Or, the educational thought and feelings of anti-DEI crusaders
What humanities curriculum do anti-DEI crusaders want taught in American colleges and universities? Are they calling for a return of the ‘Great Books‘ curriculum featuring Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens? The ‘Foundations of Western Civilisation’ curriculum that traces 500 years of European history and culture? Or, perhaps a curriculum that is less, well, civilised…
The Curriculum Wars
In the 1990s, conservative intellectuals lamented the ostensible loss of these curricula in the ‘curriculum wars’. This loss stemmed from efforts that contested how subjugating, ignoring, and erasing knowledge maintains systems of domination. These curriculum wars have never really stopped. However, the struggle over the humanities curriculum today has been overshadowed by more pressing concerns: the threat to academic freedom and autonomy; the attack on scientific research; the rollback of admissions and staffing practices that acknowledge histories of discrimination; and, perhaps most worryingly, the detention and deportation of international students who are Muslim or support Palestinian lives and sovereignty.
Since Ferguson, one of the charges against left-wing student protestors has been that they have no other aim than to dismantle universities, to burn them proverbially to the ground. I have been mindful of that criticism as I have tried to understand, perhaps naively, what vision ‘anti-DEI crusaders’ have for higher education institutions, other than, say, burning them down. I have been particularly interested in their vision for the humanities curriculum. What is their vision for first-year humanities courses that are taught across private and publish higher education institutions, courses that they have attacked as leftist indoctrination?
Christopher Rufo’s Curriculum Contribution
A glimpse of this curricular vision was provided in a 7 March 2025 interview by conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat with Christopher Rufo, a key architect of the American war on critical race theory. Douthat asks Rufo what professors should do if they want to assign students books by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other figures who, as he puts it, ‘are associated with radicalism and wokeness.’ To give Rufo a wee bit of credit, he does not answer by saying these books should be burned or banned from libraries and curriculum (a low threshold for sure … but hey ho that’s where we are.) Instead, Rufo answers that the professor should pair one of Coates‘s books with his own book, America’s Cultural Revolution. That way, Rufo says, students will grapple with the ‘best arguments from both of the major sides or traditions.’
In his response to this question, Rufo speaks to the liberal curriculum tradition in which ideas from ’both of the major sides or traditions’ are presented to students. The curricular aim is to teach them to think critically about which traditions should win in the marketplace of ideas. But, not so subtly, Rufo determined that his book is the best book to pick for this competition. In other words, his book represents the best argument from a major tradition. If Rufo is seeking a curriculum that teaches university students’ epistemic humility, he seems to lack the stuff. Nonetheless, to give him the benefit of the doubt, which is to say that he is trying to do something other than merely sell his own books, what is this curriculum vision? After all, Rufo did not call for a return to the ‘white curriculum‘. Say what you will about his intentions, he did not demand that books by Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates be excluded from the humanities curriculum. What then is this curriculum?
Juliet Hooker on White grievance
Juliet Hooker, a political philosopher at Brown University, has investigated how White people’s emotions that have been fuelling the right-wing authoritarian populist movement. This scholarship is part of a broader understanding of how ‘racialised emotions‘—or emotions that fit one’s position within a society structured in racial dominance—forge social collectives that contest the uneven distribution of material and symbolic rewards based on ‘race.’ indeed, there has been broader public recognition of the role that grievance has played in motivating White voters without university degrees to support Trump, what has been called the ‘whitelash.’ American historian Carol Anderson’s book ‘White Rage‘ was highly influential in this regard.
In Hooker’s 2017 paper in South Atlantic Quarterly, Hooker argues that white grievance can be explained in part by the ‘white inability to cope with loss.’ This loss not only encompasses the decline of relative material advantages over non–Whites. It also encompasses the decline of relative symbolic advantages over non-Whites. Hooker points to countless examples of symbolic loss since Ferguson: the removal of Confederate symbols from state property; the push to place Harriet Tubman on the twenty dollar bill; and, the rise of black artists in country music. Perhaps nothing triggered this inability to cope with cultural loss more than the symbol #blacklivesmatter. White people across class lines interpreted this symbol as if it meant protestors were declaring that White lives didn’t matter, hence the resentful retort, #AllLivesMatter. Hooker argues that these flashpoints of symbolic loss trigger white rage. This racialised emotion coalesces a populist, xenophobic, racist, and White nativist political movement led by Trump.
The White Rage Curriculum
Is ‘white rage’ fuelling Rufo’s vision for the humanities curriculum? From this perspective, the problem here that Rufo seeks to address is his own struggle, and the struggle of white people more generally, to cope with the loss of the relative advantage that whiteness has enjoyed in the ostensibly neutral liberal marketplace of ideas. In other words, white people’s ideas are no longer valued as much merely for being conjured up in heads that are white. They have to be good too! The rage over this loss, this relative and unfair advantage, is what motivates his curriculum proposal. He is not calling for the return of the white curriculum per se. He is calling for the restoration of this relative advantage of the white intellectual tradition in the liberal marketplace of ideas.
Of course, the neutrality of that marketplace was always a myth. The ‘Great Books’ curriculum and the ‘Foundations of Western Civilisation’ curriculum won out, so to speak, through exclusion, erasure, and ‘epistemicide,’ as decolonial scholars such as Ramón Grosfoguel put it. It was the hard-fought push to recognise this ‘epistemic violence,’ and its material (and existential) effects, that led to their relative downfall in the first place. Losing this relative advantage in the global marketplace of ideas, one that is still being waged, including through scholasticide, has perhaps become too much for Rufo and other anti-DEI crusaders to bear. However, Rufo appears to recognise that he cannot win by proposing to exclude subordinated knowledge, or merely assign the ‘white curriculum.’ That would make him the racist that anti-racists are fighting. Instead, holding his own ideas in high esteem, he seeks to restore the epistemic virtue of whiteness through assigning his own book alongside the public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s a curriculum of white rage. And like the white curriculum before it, it is still shaped by illiberal tendencies (rage, violence, and revenge) as much as liberal ones (equality, neutrality, competition).
Emotional Learning for White Loss?
White emotions have been at the heart of curriculum debates in the wake of #blacklivesmatter. A few years ago, my high school alma mater, The Columbus Academy, a private independent school in Ohio, became embroiled in a Fox News-fed frenzy. A group of parents accused the school of making their White children feel guilt, shame, and hatred towards themselves and their nation for its racial and settler colonial violence in the past and present. Their feelings should matter, these parents said. Yes indeed. And the curriculum that recognises those feelings is the white rage curriculum.
When confronted with how to address the problem of white rage, Juliet Hooker turns to Frederick Douglass. In 1894, Douglass argued that the problem of lynching and anti-Black violence was a white problem, not a black one. Through this insight, Hooker argues that the question of what comes after Trump will be determined by whether white citizens can learn to cope with the loss of relative material and symbolic advantages that they have enjoyed in a world that has been structured in racial domination for hundreds of years. That is an education problem, one that a curriculum against white rage might set out to achieve.
Further reading
Hooker, Juliet. “Black Protest / White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 3 (July 2017): 483 – 504. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3961450
Modrak, Rebekah, and Jamie Vander Broek, eds. Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts. Cleveland, Ohio: Belt Publishing, 2021.
While you are here…
Please consider supporting campaigns that provide support to academics and students who are being targeted by the current administration.