This article was originally published in The American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute
In states across the country, left-wing academics and major educational establishments are hijacking the review process for K-12 history and civics curricula. Educators and radicals, in league with one another, are conspiring to turn students against America’s traditional cultural and political institutions.
Now that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is being exposed as ahistorical indoctrination, a new permutation of neo-Marxist theory is gaining currency in our schools. It’s called postcolonialism. Its stated mission is to fight “settler colonialism,” a term used to describe any society supposedly built upon the oppression and genocide of indigenous people. Examples of “settler societies” include Israel, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. The recent student activism against Israel, which denied the country’s right to exist and celebrated terrorist attacks against it, demonstrated the true nature of postcolonialism and its power to inspire hatred on campus.
Whereas CRT is largely an American phenomenon, postcolonial ideology developed within a broader global context, emerging out of the various movements to end empire around the world—much as CRT emerged as a mutation of the movement to end racial segregation in America. What the civil rights movement is to CRT, the decolonization movement is to postcolonialism. The intellectual forefather of postcolonial ideology is the Marxist intellectual Frantz Fanon, whose writings glorified Algeria’s violent resistance to French control in the middle of the 20th century.
Starting in the 1990s, the field of settler colonial studies (SCS) brought postcolonial ideology into mainstream academia. Since then, history, anthropology, and sociology departments across the Western world have been teaching college students that their nation is an illegitimate settler colonial society built upon white supremacy, theft, and genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples.
SCS is now quietly becoming the basic framework for K-12 social studies curricula throughout the country. For instance, Oregon’s 8th-grade history standards ask students “to examine the differing forms of oppression, including cultural and physical genocide, faced by Indigenous Tribes and acts of resilience and resistance used by Indigenous peoples in response to settler colonialism.”
Among the most powerful exponents of postcolonial ideology in K-12 curricula is the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), the nation’s largest social studies organization. In 2018, NCSS issued a policy statement declaring that because “all education in the United States takes place on Indigenous lands,” social studies education ought to prioritize “Indigenous perspectives” and challenge “dominant narratives and Eurocentric logics in curricula.”
To accomplish this agenda, NCSS encourages standards to be written in a manner so that words like “discovery,” “exploration,” and “expansion” are no longer “normalized ways to organize curriculum.” Among the topics NCSS indicts for encoding “Eurocentric norms, values, and knowledge” are teaching units on westward expansion, Lewis and Clark, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving; reading the novel Little House on the Prairie; and conducting historical reenactments of events like the Oklahoma Land Run. Instead, NCSS encourages an inordinate focus on American Indian history, culture, and tribal government.
Of course, our national story is deeply intertwined with the history of American Indians. Any rigorous set of standards would include relevant discussions of them when appropriate. However, when “indigenous perspectives” are made the dominant framework in order to “decolonize” the curriculum, presentations of significant historical figures and events are either distorted or entirely omitted to make way for niche topics. Oregon’s 5th-grade history standards covering colonial and early U.S. history excludes mention of Christopher Columbus in favor of analyzing “the distinct way of knowing and living amongst the different Indigenous peoples of North America before contact.”
The exclusion and distortion of traditional American history in favor of “indigenous perspectives” is both ideologically and politically motivated. The central tenet of postcolonial ideology is that the perceived injustices of the past are not isolated to a limited set of finite historical moments. The Australian historian Patrick Wolfe, considered one of the founding scholars of SCS, explains that “Invasion is a structure not an event,” meaning that all settler colonial societies perpetuate the oppression and genocide of indigenous peoples by virtue of their existence.
Accordingly, the goal of postcolonial ideology extends far beyond simply including nontraditional perspectives in K-12 curriculum; its aim is to indoctrinate and train a generation of radical Left activists. As explained by NCSS, “social studies education has a responsibility to oppose colonialism and systemic racism,” making it essential for teachers to understand “their role as agents for social change.”
Revolution Without Borders
The infiltration of postcolonial ideology into K-12 social studies curriculum is widespread, with even solidly conservative states in the heartland of America such as Idaho and Wyoming falling victim. Though postcolonialist teaching in these states is far less explicit than in places like Oregon or Maine, the influence of SCS is nevertheless evident.
One of the most underhanded ways to sneak postcolonialism into K-12 social studies is through lessons on “tribal sovereignty” in civics. Ostensibly, these lessons merely inform students about the legal structures of native tribes and their relation to the U.S. government. But although such discussions may seem innocuous, tribal sovereignty is actually emphasized to illustrate that the fight against settler colonialism is an ongoing struggle. As explained by SCS scholars Leilani Sabzalian and Sarah B. Shear in an essay titled “Confronting Colonial Blindness in Citizenship Education: Recognizing Colonization, Self-Determination, and Sovereignty as Core Knowledge for Elementary Social Studies Teacher Education”:
While teaching about Indigenous citizenship, nationhood, and sovereignty might not appear “controversial”…recognizing these constructs disrupts normative discourses about citizenship, as well as challenges the legitimacy of the U.S. as a democracy. Indigenous citizenship, for example, challenges normative discourses of whiteness and white supremacy…as well as “colonial normativity” in U.S. citizenship.
The most telling linguistic marker of SCS’s influence is the use of “indigenous peoples” in place of traditional terms like American Indian. The difference between these terms is not merely semantic. In the parlance of critical theory, “indigenous peoples” serves the same function as “proletariat” in traditional Marxist theory. It evokes “an emergent, collective, (and) globalizing…sociopolitical identity” premised upon the shared struggle of all indigenous peoples across the globe against a common system of oppression. Illustrating this same understanding of the concept, Idaho’s proposed standards will require students to “develop an awareness of the similar experiences of indigenous populations in the world.”
According to the settler colonialist framework, indigenous peoples across the globe share a common struggle against the continued exploitation and theft of “indigenous lands.” To reinforce this belief, standards will often include mini land-acknowledgements by referring to the “time immemorial presence” of American Indians or emphasizing that they were the continent’s first inhabitants. The implicit lesson of this claim is that all current lands “occupied” by those societies rightfully belong to their original inhabitants.
It is this message—that America was stolen, and by extension its existence is inherently illegitimate—that makes postcolonial ideology so dangerous. Postcolonialism is not about creating a colorblind society, achieving equal rights, or advancing social justice. It is an ideology of sedition, which is why it fetishizes indigenous “resistance and resilience.” Under these terms, the calls heard in far-flung corners of the world to “kill the Boer” and liberate Palestine “from the river to the sea” are just as much a threat to America as they are to Israel or South Africa.
Such a divisive and militant ideology has no place in our children’s classrooms. In confronting this problem, lawmakers must recognize that the proliferation of critical theory in social studies curricula puts to rest once and for all the myth of value-neutral education. The teaching of our national story is inherently political; the question is whether we want our children to cherish or revile their national heritage. If we are to preserve the American way of life, we must purge postcolonial ideology from our education system and emphatically reaffirm the nobility and justice of our political and cultural inheritance.
