No, They're Not Going To Stop Teaching Dred Scott

Last night, the New Yorker tweeted out an alarming legal story:

Oh my! That would be problematic. Except that’s not at all what anyone was suggesting.

The article, written by Harvard Law School prof Jeannie Suk Gersen — we’ll get back to why that’s significant in a second — leans into the sad state of affairs for justice brought upon by wokeness coming for Justice Taney’s monument to racism. It’s not that Dred Scott is a good decision, quite the opposite, but students need to learn about it to understand the racism inherent in the system.

Which is true!

But here’s what actually amounts to a “debate” over Dred Scott getting “excised”:

Matthew Steilen, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, launched the Twitter thread and advocated for editing the case down to a minimalistic page or so, to omit text that is “so gratuitously insulting and demeaning.”

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Well, that’s… not at all ludicrous. Personally, I’m in favor of presenting text in full but then not gratuitously turning the class into an opportunity for adolescent edgelord white professors to hurl racial epithets. Everyone can read the case and know what it says, we don’t need to have dramatic reenactments in class.

But even if this particular proposal is too extreme a solution, cutting back the text of the case to a version that delivers the crux of the Court’s disgraceful argument without necessarily dragging everyone through the rhetoric isn’t an absurd proposition. How one gets from this honest philosophical question to the idea that the case will soon be excised from courses is hard to fathom.

Unless you note the byline of course.

Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen rose to mainstream fame for complaining that the youths were going to ruin the law by taking away her ability to play around with rape hypos.

Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor. Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories.

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Yeah, we let people personally impacted by sexual assault participate in law school now. Who knew?

The crux of that 2014 article was “learning about criminal law requires learning how rape is prosecuted, but I can’t think of a way to impart those lessons without traumatizing students therefore… it’s the children who are wrong.” So it’s not shocking at all that she’s eager to spin the narrative that political correctness is going to whitewash racial injustice. And somehow spins it all into the idea that not assigning every word Roger Taney wrote makes you no better than the troglodytes trying to ban critical race theory in schools.

Which is a disingenuous take at best.

Sometimes the two converge in advocating the editing out of racist content that is deemed too upsetting to be worth the pedagogical benefits.

No, they don’t.

Not reading the whole text of a decision explicitly framed in class as a racist example of a broken constitutional system does not in any way converge with “we only teach that white people are great here” laws.

They’re not in the same ballpark. Not in the same league. Not in the same sport.

And, remember, I’m not even for the idea of editing the text down, but I just can’t abide the cynicism required by the professor’s take.

The article notes that Professor Steilen did not teach Plessy v. Ferguson and instead covered it as part of the Brown v. Board unit. That… makes sense. Plessy is only relevant today in juxtaposition with Brown, so how much is gained when professors demand to treat them as separate discussions? And yes, the irony is fully appreciated.

The point is that there are a lot of ways to teach the material, and professors don’t have to — and probably shouldn’t — teach the way they were taught out of unblinking fidelity to the old ways.

Experiment! Dare to approach questions in a new way! Listen to students and adapt! This may not be the right answer but at least some professors are trying.

But that’s not really what’s at stake in the New Yorker article. The New Yorker article is a click-baity effort to repackage a 2014 rape argument into a sleek “if you don’t let us do what we want, the racists win” package.

The Importance of Teaching Dred Scott [The New Yorker]