Michael Olneck: Kevin, you’ve been at this work your whole career. I’m wondering if you can kick off this conversation about the current attack on DEI by telling me what stands out to you about it? What’s unique about this historical moment?

Kevin Kumashiro: Thanks for the question, Mike. I love beginning in this way because I feel like whatever project we’re engaged in—whether it’s a scholarly one, or an organizing one, or an advocacy project—it’s incredibly important to begin by naming the moment that we’re in. How might we make sense of what’s happening, of what makes this moment unique, and of how it draws on the past?

I think the current attacks on DEI make quite clear how the goal for some is not merely to change policy, but to build a base and mobilize the public. A helpful example is the hundreds of bills in 2020 to 2021 that kicked off the latest wave of attacks. These bills aimed to restrict what we can teach—like, about critical race theory, The 1619 Project, systemic racism, gender and LGBTQ+ studies, and other “controversial” topics about diversity and equity—and, in some ways, mandate what we must teach—like so-called patriotic education or Christian ethics—as well as to dismantle civil-rights and healthcare supports for marginalized populations, particularly trans youth.

In 2021, over 130 education, legal, and civil rights organizations collaborated with me on Understanding the Attacks on Teaching: A Background Brief for Educators and Leaders, in which we argued that these attacks served collectively as both a straw man and a bogeyman: a straw man in the sense of a caricature—like the grossly distorted description of critical race theory that was to serve as a symbol of leftist ideology in schools—that was easy to beat down, and a bogeyman in the sense of something dangerous or threatening—from supposedly anti-American or divisive curriculum to trans athletes—to be feared. We argued that such narrative strategies served to stir emotions, galvanizing the public to coalesce and rise up for these and related policy goals, including other ways to dismantle public education, such as privatization. The attacks, in other words, consisted of a mix of legal, organizing, and narrative strategies to build a base, which was ultimately the goal.

How about you? How do you make sense of this moment that we’re in?

Michael Olneck: I started looking at this current iteration of the culture wars around schooling by looking at the attack on Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, which the Arizona State superintendent of education initiated in 2007. From there I went on to look at the more recent attacks initiated and catalyzed by Christopher Rufo on critical race theory, including attacks on ethnic studies. These attacks often began at local levels and spread to state and national levels. And what I noticed was how well organized the attacks were, how heavily funded they were, how local issues—local controversies—came to be amplified.

For example, Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, was very active in funding attacks on the school board in Loudoun County, Virginia. As I looked at more conflicts I was stuck by how well coordinated they were, how easily something that starts locally could be made national. Chapters of local protest groups, like No Left Turn and Moms for Liberty, with assists from appearances on right-wing media, like FOX’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show, proliferated.

What is most distinctive, right now, is the extent of the federal government’s involvement. This There is a massive and sustained attack from the very top, exceeding even Trump’s 2020 executive order on “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” which followed closely after Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson.

Now we’re seeng the mobilization of truly enormous resources. Are they going to persuade the public? They certainly can pass laws—the various states’ “divisive concept” bills, for instance. They can force DEI apparatus to shut down. But can they really turn the clock back in terms of what the public feels and thinks? That’s something I don’t think they can do.

I think the notion that America is plural is baked in now. They can’t go back on that. I think the fallback will not be to reject a mild pluralism.

Kevin Kumashiro: When you were talking about resources—how well resourced those groups are, and the larger movement seeking to dismantle public schools and attack DEI—I was reminded of the importance of power-mapping and network-mapping, both contemporarily and historically, to understand who’s leading the attacks and why their impact has been so far-reaching. Recently, we’ve seen hundreds of anti-DEI bills, including “divisive concepts” bills and anti-trans bills, which have been introduced each year in state legislatures across the country. This is not surprising, given that many of these bills were derived from model legislation put forth by organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, State Policy Network, Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, and other conservative or Christian nationalist organizations.

The recent dismantling of the US Department of Education also should not be surprising, given that a coalition of organizations led by the Heritage Foundation published the Project 2025 document, which was a blueprint for a second Trump administration that included a number of educational policy priorities that have since come to pass—ranging from dismantling and defunding the public sector, to expanding privatization, to gutting civil rights protections, to attempting to restrict curriculum and speech. Such influence over an administration is not new; Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of a blueprint, the first being for the initial Reagan administration.

In addition to seeing which and how organizations are connected, I find it helpful to unearth the strategies that have proven to be effective in changing policy. One, as already mentioned, is model legislation. Another is impact litigation, which aims, among other things, to establish precedent for future court cases—such as the string of court cases over decades that has slowly but surely whittled away at the separation of church and state in schools. Many of these court cases were spearheaded or supported by the same organizations listed above.

But changing policy is not the only goal. I was listening to a recent interview with Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a decades-old civil rights advocacy organization. One of the things he discussed was CCR’s three-pronged strategy for societal change. One is legal, trying to change the law. One is community organizing, or building up a base. And one is storytelling, or shifting the kind of narratives that are out there.

I bring this up because you were asking whether the right can persuade the public or shift public consciousness. They have in the past, and they likely will in the future, but I think that narrative work is ongoing and ever shifting, and what plays in our favor in this moment is that the demographics and cultural contexts of this country continue to increase in diversity, and with that diversification will come new ideas.

Your current work is historical, but your training is in sociology. So, I’m curious, how do you think about the intersections of these two fields, how do you bring them together, and what do they both offer us in really understanding this moment?

Michael Olneck: Well, there’s much that history shows us. As you mentioned, DEI is a kind of bogeyman meant to provoke fear. Invocation of “bogeymen” has been a staple in American political culture. The attacks on DEI fit well into the “patterns of American nativism,” which John Higham detailed in his famous 1955 book, Strangers in the Land. Steven Hahn’s recent book, Illiberal America, shows that the exclusionary impulses that are so prominent now in this DEI controversy—the purging and the effort to purge what is, in some views, un-American—are not at all new.

Despite recurrent nativism, especially explicitly racist nativism like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Americans believe that we are a nation of immigrants. Think of how Crèvecour’s Letters from an American Farmer, which celebrated the incorporation of the variety of European immigrants into American society, became a classic in the American literary canon. Even the texts and pageants from the Americanization movement made a point of putting immigrants into the American saga. After 1940, the phrase “nation of immigrants” became a commonplace. I don’t think you can get rid of that, although JD Vance is trying to. It’s an expression of an enduring side of American culture and experience, although a contested side.

Immigration restrictionists in the 1920s needlessly worried about whether eastern and southern Europeans could become good citizens in a democracy. I wish we would hear more now about what American democracy should mean and can mean. We should be talking more about aspirational America, the America in which Frederick Douglass came to believe during the Civil War, and which Langston Hughes invoked in “Let America Be America Again.” Think of Kermit Roosevelt III’s book called The Nation That Never Was. It’s a very good analysis demonstrating that our current ideals of equality and liberty for all do not derive from America’s 1776 founding but from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and from the Reconstruction Amendments. Roosevelt urges us to become not the Founders’ America but the America Lincoln tried to call into being at Gettysburg.

Kevin Kumashiro: You’re making me think of the crucial, fundamental kinds of conversations that we need to be having, not just in education, but broadly speaking. What’s the type of society or community that we aspire to be? What are the values that we wish to animate in our everyday lives, not just in words? Such big-picture philosophical and ethical questions often get tackled in spaces for the arts and humanities and social studies. And yet, those are some of the subjects that we compartmentalize and push out of schools to teach the so-called basics. We’re giving students less of the kind of education they need to really imagine what it means to advance democracy.

I was once at a conference where the speaker, Bill Ayers, was asking, “In a totalitarian society, what might we imagine schools to look like?” We brainstormed that the elite might get a really amazing education that’s teaching them to think and question and imagine and lead, but that the masses would be getting something much more watered down and impoverished that’s teaching them merely to follow. And his point was that many scholars have argued that that’s the kind of two- or three-tiered educational system that we have here in this country—a system that is antithetical to the values of DEI—despite that we claim the United States to be a democratic nation. The recent attacks on DEI only take us further from this ideal. This begs the question, what would we say an educational system should look like that serves and advances democracy?

Going back to your points, I feel like an education that serves democracy isn’t one that merely teaches us to fit into and thrive in society as it is, especially when that society suffers long legacies of inequity and injustice. Rather, it’s one that builds our capacity to imagine and create the world as it is not yet, the world as it could be—struggling to be better on issues of diversity, equity, justice, and democracy, as uncomfortable as doing so may be.

Polls tell us that people generally think highly of their public schools; they value diversity; they want their children to learn truths. Yet, we don’t often vote in our own self-interest. We can be swayed because of the seductive power of narratives and, relatedly, the emotional tug of culture wars. I wrote a report last year on A Brief History of U.S. Christian Nationalist Activism and Public Education. For the New Christian Right that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, a lot of their strategies were not unlike the three prongs of the Center for Constitutional Rights—policy work, community organization, and storytelling. This work was bolstered by inflammatory culture wars around issues like abortion, immigration, and LGBTQ+ rights, which masked intersecting policy priorities—for instance, racial segregation and neoliberal economic reforms.

I know you’ve just written a book about culture wars and education throughout history. What are some of the insights that you came up with about culture wars in the past, and how they can help us make sense of what’s happening today?

Michael Olneck: Well, the first thing I would say is that you pointed to it when you talked about public consciousness and imagination. This is where my sociological side, about which you asked earlier, comes in. I have in mind what Joseph Gusfield calls the “symbolic order” in his 1963 book Symbolic Crusade and in his 1981 book The Culture of Public Problems. In my book I employ the concept of “symbolic order” to analyze diverse education movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The symbolic order is not reducible to what kids necessarily learn in school.

What matters is what an institution expresses that is held pervasively by a society’s members to be real and to be legitimate, what Durkheim called the “conscience collective.” As Ivan Illich and David Baker have observed, we live in a schooled society. Schools pervade community life. Schooling expresses meanings. What’s being expressed is very important. And you don’t measure that by whether kids have learned it in school. You observe it or you understand it through what John Meyer calls the “effects of education as an institution.” Meyer observes that mass education reifies a national history and constructs a common civic order through cultural symbols. The symbolic order shapes what narratives have plausibility to people. What guides them? What do they make of matters? What’s most important is what schools mean and how they contribute to making meaning in a society.

A good illustration of the American symbolic order is what I call in my book “the paradigm of individual differences.” The “paradigm of individual differences” refers to the symbolic representation of the United States as a society that comprises autonomous individuals rather than particular collective entities. This is not merely acknowledging that individualism and protection of individual rights are paramount American values. It is a matter of how most Americans implicitly comprehend, interpret, and experience their lives. The paradigm of individual differences is prominent in movements both hostile to and friendly to pluralism. As I show in my book, the paradigm of individual differences is a constant from the Americanization movement through intercultural education and in multicultural education. The paradigm of individual differences constrains the realization of the oppositional or transformational aspirations that of prominent multicultural education advocates theorists like Christine Sleeter and Jim Banks advocate. Ethnic studies, on the other hand, violates the paradigm of individual differences and favorably represents the solidarity of historically marginalized and oppressed groups. This is one source of opposition to ethnic studies. Attacks on DEI take the paradigm of individual differences to an extreme by trying to efface even the recognition of the “contributions” of individuals from identifiable groups to shared American experiences and accomplishments. These attacks, and resistance to them, show that the stability of the symbolic order cannot be taken for granted. The symbolic order is both terrain for and a stake in culture wars.

Kevin Kumashiro: One thing that I’m really appreciating, Mike, is the importance of naming the paradigms of those attacking DEI, and the question of whether progressives or educators are effectively countering with a different vision. I recently wrote a book called Why Progressives Are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education, and my argument is that, too often, we are buying into someone else’s story of what the problem is and, as a result, are offering solutions that can be and have been counterproductive. Education has long been a contested site—a space where, say, anti-racism grapples with White supremacy; imperialism struggles against anti-coloniality; and so on—regarding gender, religion, social class, and other dimensions of diversity. DEI initiatives typically refuse to turn away from the intrinsic and endemic nature of these struggles that lie at the very roots of education. This is what critics of DEI oppose—teaching and learning about honest history.

I wonder if there’s anything from the past that offers hope or guidance? You know, a vision of possible worlds.

Michael Olneck: Going back to at least Rousseau, philosophers and social reformers have imagined education as a means through which to reconstruct society. John Dewey and the progressive education movement he inspired and led attempted to do just that. George S. Counts asked in 1932, “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” Counts was critical of progressive schools for not going far enough, and argued that we should give our children a vision of the possibilities that lie ahead and try to enlist them as collaborators in realizing that vision. There are, of course, examples of encouraging models worthy of respect, among them the early 1940s Springfield (Massachusetts) Plan for citizenship education and promoting democratic living. But, as David Cohen has argued, changing schools is very difficult and many laudable experiments fall prey to long-standing tacit orthodoxy about what schools and education are. Recurring red-baiting, too, has put an end to multiple attempts to make schools crucibles for democracy. And, as David Tyack and Larry Cuban show, we—at best—“tinker toward utopia.” I wish I could be more upbeat.

Kevin Kumashiro: I’ve been increasingly swayed by the argument that what changes society is not merely changing laws and changing who’s in leadership roles, but changing how the masses and the public think about things. So, I find much hope when looking to community organizing and social movements. These are more than merely a protest that leads to a chance in policy; rather, these happen when we bring a large group together to work collectively to tell a different kind of story, to shift the paradigm.

I feel like this is a moment when we can look around the country and the world and see, in some ways, historic levels of mass organizing and collective action around DEI and its intersections with other issues of injustice—from K-12 youth organizing against gun violence or climate destruction, to university students organizing against war and genocide, to young openly socialist candidates running for office and winning. Teachers are mobilizing, protesting, speaking out, and lobbying, whether it’s through their unions or beyond. And of course, so too are academics! I’m about to publish a book this summer called Collectives and the Commons that examines the journeys of four scholar-activist collectives—scholars in Chicago, California, and Hawai‘i, and deans nationwide—that have endeavored to speak collectively and publicly to raise public awareness and influence public policy. I’ve been trying to explore what it means to bring principles from movement-building into our work as scholars and leaders.

Michael Olneck: As you were talking, Kevin, I was thinking in terms of broad and deep societal changes and ways of apprehending the world. If you thought that my invoking the “symbolic order” was somewhat airy-fairy, let me throw in another concept—the concept of the “social imaginary.” Most of how I think about this is taken from the philosopher Charles Taylor’s book Modern Social Imaginaries and a 2002 essay of the same name. Oversimplifying, Taylor writes about what people carry in their heads about what is, what can be and what should be, what tacit “self-understandings” are constitutive of our modernity.

Importantly, the social imaginary is not a set of ideas. It entails what he calls “a new conception of the moral order of society.” To be sure, ideas are important for the formation of a new social imaginary. What began as an idea among a few thinkers spread into the shared imagination of many, and then into whole societies. This comes to seem Now it seems self-evident rather than one option.; this change The change which Taylor describes came about through institutions like the market economy, the public sphere, and the self-governing people. We can see the outlines of the emergent modern social imaginary in America in what the historian Gordon S. Wood has called in his book of the same title “the radicalism of the American Revolution,” where Americans began to imagine a genuinely modern world without monarchy and without the premodern social positions and social relationships monarchical governance presumes.

I have begun to worry that the attacks on DEI could be the beginning of a shift in our social imaginary that will suppress the democratic and emancipatory assumptions through which many (most?) Americans operate. Social imaginaries take a very long time to change. But the discourses which Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller are using, in combination with the fracturing of social and material infrastructure heralded by AI and the paradoxically concentrated and dispersed power the tech oligarchs wield, make me very afraid of what lies ahead. I may well be less optimistic than I sounded earlier in our conversation when I said our self-conception of America as a “nation of immigrants” would endure.

There is good reason the national protests which Indivisible and other grassroots groups undertake are called “No Kings”!

Kevin Kumashiro: I’m loving everything you’re saying. I think a lot of these battles are about whose vision of the world is going to prevail and shape the majority, or even, how does a group come up with a new vision that hasn’t yet been articulated, right?

Michael Olneck: And how do new visions become articulated and disseminated? As I tried to explain when talking a moment ago about Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary,” leaders of the American Revolution weren’t just talking about and debating political theory. They weren’t just reacting to the felt oppression of the king. They were part of a movement that shifted how we apprehend society and imagine government. They were onto something that they framed as liberty and independence, but came to be democracy.

Kevin Kumashiro: Yes. These are the kinds of questions that we’re hoping teachers and students are grappling with in schools as well. DEI initiatives have the potential to move us closer to the promise of democracy. I hope this dialogue helps in that effort!