U.S. president Donald Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account in which former American president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama were depicted as apes. I was unsurprised, yet nonetheless disgusted. U.S. senator Jon Ossoff also found the video unacceptable. He said during a rally in Atlanta that Donald Trump was “posting about the Obamas like a Klansman.”
There is a chance that not many Americans understand what Ossoff meant by that.
I do not make excuses for people who say and do racist things. I do, however, assume some level of what I call “educational responsibility” for such actions. By this, I mean that I ask myself and other colleagues questions like, “Where in the K–12 curriculum and in college classrooms do we explicitly teach students why that statement or behavior is racist?”
It is plausible that older Americans who were once youngsters never learned anything at home, in schools or anyplace else about the history of Black people being associated with monkeys and apes, and why it is beyond problematic. Abby Phillip, host of CNN NewsNight, offered a clear explanation on her show following the Trump incident.
I have higher expectations for a U.S. president. But for others, I accept some portion of the blame on behalf of educators who presume that students were perhaps taught about these topics at home and already know better. We should stop making such assumptions. Doing so makes us complicit when current and former students of ours engage in outrageously racist acts.
James Bridgeforth, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, is one of my former Ph.D. advisees. In 2019, he and I wrote an Education Week article about a photo that emerged of four elementary school teachers in Los Angeles County holding a noose on campus. They were smiling. The principal was their photographer. As indicated in our article title, James and I were not surprised. We were neither excusing nor normalizing this behavior. However, we both had tracked educator-involved racist incidents for years. We had seen similar and worse situations. James subsequently handcrafted a database of more than 500 educator-involved racist incidents occurring in K–12 schools spanning every geographic region of the country.
Beyond the regularity of racial absurdity, there was another reason why the California teachers noose incident did not surprise James or me: our recognition that explicit teaching and learning about nooses occurs far too infrequently in K–12 schools and in university-based teacher-preparation programs. Is it possible that the four teachers and their principal never learned anything at all in their formal schooling experiences about nooses as a tool used to terrorize Black people in America? It is not only conceivable, but highly likely. Such topics are not traceable in K–12 and postsecondary curricula. Honestly, they probably never have been.
Illiteracy about this and a range of other racial topics is guaranteed to worsen as books are banned in our nation’s K–12 schools. The teaching of racial topics has been outlawed or whitewashed at many educational institutions, including colleges and universities. How and where, then, will students learn that posting a video that depicts Black people as apes is racist? They will grow up to become teachers and school administrators, CEOs, elected officials, and leaders in other industries who unknowingly do and say racist things.
The blame will not be entirely theirs. We, educators, will be partly responsible. The politicians who refused to let us teach full truths about America’s racial past and present also will be culpable. College and university presidents and governing board members who failed to do more in defense of academic freedom and the freedom to learn also will be liable.
I go on record here with these two declarations: Associating Black people with apes is racist, and educators must assume greater responsibility for ensuring that today’s students do not become tomorrow’s adults who engage in racist behaviors because we failed to teach them better.
“I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump told a reporter who asked him about the Obama apes Truth Social post. Tim Scott, our nation’s lone Black Republican senator, posted on X, “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.” Other GOP leaders have condemned Trump’s post. They and the rest of us will likely have to keep denouncing and apologizing for people doing racist things in our country until we, educators, are allowed to teach them better.
Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.
