City Journal, a Right-of-Center (but not off the edge), high-brow magazine and website – posted an article on Monday (September 1) by Michael Torres about what he claims is the teaching of Critical Pedagogy by the Lower Merion School District.
TheAdvocate.org defines Critical Pedagogy as a teaching philosophy that invites educators to encourage students to critique structures of power and oppression. It is rooted in critical theory, which involves becoming aware of and questioning the societal status quo. In critical pedagogy, a teacher uses his or her own enlightenment to encourage students to question and challenge inequalities that exist in families, schools, and societies.
As evidence of LMSD’s embrace of Critical Pedgogy, Torres cites the book “Not My Idea – A Book About Whiteness,” which was read by fourth and fifth-graders at Gladwyne Elementary School.
Anastasia Higginbotham, the author of “Not My Idea,” doesn’t go to great lengths to define or explain what it is that she means by Whiteness. In fact, it’s not until you get past “the end” of the story when you actually see the word Whiteness for the first time in the “activities,” where she explains that “Whiteness is a bad deal. It always was.” And on the opposite page she displays the contract (see above) “binding you to Whiteness.” Then on the next page she tells the kids, “You can be White, without signing on to “Whitenss.”
That’s it. You won’t find the word Whiteness anywhere else in “The Book About Whiteness.”
Presumably, the nine-to-eleven-year-olds reading “Not My Idea” will be able to figure out what Higginbotham means by Whiteness from the three mentions of it, or from the context of the rest of the book. Or maybe their teachers or parents will explain it to them.
This adult reader is pretty sure that what the author is talking about in title of the book and in the three other instances where she actually uses the word, is that Whiteness is a condition or a state into which all White People are born – A state that gives them opportunities to have success and happiness (mostly economic, but not entirely) at the expense of Non-White People who must suffer and experience less success and happiness because of Whiteness. It’s a zero-sum game in which Whiteness enables White People to get a disproportionately larger piece of the Happiness Pie.
After reading “Not My Idea,” children still might not be able to articulate the meaning of the word Whiteness. But that’s not to say that this book doesn’t get its message across well, and that message (as this adult reader understood it) is that even little kids like you, can and should liberate yoursevles from Whiteness, and that you should choose the other path (not named anywhere in the book, but you don’t need to know its name in order to choose it) and make yourselves happier people – and make a lot of other people happier as well.
To say that “Not My Idea – A Book About Whiteness,” is also a book surrounded in controversy, would be an understatement.
In March of 2021, Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for The Atlantic, which is not by any means considered to be Right-of-Center, wrote about “Not My Idea,” – it seems to teach children with white parents that they should not count on their goodness or trustworthiness. And as someone whose profession requires watching awful videos of police killings, I would strongly urge parents to switch off a TV rather than let their young child see one—a choice that the book seems to criticize. Many parents will also find the book’s subject matter too mature for kids not yet in the first grade. Denisha Jones, a Sarah Lawrence College scholar active in the BLM at School movement, articulated a related concern in a 2020 Zoom discussion with other educators. Teachers must be careful about exposing young kids to horrific material, she said, because the movement’s goal is “to affirm Blackness in children, especially young children,” and “that needs to happen before we even get to America’s history of slavery … It is not appropriate for really young children that they only hear about Black history through a lens of slavery and civil rights.”
“Not My Idea” also has its supporters. The New York Times cited Gisel Saillant [who] teaches sixth-grade social studies at a public middle school in Cambridge, Mass. She used to be frustrated that the white children in her class approached conversations about race as thought experiments. “I didn’t want to have my students leave sixth grade without discomfort,” she said. “That’s part of their learning.”
And Elizabeth Bird, in SchoolLibraryJournal.com wrote – Anastasia Higginbotham’s latest book Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness. It is, quite frankly, the first book I’ve seen to that provides an honest explanation for kids about the state of race in America today … Did I have any moments of doubt about reading this book to my kid? I wish I could tell you that I walk through life without succumbing to whiteness at any time, but let’s be honest. The minute I got this book I didn’t immediately show it to my daughter. It’s crazy to think that as an adult I had to read and digest and process the book first, but I did. To some extent I wanted to be able to talk with my kid about every single aspect of this story as it comes up. When you get to the page where it shows how whites have “exploited the love and labor of Black women” you should be able to say what that means. And if you don’t know what that means then you need to educate yourself first and then educate your child. That’s a lot of work, but long gone are the days when being a parent meant phoning in your opinions.
Because their students were reading “Not My Idea,” Gladwyne School was cited last August in the Washington Free Beacon and discussed on FoxNews by Tucker Carlson. NBC News also mentioned Gladwyne school in a story about Critical Race Theory.
Here’s the whole book, read by actor John Jimmerson. Watch/Listen/Read it and leave your own critique of it in the Reply Section below.
I am not a parent but I think this book could be very helpful.
It is a good book for starting kids thinking. And feeling. I like that it deals with some of the feelings that can arise when looking at racism for the first time. These feelings: like sadness or even grief can come up for adults too.
The book should be discussed to make sure that kids especially younger ones understand the concepts.
The idea of the contract of whiteness in particular could be hard to grasp, kids might not even know what a contract is, but it could be explained.
The one thing I wish it included were some ideas of -specific- things kids could do. But perhaps that could be part of the discussion between a child and parent after reading it. “I wonder what our family could do?”