Ethnoracial Curricular Deprivation and Indexes of (Anti-)Blackness in U.S. History Textbooks, 1950–2020

• In Event: (Mis)Educating (Black) Sexed and Gendered (Some)Bodies

Abstract

Using 42 textbooks published between 1950 and 2020 in California and Texas, this study employs critical discourse analysis to make sense of the way Black life is positioned, or conceptually framed as indexes of the genre of human in this paper, within the larger historiography of the United States. Preliminary findings suggest that Between 1950 and 2020 United States’ textbooks have indexed Blackness across a myriad of genres of human (e.g., respectable, agentive, non-human, etc.). As education is seen as a vehicle to improve humanity, this project reorients our interrogation of racial logics in textbooks to move beyond an analysis of discrete racial categories to call into question how Black life has been rendered legible as human within textbooks.

Author

• Darion A. Wallace, Stanford University