To the Editor:
Steven Brint illuminates many crucial issues regarding the burgeoning state laws that restrict “divisive concepts” and DEI endeavors, but he sometimes drifts from scholarship into propaganda (“The Political Machine Behind the War on Academic Freedom,” The Chronicle Review, August 28).
The K-12 legislation proposed by the Heritage Foundation in 2021 does prohibit teaching that “individuals should be adversely or advantageously treated on the basis of their race, ethnicity, color, or national origin,” that any of these traits mark someone as “superior or inferior,” or that they convey “collective guilt.” Brint, unfortunately, errs significantly when he complains that these clauses serve to protect white people “rather than” racial minorities and thus manifest a “novel treatment” of the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. First, the quoted passages (like the rest of the Heritage proposal) make no racial distinctions. Second, millions of nonwhite people could benefit from the protections regarding “national origin.” Third, the Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act are entirely color-blind in their proscriptions. Title VI of the latter, for example, requires that no one be discriminated against (under any “program or activity” receiving Federal aid) “on the ground of race, color, or national origin.” If these two mandates had authorized discrimination against whites, a decades-long string of Supreme Court cases — from Bakke (1978), Croson (1989), Adarand (1995), Gratz (2003), and Ricci (2009) to SFFA (2023) — would have been decided differently. Because defenders of slavery routinely invoked the “curse of Ham” in Genesis, finally, many African-Americans might welcome the Heritage clause about “collective guilt.”
Brint proceeds to offer a second partisan-tinged misinterpretation, though this one is milder. Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, he asserts, requires that no students “should feel” psychological distress because of “actions taken in the past by members of their race or sex.” Laws, however, cannot prohibit people from feeling distress. What the statute forbids is telling students that they “must feel” guilt, anguish, or other forms of “psychological distress” regarding such past actions. As I wrote earlier this year, hyperbole about the distress clause is proliferating in premier journalistic organs and will itself hamper antiracist education.
Peter Minowitz
Professor of Political Science
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, Calif.
