The College Board, the organization that designs the Advanced Placement college-level curriculum for high school students, recently removed a number of terms from a preliminary course on African American studies. One of the keywords that disappeared? “Systemic”.
By removing this term, the College Board lost an opportunity to help young people learn and think critically about the connection between the design of our institutions and the unequal way opportunities and resources are distributed in America.
The debate over whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis influenced this decision misses a more important point. These language changes speak volumes about the current state of American culture and what is required to move forward.
conservative activists say that the changes in the study plans have to do with keeping “politics” out of the classroom. But I see this as a troubling example of the use of state power to censor ideas. I worry about a future in which students have not been exposed to accurate and comprehensive perspectives of our past.
I think we would all agree on one thing: The College Board made these changes under duress.
But where did this pressure come from? Pointing fingers at politicians or social media influencers only gets us so far. We need to look at the cultural mindsets that make it possible for the term “systemic racism” to become a topic of educational controversy.
cultural mindsets they are understandings and assumptions that run beneath our superficial opinions. They shape how we see the world and act in it.
As a psychological anthropologist, I have been studying these mindsets for the past 20 years and have found a set of them—individualism, otherism, and fatalism—that underlie many Americans’ thinking about racism. These mindsets don’t justify the College Board’s decisions, but they show us what needs to be done to move the culture to a place where there is no pressure to remove words like “systemic” and “fixes” from a high school class.
These mindsets point to the need for more explanatory stories, in our public discourse and in public education, about social systems of all kinds and systemic racism in particular. These stories should explain why these systems exist, how their design shapes our lives, and what we must do to redesign them to achieve different results. Importantly, these stories must make clear and undeniable the collective importance of this redesign for the future of our country.
Delving into cultural mindsets
Systemic racism refers to the way that discrimination and prejudice are written into the code of policies and practices that shape our lives. This includes the Health Care Systemhe criminal justice systemhe education systemhe housing systemhe economic system and more. Experts who study systemic racism agree that our public policies and institutions are set up in ways that provide an unfair advantage to some racial and ethnic groups and perpetuate an unfair disadvantage for others.
However, there are various cultural mindsets that make the concept of systemic racism tense for many Americans, particularly white Americans.
First is the idea that success and failure are the sole result of how hard someone tries. This individualism underlies the inclination to assess worthiness and determine, paradoxically, that those opportunities that are denied do not deserve support. This mindset explains away any lack of well-being someone experiences as a lack of character, leaving no room to criticize the larger systems that make opportunities available to some and not others.
The College Board also faced pressure from the othering cultural mindset, the threat many Americans feel to their status as the idea of structural racism has gained traction. In this mindset, giving out more to others, even if “more” means acknowledging and compensating for injustice, feels like getting less for themselves.
If these mindsets aren’t toxic enough, the idea of systemic racism presents additional challenges for many Americans.
There is also a strong sense of fatalism, a third cultural mindset, associated with thinking about systemic racism. People understand systems in a nebulous and naturalistic way: that systems are above and beyond human intervention. The result is that people view anything embedded in or caused by a system as uncompromising and beyond intervention. As a result, we disengage and resist discussing problems that are framed in this level of systems.
These challenges do not mean that teachers and students, or those who communicate in the public sphere in general, should shy away from discussions about systems. Instead, it highlights the opportunity to build on such conversations and the importance of an explanatory approach. The very fact that the College Board removed the concept of “systemic” from the curriculum shows us how important it is to discuss and explain systems: how they work, their effects, and how they can be redesigned.
Until those of us working to shape the discussion in and out of the classroom change these underlying mindsets and rebalance the cultural terrain that shapes Americans’ understanding of racism, decision-makers about institutions of our country (like our education system) will be bound and limited in the directions they feel they can take to achieve full inclusion, opportunity, access, and equity. We can argue about what should or shouldn’t be on a school curriculum, but the real work also lies in changing the culture on which these arguments are based.
This requires persistently advancing a narrative that makes the effect of systems on the social problems we experience clear and apparent. It requires a narrative that makes the designed nature of these systems undeniable. It requires a narrative that speaks pragmatically and hopefully about our ability to redesign these systems for more equitable outcomes and establishes the urgency of these changes to ensure a future for the country in which everyone has a part and a chance to be well and prosper. .
Pushing back on mindsets that lead to bad decisions, like censoring history lessons for students, requires promoting alternative ways of thinking that make the best decisions seem like common sense.
