Book Review: Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools by Amy J. Binder

There is considerable pressure in the human and social sciences to overstate the theoretical implications of empirical work, to be able to say something illuminating about everything on the basis of highly specialized mastery. This is evident in the many books with grand main titles followed by very narrow subtitles. Amy Binder’s book, of much humbler name, does accomplish its stated aims, convincingly urging for long overdue revisions to social movement theory based on her study of Afrocentric and creationist challenges to U.S. public schools in the 1980s and 1990s.

In this highly readable book, Amy Binder explores two seemingly different groups of citizens that charged local American schools with mistreating their children in ways that diminished their self-esteem and nurtured their under-performance: Afrocentrists who aimed to dis-lodge the Eurocentrism that saturated social studies and history classes and Christian conservatives troubled by the hegemonic secular humanist culture of schools reflected in the teaching of evolution in science classes. Both ultimately won some battles but lost the war, although they lost in different ways: school officials were generally more respectful of Afrocentric demands, treating them as legitimate ones to be considered in their official agendas. Although in two instances, curricula were, in fact, adjusted, these were not lasting accommodations. The efforts of creationists, by contrast, were openly rejected with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Academy of Sciences, both invoking constitutional requirements separating church and state. While creation science advocates were elected to school boards and legislative bodies in three different locations and were able to pass creationism-friendly law in their school systems, educational professionals quickly fought these political gains with all of their institutional resources.

Binder outlines the larger implications of these conclusions for social movement theory. First, the ‘‘movements’’ under study here, while not the typical (mass, national, government-directed) focus of social movement theory, are actually far more characteristic of the kind of local and institution-focused activism of the U.S. at the end of the twentieth century. What is more, unlike the primary focus of social movement theory on the formation and emergence of political activity, Binder’s concentration on the question of efficacy and outcome suggests a need to revise other central concepts, in particular those of framing, of insider/outsider location, and of political opportunities and constraints. While framing clearly still involves diagnosing a problem, giving a prognosis, and defining who belongs to the side of justice, past work has focused primarily on framing that mobilizes large publics. In Binder’s study, the people who activists aimed to sway were those working inside educational institutions. The ability of Afrocentrists to persuade such ‘‘insiders’’ and of creationists to become ‘‘insiders’’ suggests that such a sharp division between insiders and outsiders obscures how people actually encounter and inhabit institutions. Insights from the new institutionalism help to explain both how educational institutions have greater autonomy than is often presupposed—that in a national conservative era, creationists were so publicly rebutted at the local level—and that they have their own set of sector-specific demands to which their members feel obliged to conform. This consistency is set against the fact of institutions being internally chaotic, divided among individuals seeking competing ends who will, at times, align against others. Schools and governments, in other words, are not the well-unified, monolithic opposition that much social movement writing suggests.

Many potential readers of this book will be drawn by an interest in its treatment of Afrocentrism, which, in my view, is its weakest feature. Although there are Afrocentric activists who fit Binder’s description as more concerned with seek- ing respect and group status in educational decision making than ‘‘measurably improved academic achievement on the part of their children’’ (5), the classicism, traditionalism, essentialism, and conservatism that she uses to define Afrocentrism seem to miss its central concern: Why is it that Black and brown student school performance is so different in countries, including those with histories of colonization, where there are Black and brown majority populations? The hope of many such writers is to wed two projects together: to insist that Black and brown students will perform better academically as curricula become more rigorous and historically accurate. Afrocentrists under-score the challenge of replacing norms of overstating the accomplishments of European communities. Really, to shift an account of the past and present of U.S. life and to make an estimation of U.S. schooling, one that incorporates the intellectual development of students of color, would require revolutionary change. The unique emphasis Afrocentrists place on Blackness and on Africa then is not contingent. Becoming American, a process in which schools have been centrally involved, has been defined as moving away from Black- ness as much as one is able.

Without an account of the efforts of Afrocentrism to create more truthful curricula, the emergence of an avowedly more pluralistic culture of schooling pales as an accomplishment. Inclusivity should not only mean openness to representing any group that can mobilize with sufficient force. There should be some criterion for evaluating the actual merit of arguments for incorporation. In the absence of this, those who are treated legitimately may only be so publicly, where elected officials fear backlash; in the case of Afrocentrist challenges, of moralistic charges of racism in districts that are majority of color. It is true that there are brands of Afrocentrism that collapse into dogmatism that is inhospitable to the very spirit of inquiry that we are already so failing to cultivate in U.S. public schools. Still, we should be more disturbed by the losses of the Afrocentrists than by those of the creationists if our hope is to really begin to have the kinds of conversations that could lead to the actual implementation of school curricula that beckon students toward learning by revealing the world of which they are a part.