively low wages, received a bonus wage of sorts for being White (Myers, 2019).

An important legacy of these wages is a unique cognitive dissonance between structural inequality and the privileges White Americans experience. As Du Bois (1899) argues in The Philadelphia Negro, White Americans are not entirely aware of the deeply rooted prejudice and bias that operates in American society because it is inherent to normative American culture. These unconscious and subconscious biases create a narrative of White superiority, with the benefits of these bonus wages serving as proof. In fact, by this logic it is impossible to be in the same social class as Black Americans (Du Bois, 1903).

As described above, under Jim Crow these privileges were explicit and legally codified, but after the Civil Rights movement, the benefits of whiteness, although real and identifiable through persistent inequalities, lose the visibility of that legal codification. The persistence of class inequality, the decreased visibility of white privilege, and the symbolic challenges to White privilege represented by the election of Barack Obama and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement have combined to intensify concerns about threats posed to white privilege, particularly among economically insecure White Americans. However, the racial boundary making—for the purpose of preventing class solidarity (Harris, 1993; Narayan, 2017)—continues, producing anxiety among some White Americans that they are getting less than they deserve, and a resentment that Black Americans are getting more than they deserve.

Critically, this anxiety and resentment stem from the original rigged deal. In this light, we see Du Bois (1935) as describing the development of a phenomenon that acts today as a two-tiered threat model. The higher-level threat is the one posed to the ownership class by the prospect of a united laboring class. To prevent this, a wedge was placed between White and Black laborers in the form of a promise of extra privileges to White Americans. This promise of the privileges to White laborers were never intended to elevate that population to the level of the ownership class, but instead were designed to mollify them and engender acquiescence with continued low wages, while simultaneously redirecting their anxiety and resentment at their circumstances towards Black Americans and away from the ownership class (Du Bois, 1935).

Education, as ever, stands as a contested site: a mechanism by which corrective light can be shed on the harms of the past and present, and also a mechanism for transmitting a false “propaganda of history” that hides these harms and justifies continued inequities (Du Bois, 1935, p. 711). More than 160 years after the end of the Civil War and more than 125 years after Du Bois first started writing about Reconstruction (Du Bois, 1901), we expect to find evidence of this ancient story. Specifically, we expect that economically insecure White Americans will be the most opposed to education efforts aimed at revealing white privilege. And we expect that those who hold the modern racial ideologies produced by Du Bois's wedge—a minimization of racism, a belief that racial inequalities are the product of Black inferiority, and a resentment rooted in economic stagnation and perceived violations of the racial contract—will be most opposed to teachings that might challenge these views.

Research Questions

Our basic question involves public support for the teaching of the US's true racial and racist history in schools. Who is most opposed to teaching about racism in schools? We look here at the intersection Du Bois points us to: that of economic insecurity and whiteness. Given the newness of these educational bans, very little empirical research exists so far on them. The little research that exists seems to support the notion that they emerge from a socio-political climate tinged with White economic anxiety and racial resentment (Vue et al., 2024).

Rather than focusing on some broad definition of socio-economic class, we look to concrete experiences of economic insecurity—the kinds of experiences most likely to trigger economic anxieties—that have been shown to be better connected to racist ideologies (Melcher, 2023). Importantly, our reading of Du Bois is that economic insecurity will specifically provoke opposition to the teaching of racism just among White respondents.

Finally, we also seek to explore the relationship between the kinds of modern racial ideologies produced by this wedge and opposition to the kinds of education that might challenge them. Specifically, we explore two closely related dimensions of modern racial ideologies. The first is racial resentment, a measure developed to capture symbolic racism (Henry & Sears, 2002), but which captures attitudes consistent with some of the other major theoretical conceptions of modern racism, including laissez-faire and colorblind racism (Bobo et al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Simmons & Bobo, 2018). It reflects a minimization of racism, a preference for understandings of racial inequalities rooted in Black deficiencies, and an affective reaction to a perceived threat to a group position. An enormous prior literature connects racial resentment to a wide variety of policy positions, including people's understanding of and opposition to the Black Lives Matter social movement (Drakulich et al., 2021; Drakulich & Denver, 2022) and support for the President responsible for the executive order attempting to curtail teaching about racism (Abramowitz & McCoy, 2019; Drakulich et al., 2017, 2020; Sides et al., 2018). We also employ a simpler measure capturing the minimization of racism (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 2018) and perceptions of current racial group positionality (e.g., Blumer, 1958; Bobo & Hutchings, 1996), by asking directly about the relative advantages of being White or Black.

Data, Methods, and Measures

Data

To test these questions we write a proposal to include questions about these efforts in the 2024 American National Election Studies Pilot Study. This data was collected through nonprobability sampling of American adults through an opt-in, cross-sectional survey. YouGov, a notable firm for public opinion research, fielded responses from their own online panel of potential respondents. Respondents were fielded from February 20, 2024, through March 1, 2024. The target sample of 1,500 respondents was achieved by matching responses (from a pool of 1,909 respondents) to be representative of the American population on several demographics (i.e., race, gender, age, and education). This matched sample of Americans’ demographics was based on the American Community Survey, public voting records, the 2020 Current Population Survey, the 2020 National Election Pool, and the 2020 Cooperative Election Study. Propensity score matching was utilized to weight the matched sample to the sampling frame.

Measures

Opposition to Teaching About Race and Racism

Our key interest is in whether people support the teaching of race and racism in schools, so we wrote a proposal to the ANES to include a question in this survey. Respondents were asked “How much emphasis should schools place on racism's impact in American society today?” Responses were measured on a 5-item Likert scale, from “a great deal” to “none at all.” This variable was coded so that higher values represent greater opposition to teachings about racism. The average respondent fell in the middle of this range, believing that a moderate amount of emphasis should be placed on teaching race and racism, but as the standard deviation suggests, these views varied widely (see Table 1, and the discussion in the results section).

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics.

Variables	Missing	Range	Mean	SD
Oppose teaching racism	1	1,5	2.96	1.33
Insecure economic behavior	1	0,4	1.70	1.24
White	0	0,1	0.66	0.48
Black	0	0,1	0.12	0.32
Asian	0	0,1	0.02	0.15
Hispanic	0	0,1	0.16	0.37
Other race/ethnicity	0	0,1	0.05	0.22
Male	0	0,1	0.48	0.50
Age (×10's years)	0	1.8,9.4	4.86	1.79
Education	0	1,6	3.55	1.53
Family income ($1,000–$19,999…)	143	1,16	6.58	3.57
Conservative	121	1,5	3.04	1.16
Republican	63	1,7	3.86	2.18
Urban–rural status	0	1,5	2.93	1.33
Protestant	0	0,1	0.31	0.46
Catholic	0	0,1	0.22	0.41
Racial resentment measures
Special favors	2	1,5	3.26	1.37
Generations of slavery	0	1,5	2.94	1.46
Gotten less than they deserve	1	1,5	3.06	1.34
Try harder	1	1,5	2.89	1.38
Black advantage-White disadvantage
Being Black is advantageous	0	1,7	3.40	1.74
Being White is disadvantageous	0	1,7	3.05	1.63

The reported mean and standard deviation use non-missing cases. Total possible N is 1,500.

Economic insecurity. Our measure of economic insecurity captures a count of insecure economic behaviors. Respondents were asked to report if they had done any of the following: “borrowed money to pay bills,” “cut down on everyday spending,” “cancelled or postponed major purchases,” and “dipped into savings.” Respondents were also able to report that they engaged in none of these behaviors.² The resulting variable represents a total count of the insecure behaviors experienced by the respondent. The average respondent engaged in slightly less than 2 of these behaviors, with almost 20% of respondents reporting no engagement in any of these insecure economic behaviors. Table 2 includes descriptive for the individual questions used to make this additive index.

Table 2.

Counts for Economic Insecurity Predictors.

Variables	Not selected	Selected
Borrowed money to pay bills	1,193	306
Cut down on everyday spending	549	950
Cancelled or postponed major purchases	830	669
Dipped into savings	873	626
None of the above	1,203	296

Imputed count variable	None of the above	One of the above	Two of the above	Three of the above	Four of the above
Insecure economic behavior	296	422	348	299	135

Racial Ideologies

To capture the kinds of racial attitudes that might be threatened by teaching about racism, we constructed two different measures. Drawing from sociological theories on contemporary forms of racism, the racial resentment scale captures a dynamic struggle for racial hierarchy that criticizes Black Americans for a perceived lack of adherence to American moral values (Kinder & Sanders, 1996). This scale measures the belief that Black people should achieve economic success without special favors (“Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”), that past slavery and discrimination have made it difficult for Black people (“Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”), that Black people have gotten less than they deserve (“Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve.”), and that Black people would be as well off as White people if they tried harder (“It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if Blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.”). Each variable was measured with a 5-item Likert scale from “Agree strongly” to “Disagree strongly.” Two variables-past discrimination has made it hard for Blacks and Blacks have gotten less than they deserve, were reverse-coded so that higher values for each racial resentment measure represented more racially resentful beliefs.

The final measure is captured as latent factor scores produced through a confirmatory factor analysis using the lavaan package in R (R Core Team, 2023; Rosseel, 2012). We freed the error variance correlation between the measures that assert Black people should work their way up without special favors, and that if Black people tried harder they would be as well off as White people (the two reverse-coded questions). All factor loadings ranged from 0.93 to 1.23. The model fit well to the data (chisq = 0.02; p-value = .877; RMSEA = 0; SRMR = 0). The Cronbach's alpha for the scale is .88.

Additionally, two measures of perceived racial (dis)advantage captured the belief that being Black came with more advantages (“In American society, do you think that being Black comes with more advantages, more disadvantages, or about equal advantages and disadvantages compared to other racial/ethnic groups?”) and being White came with more disadvantages (“In American society, do you think that being White comes with more advantages, more disadvantages, or about equal advantages and disadvantages compared to other racial/ethnic groups?”). Each of these measures was on a 7-item Likert scale from “Many more advantages” to “Many more disadvantages.” These measures were coded to include follow-up strength variables that measured the degree of (dis)advantages each group had. For perceiving being Black as advantageous, this measure was reverse-coded so lower values represent the belief that being Black comes with many more disadvantages, and higher values represent being Black comes with many more advantages. For perceiving being White as disadvantageous, lower values represent the belief that being White comes with many more advantages, and high values represent being White comes with many more disadvantages. The final measure is a simple average of standardized scores capturing the belief that being Black comes with advantages and being White comes with disadvantages (Cronbach's alpha = .81).

Demographic and Biographical Characteristics

Additionally, demographic variables also captured respondents’ race and ethnicity, gender, age (in tens of years), education, family income thresholds,³ political ideology, political affiliation, urbanicity, and religion. Race was coded so that in multivariate analyses, being Black was considered the reference category. The teaching of racism in schools, while potentially applicable to all people of color, has been specifically politicized to teachings about racism against Black Americans. Thus, Black Americans might hold unique views towards this issue compared to other people of color. In addition to capturing respondents who identified as White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic, other respondents shared race-ethnic identities in numbers too small to separately analyze (e.g., Native American, Bi/Multiracial, Middle Eastern, etc.). This measure is included to make Black Americans the reference category, but, given its substantial heterogeneity, we advise against interpreting it directly.

Methodology/Analytical Strategy

First, we ran descriptive statistics on all model variables. Only three variables had more than trivial numbers of missing values: family income (missing 9.5%), political ideology (8.0%), and political affiliation (4.2%). To address missing data, we multiply imputed cases, utilizing auxiliary variables to reduce bias and improve the accuracy of our estimates. These included if respondents owned or rented their home, and to rate how hot/cold they felt toward the Republican and Democratic parties. Missing values were imputed using the mice package in R to create 20 imputed datasets (van Buuren & Groothuis-Oudshoorn, 2011).

Results

Our most basic question involves how people feel about schools teaching racism. Given our focus on race, we start by exploring basic racial differences in this question. Overall, the average American is supportive of having a “moderate” amount of emphasis placed on the teaching of racism in schools (the overall mean reported in Table is close to 3, reflecting support for a moderate amount of emphasis on the five-category scale). However, there do appear to be differences in opinion based on racial identification.

Figure 1 presents a basic stacked bar chart—separately for the three most common racial identities⁴—of public opinion about the emphasis schools should place on teaching about racism. Moreover, 40% of White Americans believed little or no emphasis should be placed on teaching about racism. By contrast, only 10% of Black Americans felt the same. Hispanic and Latine Americans fell in between: about 24%. On the other side of the scale, a majority of Black Americans—62%—felt that a lot or a great deal of emphasis should be placed on racism. Moreover, 31% of White Americans and 40% of Hispanic or Latine Americans felt similarly. As Table 3 suggests, average racial differences in these views are statistically significant, with White Americans most opposed, Black Americans most in favor, and Americans of other race-ethnic identities falling somewhere in between.

Figure 1.

Proportion of Emphasis Schools Should Place on Teaching About Racism.

Table 3.

Average Racial Differences of Opposition to Teaching Racism.

Variables	White	Black	Hispanic	Asian	Other race- ethnicity
Oppose teaching racism	3.18	2.09	2.77	2.91	2.76
Mean differences and t-tests
Relative to White Americans	-	1.09***	.41***	.27	.42*
Relative to Black Americans	-	-	−.68***	−.82***	−.67***

We see these same relationships in multivariate analyses. Model 1 of Table 4 presents coefficients for our most basic model, attempting to explain how people feel about racism being taught in schools. Relative to Black respondents (the reference category), White, Asian, and Hispanic Americans are all more likely to oppose schools teaching racism. Older Americans, conservatives, Republicans, and Americans who live in more rural areas are also more likely to oppose racism teachings. On the other hand, more educated Americans are more supportive of schools teaching about racism, suggesting a liberalizing effect of education. Notably, engaging in more insecure economic behaviors is not significantly related to feelings about teaching racism in schools—in fact, the two are not even correlated.

Table 4.

Results From Regressions Predicting Opposition to Teaching Racism.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Intercept	.57***	.78***	2.00***
	(.16)	(.17)	(.16)
White	.69***	.37**	.08
	(.09)	(.12)	(.11)
Asian/Pacific Islander	.73**	.608*	.43*
	(.20)	(.20)	(.18)
Hispanic	.55**	.51**	.30**
	(.10)	(.10)	(.09)
Other race/ethnicity	.49***	.51***	.36**
	(.14)	(.14)	(.12)
Male	.04	.04	−.04
	(.06)	(.06)	(.05)
Age	.05**	.05**	.04*
	(.02)	(.02)	(.01)
Education	−.06**	−.06**	−.02
	(.02)	(.02)	(.00)
Family income (10k)	.01	.01	.01
	(.01)	(.01)	(.01)
Conservatism	.35***	.34***	.12**
	(.04)	(.04)	(.03)
Republican	.13***	.13***	.05**
	(.02)	(.02)	(.02)
Urban–rural status	.06*	.05*	.05*
	(.02)	(.02)	(.02)
Protestant	.07	.07	.02
	(.07)	(.07)	(.06)
Catholic	−.11	−.11	−.17**
	(.08)	(.07)	(.07)
Economic insecurity	.00	−.12**	−.10**
	(.02)	(.04)	(.04)
White * Economic insecurity		.18***	.15***
		(.05)	(.04)
Racial resentment			.49***
			(.04)
Black advantage/White disadvantage			.29***
			(.04)
Observations	1,500	1,500	1,500
R ²	0.34	0.34	0.48
Adjusted R²	0.33	0.34	0.48

Note: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

Our core suspicion, however, was not that economically insecure people overall would be more opposed to teaching racism in schools, but that specifically economically insecure White Americans would. Model 2 explores this by adding an interaction between White identification and economic insecurity.⁵ The results suggest that this is the case: relative to Black respondents, economic insecurity is associated with significantly more opposition to teaching racism in schools among White respondents. Figure 2 presents predicted values for opposition to schools teaching racism for White and Black Americans across their levels of economic insecurity. As the figure suggests, economic insecurity is associated with less opposition to teaching racism among Black respondents but increases opposition among White respondents. It also appears that White and Black respondents with no economic insecurity differ less in their views of whether schools should teach about racism.

Figure 2.

Predicted Opposition to Teaching Racism in Schools from the Interaction of Economic Insecurity and Race.

Finally, we explore the role of the kinds of racial ideologies that might be challenged by teaching about racism. As we suggested, these ideologies act broadly to protect racial privileges by minimizing the role of historical and contemporary racism, implying that racial inequalities are deserved, and engendering resentment at perceived efforts to address them. In other words, the kinds of ideologies born of the wedge placed between Black and White Americans. Results from Model 3 indicate both racial ideologies are significantly and positively correlated to our outcome, meaning Americans who are racially resentful or who believe being Black is advantageous and being White is disadvantageous are more likely to oppose schools teaching racism. Importantly, however, the interaction capturing White economic insecurity is still significant, suggesting that these two racial ideologies do not fully explain the differential effects of economic insecurity between White and Black Americans.

Discussion

The January 29, 2025 executive order titled “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” is an open attempt to criminalize knowledge, as are the related state-level policies that preceded it in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia (Schwartz, 2021). The most basic question of this paper is to identify who opposes teaching knowledge about racism in schools—and why.

We follow insights from Du Bois (1935) to look specifically at the attitudes of economically insecure White Americans, as well as Americans with the kinds of racial ideologies that maintain racial separation and resentment. Our results speak to each of these. First, White Americans are, on average, more opposed to racism being taught in schools, while Black Americans are more supportive. Interestingly, other groups that have experiences with racism that might be taught in schools, including Asian and Hispanic Americans, are more opposed to racism being taught than Black Americans—though, in the case of Hispanic Americans, also less opposed than White Americans. Second, as expected, economic insecurity is associated with increased opposition to teaching about racism only among White Americans, highlighting particularly high opposition among this group. Third, and finally, those who hold the kinds of racial ideology that justify persistent inequalities and engender resentment.

Several of these findings deserve discussion. First, the good news is that most Americans are not strongly opposed to teaching racism in schools. The average American believes a “moderate amount” of emphasis should be placed on racism in schooling, while the average non-White American falls somewhere between a “moderate amount” and “a lot.” In other words, a majority of Americans in 2024 did not seem to support outright bans on the teaching of racism in schools.

Second, although school curriculum on racism also contains discussion of historical and contemporary racism and discrimination against Asian-Americans and Hispanic or Latine Americans, support for teaching about racism falls along the US's usual racial order (Peterson & Krivo, 2010): the highest support among Black Americans, the lowest among White Americans, with Asian and Hispanic Americans somewhere in between. Asian Americans, in particular, are not statistically distinguishable from White Americans in these views. Although White racist fears have been accelerated by the prospect of a minority-White political landscape, this provides more evidence for the obvious insight that non-White Americans are far from a united block in their views of race and racism. Asian Americans, in particular, have mixed views overall on efforts to address historic inequities in education (Ruiz et al., 2023).

Third, the variable role of economic insecurity by race is especially notable. Among Black Americans, more economic insecurity increases support for teaching about racism in school. Among White Americans, it increases opposition. Or, in other words, the literal wedge shape in Figure 2—specifically separating economically insecure Black and White Americans—illustrates the effects of the metaphorical wedge Du Bois (1935) describes to prevent class solidarity between Black and White laborers.

Fourth, and finally, the strong protective effects of anti-Black ideologies in motivating opposition to the kinds of educational efforts that would challenge those ideologies is not surprising. We found strong independent effects of racial resentment—a measure reflecting a minimization of racism and understanding of racial inequalities as the product of Black deficiencies—and a measure capturing false concerns that Black advantages now exceed White advantages. Interestingly, however, even after accounting for these ideologies, economic insecurity still has a distinctly different effect among White versus Black Americans. One possible explanation for this is that these are but two dimensions in the broader constellation that Charles Mills (2007, 2011) describes as white ignorance. It is this broader ignorance that is directly threatened by educational efforts focused on revealing racism.

Conclusion

We would be remiss if we failed to point out that the educational restrictions are based on flagrantly false depictions of the actual educational efforts in schools to teach about racism. Few students outside of law schools and graduate social science programs have ever been taught critical race theory (Filimon & Ivănescu, 2024; Watson, 2023). There is no concerted or coordinated effort to discriminate against White students or make them feel guilty. Many schools do little to teach about race and racism, and among those who do, many take a multiculturalism frame—that we need to respect different cultures—rather than a frame that critically and directly identifies the role of historical or contemporary racism in the average well-being of different groups. Even in places that do attempt to describe racism, many teachers are not suitably prepared or comfortable teaching this material (Marrun et al., 2024).

That the threat is at least in part imagined does not mean that these bills will not be impactful. They ask teachers to misrepresent history intentionally (Morgan, 2022). Unlike the invented harms to White students, they ask teachers to avoid or misrepresent real forces that have negatively affected their students and their families, causing actual harms. In short, these policies ask that teachers actively and purposefully participate in what Du Bois (1935) describes as the “propaganda of history.”

In addition to general harms to understandings of race and racism, these educational restrictions pose a substantial threat to teaching and research specifically on criminology and criminal justice. Race and racism are not fringe or secondary topics to this field—they are absolutely central and critical to understanding crime and the criminal legal system in America (e.g., Alexander, 2020; Drakulich et al., 2023; Drakulich & Rodriguez-Whitney, 2018; Du Bois, 1899; Muhammad, 2010; Peterson & Krivo, 2010; Russell-Brown, 1998; Tonry, 2011; Unnever & Gabbidon, 2011). Given this, it is a positive development that race, crime, and justice courses have become increasingly common at the university level (Gabbidon & Preston, 2003), particularly since the mass Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the spring and summer of 2020 (Russell-Brown & Miller, 2024). Race and justice centers provide important value for both curricula and research in the area (Russell-Brown & Miller, 2024).

Efforts to restrict teaching about race and racism are already underway and already posing threats to criminological education. There have already been notable restrictions placed on college diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, in addition to bans on “critical race theory” (Rivera et al., 2025; Russell-Brown, 2023, 2024). These efforts pose threats to the faculty members who teach these courses, who are generally the same faculty doing critical research in the area of race and justice. These courses can be difficult to teach because they challenge some of the foundational assumptions protecting white privilege (Cooper et al., 2025; Gabbidon, 2002), though this challenge is also the value of the course (Cooper et al., 2025; Gabbidon & Preston, 2003). However, new efforts, such as Florida's Stop WOKE Act and Mississippi's HB 1193, deputize students to report on instructors who make them feel guilty or uncomfortable, creating a much more serious threat to these instructors and their teaching and research work (Russell-Brown, 2024). The 2024 Trump administration's cancellation and restriction of federal grants that address race, equity, and justice issues, and the targeting of Universities engaging in this work in teaching or research, provide even more fundamental threats on a national scale. Restricting research and pedagogy on race and racism, by restricting the creation and dissemination of knowledge about a critical component of crime and justice, will produce inaccurate and incomplete understandings of crime and justice, reinforcing faulty and erroneous associations between race and crime (Rivera et al., 2025).

Our findings suggest several avenues for further research. Most simply, while this paper looks at generic opposition to the teaching of racism in school, the same forces likely predict support for specific policy efforts to criminalize knowledge about racism, including restrictions on what can be taught, what can be required, and what can be banned. Racism is also not the only knowledge currently targeted for bans: so, too, is teaching about misogyny, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This convergence suggests the relevance of an intersectional threat perspective (Drakulich & Craig, 2024; Drakulich & Law, Forthcoming), in which this criminalization of knowledge reflects a coordinated project to protect white and male privilege. It is particularly interesting that these attacks come at a time of declining White male enrollment in higher education.

Additionally, as bans on teaching about race and racism are enacted, research is urgently needed on the consequences of this decline in the quality of education: on how people think about race, crime, and justice; on the policies they support to address problems like racial inequalities and crime. In particular, we recommend attention to how criminalizing racial justice education and advocacy can suppress efforts to address racial inequities and injustices. Here, historical and comparative work may be useful, acknowledging that this is not the first time in U.S. history that this kind of suppression has been attempted.

Du Bois’s (1935) history of Reconstruction has immense value because of its critical approach to identifying the real forces at play and challenging falsehoods in otherwise popular accounts. Specific to our purposes, it identifies a complicated set of forces acting at the intersection of race and class. It identifies the real and substantial harms posed by anti-Black racism, while also identifying this racism as the product of an intentional strategy to prevent class solidarity and deflect attention from a direct source of the economic instability among both White and Black Americans.

This has obvious modern relevance. The Tea Party, whose popularity was fueled by a racist backlash to Barack Obama's presidency (Engels, 2010; Hochschild, 2016; Parker, 2016; Parker & Barreto, 2013; Tope et al., 2015; Zeskind, 2012) received substantial economic support from the owners of industry who desired to use the movement to subvert efforts to hold big businesses responsible for environmental damage (Doreian & Mrvar, 2022; Gibson & Brulle, 2024; Nesbit, 2016). The MAGA movement (Gervais & Morris, 2018) emerges out of the Tea Party movement, again combining racist populism and the interests (and involvement) of the capitalist class. Of course, it is for exactly this reason that Du Bois's work helps us understand the very anti-educational efforts that it is itself a target of.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Christian Law

Ciela C. Capage

Notes

Author Biographies

Kevin Drakulich is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, where he also serves as Associate Director and PhD Program Director, and as Co-Director of the Race and Justice Lab in the Center for Crime, Race, and Justice. His work is concerned with how Americans think about crime and justice, both within communities and as tied to broader social issues and politics. In this work, he has a particular focus on the dynamics of race and racism.

Christian Law is a doctoral student in Northeastern University's School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. His research explores the intersections of how people think about race, crime, politics, and policing. His work is inherently interdisciplinary and spans across the fields of sociology, political science, and social psychology.

Ciela Capage is a doctoral student in the school of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology from American University. Her research interests are in how race affects perceptions of crime and criminality, the criminalization of women, and processes of gentrification.

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How the Purportedly Unpaid Wages of Whiteness Explain Support for the Criminalization of Knowledge

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Historical Background: Labor Exploitation, Racial Separation, and Education

Conceptual Model: Connecting Jim Crow to Anti-Woke Policies

Research Questions

Data, Methods, and Measures

Data

Measures

Opposition to Teaching About Race and Racism

Racial Ideologies

Demographic and Biographical Characteristics

Methodology/Analytical Strategy

Results

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author Biographies

References