The Diversity Bell That Trump Can’t Un-ring
Debates about teaching and writing U.S. history are as old as arguments about the character of the United States, but one recent flash point came in the early twenty-first century, with the publication of Samuel Huntington’s book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. I picked it up because I had heard grumbling about his thoughts on Latin American immigration to the United States and Latinos in general—that they concentrated in ethnic barrios, didn’t learn English, didn’t assimilate. He called it “The Hispanic Challenge.”
As I read it, I became more curious about his thoughts on what he described as the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant origins of American character, and the threat posed by the nation’s growing diversity. We had become more fragmented as a nation, and our pluralism might be our end. It’s easy to imagine the appeal of Huntington’s story of America to Donald Trump and others in his circle. Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and, “We have no country if we have no border,” Trump has said.
Huntington’s book came out in 2005, a decade after celebrations of multiculturalism and backlash against them. Indeed, Huntington’s book was part of the backlash, along with California’s Proposition 187, the voter ballot initiative that sought to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving certain public benefits; the anti-Muslim sentiment that arose after 9/11; and the 2005 Sensenbrenner bill, which stipulated the construction of 700 miles of border fencing, and which sparked the largest immigrant rights protests in American history.
Huntington’s book also anticipated by a decade the nativist reaction to the news that more than half of the babies born in the United States were nonwhite, and that a growing number of cities were majority-minority. Support for Donald Trump in many ways came from the groundswell from people terrified by these changes. The whole Trump era can be understood as a kind of last stand for a white supremacist’s conception of American history.
Compared with Huntington’s version of the American character, I was more interested in the conception provided by Richard Rodriguez in his 2003 book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Rodriguez had been criticized from the left in the early 1980s, when he argued controversially, in Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, that the way immigrants had to assimilate into the United States was by learning English. (I met him at a book signing, and when I told him I was a history Ph.D. student, training to become a Latino historian, he asked me, “Do your mentors know you’re here?”)
Rodriguez’s book was an extended meditation on the color brown, and his argument was that the Americas, including the United States, were always brown continents. His conception of the color brown had to do with skin, of course, but it was also a plea for Americans to embrace the complexity of our nation’s past; to do away with any notion of pure beginnings, and to begin again with an embrace of our impurity.
The implicit debate between Huntington and Rodriguez continues to rage. (Huntington is dead, while Rodriguez, now in his eighties, has continued to write about America’s character from his perspective as a queer Roman Catholic Latino with strong Indigenous features, as he has described his appearance.) But now Huntington’s vision has the full force of the federal government behind it. President Trump has issued executive orders to eliminate birthright citizenship, to roll back legal immigration, to make English the official language of the United States, and to enforce something he describes as a “patriotic education” in the history of our nation. Together, these orders seek both to stem the tide of demographic change—to actually make the country less brown—and to impose a version of U.S. history that replaces ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and ideological diversity with a history that has never in fact existed.
Even at the time of the founding of the United States in 1776—that all-important era that conservatives want to be our focus when contemplating our nation’s roots—the United States was never only a white, Western European, Christian, English-speaking country full of people who all shared similar backgrounds and beliefs and didn’t much care about frivolous matters such as pluralism. Large numbers of Native Americans and people of African descent lived in all of the original states. There were smaller numbers of Spanish Americans and Asian Americans.
To be sure, many of these diverse people living within the borders of the United States were by design invisible. They were not all citizens. The first census of the United States, in 1790, counted “slaves,” “free white males” over the age of 16, “free white males” under the age of 16, “free white females,” and “all other free people,” a sort of catchall used for nonwhite people who were not enslaved. Moreover, the United States in the late eighteenth century only had a small geographic footprint, and much of the North American continent’s diversity was located outside of it. Even if African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans are recognized as part of the nation now, they wouldn’t necessarily have been counted as part of America then. Much of the nation’s diversity now is the result of relatively recent legislation such as the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law during a ceremony at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and which Republicans have bemoaned ever since.
Yet none of these considerations diminishes the fact that many of the diverse peoples living in the United States today descended from these diverse communities in the past; or, even if they aren’t direct descendants, they see some of their own experiences reflected in those of earlier inhabitants who shared their culture. They want to learn their history in order to understand their place in the United States today. They seek their own roots in the larger story of their nation. Their experience of the United States hews much more closely to Rodriguez’s understanding of the country than to Huntington’s, so the challenge right now is to keep asserting Rodriguez’s version of history more than Huntington’s. This project faces significant headwinds, but like the wind blowing from the west, and rivers that run deep and steady, there’s also an incredible demand for it that will not cease.
As much as Trump and Christopher Rufo may not like it, the classes on Latino history that I teach at Northwestern have had full enrollment for several years now. Each time I teach one, I try to incorporate some new directions of the field, including a growing focus on Afro Latino communities, Indigenous Latinos, and gender discrimination, subjects driven by blossoming scholarship. Since 2022, I’ve also been teaching a Latino history course for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The course is full of high school history teachers who are hungry for more content to teach their Latino students and others. In the three years that I’ve taught it, more than 500 instructors from more than 35 states (and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Mexico) have enrolled, including the expected blue states but also red states like Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Texas, and even Nebraska.
The demand stems from growing Latino student populations in almost every corner of the United States. Some three-quarters of K-12 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District identify as Latino. The same is true of the Miami-Dade County Public School System. In Chicago Public Schools, meanwhile, the figure is about half; and for New York City Public Schools, it’s more than 40 percent. These are cities that have had significant Latino populations for a long time, but the percentage of K-12 students who are Latino is also growing in districts like the Little Rock School District in Arkansas, which is more than 15 percent Latino; Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, at more than 30 percent Latino; and Metro Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee, almost 35 percent Latino. Most of the states Trump won even have high school history or social studies standards that require the teaching of Black, Latino, Native, and/or Asian American history. These are the “divisive” subjects Trump’s Department of Education has tried to defund. Arkansas requires units in African American history. Florida requires instruction in African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American history. Indiana requires all students to take a course in ethnic studies before they graduate from high school. Kentucky requires all students to learn some African American and Native American history before they graduate. These states could hardly be accused of acting only because they are woke. I would venture to say they do not want to teach their schoolchildren to hate America. And I’m pretty sure that their aim is not to divide students from one another. To the contrary, the inclusion of these requirements in state standards brings communities together by demonstrating that different groups—all of them—have both shaped and been shaped by histories of race and inequality.
State standards get renewed every few years, and some state standards will come up for review while Trump is still president. Amid the executive orders that aim to dismantle the Department of Education as we know it and to give grants to states based on their compliance with the president’s agenda, it’s possible that these requirements will be scaled back or eliminated entirely. Certain states, even though they may have such requirements, have passed other laws that seek to restrict how race is taught. But even if the requirements go away, it won’t dampen the demand that has taken root for Latino and other rich parts of American history. The increasingly diverse students in the United States want to know the histories of their communities, and those who don’t come from those communities need to know their histories as well, because in doing so they are learning the stories of their neighbors and fellow Americans. The bell can’t be un-rung. Maybe it never had to be rung in the first place, because we’ve always lived in Richard Rodriguez’s America, not Samuel Huntington’s.