TEACHING WHITE SUPREMACY by award-winning author Donald Yacovone is a fascinating look at "America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity." It seems that much of the very public debate about critical race theory was based on misunderstandings and this text "flips" questions about curriculum content to look at how ideas about white supremacy are actually ingrained in culture and school texts. Yacovone focuses quite a bit of his discussion on the Reconstruction period which he says, "although intending to be a transforming democratic experience, ironically only increased the North's desire to erect walls of racial segregation." He also notes in detail how several cities and some Southern rural areas adopted Black history textbooks in the 1920s for their segregated schools. In another example, he describes mid-1940s research by Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Prize winning economist, as concluding "that white American democracy depended on Black subordination for social stability." While Yacovone alludes to the 1970s as a time when "textbooks begin to reflect a shifting society and question how Americans had previously understood their past and themselves," I wish there was more discussion of recent events, including efforts at banning books. The New York Times contrasted textbook content in a 2020 article which has an accompanying lesson for students [links below].

A noteworthy aside is the poetry which Yacovone includes at the beginning of various sections. This ranges from lyrics from the musical South Pacific: "You've got to be taught to hate and fear, You've got to be taught from year to year..." to Amanda Gordon's "The Hill We Climb:" "being American is more than a pride we inherit -- It's the past we step into and how we repair it." Yacovone includes copious notes (roughly twenty-five percent of the text) and at least ten pages filled with a Bibliography of Textbooks, many of which have late 1800s copyrights. Interestingly, he refers to The American YAWP in his notes; that updated (2021-2022) open source text is available online. Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly all gave TEACHING WHITE SUPREMACY starred reviews, referring to it as an "outstanding contribution to the historical literature" and "essential reading." I am looking forward to the many discussions TEACHING WHITE SUPREMACY will prompt.

Related links:
https://www.americanyawp.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/learning/lesson-of-the-day-two-states-eight-textbooks-two-american-stories.html

I had to do a second take and then read the description when I first saw this book. It is a history on the dissemination of white supremacist ideas through textbooks. It really shows just how ingrained the idea has been, generation to generation, and accounts for some of the reason why there was no pushback, and now, resistance to dismantling the paradigm.
In some ways, the book is a more targeted version of Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. It's not just on specific textbooks, however, but on the history of slavery and racism in textbooks. For me, the chapter that stood out the most was the one covering 1920-1964, which really linked the Lost Cause myth, resistance to civil rights, and the development of dog-whistling.
I would have liked some longer excerpts from the textbooks the author mentions. In some places, I feel like I was being told rather than being able to see, what the books were saying. In some places, the book was encyclopedia-ish, with lots of mentions of books and phrases found within them. I wondered as I read if it would have been better to narrow down the books the author examined in each time period to focus on a few in particular.