Anti-Diversity Education Laws Chill Classroom Speech and Threaten Inclusive Education

Genevieve Bonadies Torres
Associate Director, Educational Opportunities Project, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

Over the past year, several conservative lawmakers have been engaged in a concerted effort to severely restrict teaching about race and gender in schools, censoring teachers from providing a more complete, truthful account of history and its present-day effects. While these laws are commonly labeled “anti-critical race theory” bills, they in fact chill speech far more broadly: attacking culturally responsive curricula, banning anti-racist practices, and prohibiting a variety of diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) training programs. Ultimately, the laws target legitimate and long overdue steps taken by thoughtful public educators who seek to acknowledge and address the past and present inequities faced by Black people and other historically marginalized groups. Educators redoubled these efforts following the national reckoning on racial injustice in 2020. These laws are a transparent attempt to halt and reverse such progress.

Oklahoma is just one example of a state where anti-diversity and anti-inclusion campaigns are already having a detrimental effect on students. Last spring, the legislature passed H.B. 1775, which restricts discussions on “race and sex” in elementary and secondary schools, as well as in higher education. State lawmakers explained that the law’s purpose is to end the use of words like “diversity” and “equity,” to protect children from the “lies” of “police brutality” and intersectionality, to curb instruction on “implicit bias,” and to erase lessons on the concept of “institutionalized racism.” Those who refuse to be silenced face stiff penalties: teachers who fail to comply can be stripped of their professional licenses, and districts can lose state accreditation.

H.B. 1775 is having its intended effect. Some districts have stricken books by Black and female authors such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass from their reading lists. School officials have instructed teachers to avoid the terms “diversity” and “white privilege” in the classroom. Some teachers are no longer teaching about the historical contributions of women of color because they fear running afoul of the law. Even university professors are modifying lessons to refrain from discussions about racism, sexism, and oppression.

This censorship is not limited to Oklahoma. Since January, more than half of all U.S. states have introduced bills or taken other steps that seek to restrict how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. At least eight states have signed such bans into law, while several others have censored and chilled classroom speech through the issuance of rules, resolutions, or attorney general opinions. These state laws vary in some particulars, but they all follow a similar formula. They are patterned on President Trump’s Executive Order 13950, which prohibited federal agencies and contractors from discussing certain “banned concepts” related to race and sex. A federal court partially enjoined EO 13950 under the First Amendment because its vague terms chilled important speech, but state legislators have copied these constitutionally infirm provisions—often verbatim—to silence any viewpoints that deviate from their own preferred narratives about our country.

The suppression of speech in places like Oklahoma robs students of the information, ideas, and tools necessary to support the type of robust dialogue long recognized by courts as essential to America’s democratic system. As recently as 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court described America’s schools as the “nurseries of democracy,” Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist. v. B. L. by & through Levy (2021), and the Court has repeatedly emphasized that “the Nation’s future depends on leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, rather than through any kind of authoritative selection.’” Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist. (1969) (quoting Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967)).
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—along with the ACLU and pro bono counsel Schulte, Roth, and Zabel—has filed a lawsuit challenging Oklahoma’s law under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and more lawsuits are likely to follow in other states. However, additional advocacy is needed to counter the slew of state laws that have emerged over the past year to erode and eliminate schools’ diversity and inclusion efforts. Such advocacy will help ensure public schools can develop the next generation of analytical, open-minded thinkers who have the skills to tackle today’s most pressing issues that often fall along the fault lines of sex, race, and inequality.