How has the intersection between religious and racial politics shaped the landscape of public education in the United States? How have communities, both past and present, historically resisted covert and overt white Christian supremacy in public education? What lessons can radical pedagogues draw from these movements today?

Our September 2024 episode features Dr. Leslie Ribovich, a scholar of American religion, religion, and education. Her book, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools (NYU Press, 2024), is illuminating reading for anyone seeking to understand the entangled histories — and surprising consequences and reverberations — of the simultaneous legal desegregation and legal secularization of public school classrooms. From the moral codes underwriting racist school discipline policies, to presumptive Protestant norms governing moral education programs, to grassroots community movements to build more equitable and just public education systems, Without a Prayer offers key context to understanding contemporary battles over the future of public education policy. Read an excerpt here.

Leslie Ribovich is currently the Director of the Greenberg Center for Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where she is also an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Law and Public Policy. She is working on a second project about forms of moral and character education in modern U.S. history.

CREDITS

Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

Editor, Audio Engineer, and composer of outro music: Aliyah Harris

Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio

Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins

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No Separation: Religion, Race, and Moral Education in American Schools

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The book is illuminating and critical reading for anyone seeking to understand the entangled histories and movements that have shaped our current public educational landscape in the U. S. From the histories of racist school discipline policies to covertly and covertly. overtly Christian curricula in public schools to vast community movements to build more equitable and just public education systems.

Leslie's book is both thorough and timely and we are so grateful for this opportunity to talk to her about her important work and how it relates to her pedagogical practices in the classroom. Welcome Leslie to Nothing Never Happens.

We want to begin by asking you about the whole issues around character education. Your fantastic historical study from the 50s and 60s, and then your own, and we can share ours, but we want to hear from you how you got into and how you define character education in public schools.

Leslie Ribovich: Absolutely. Great. Well, first, thank you so, so much for having me on.

And then my dad lived in Oakland which was right nearby until I was 14. My dad and stepmom are both public school teachers and they taught in different districts. So I just had all of these kind of different ideas and different examples of what moral and spiritual values education kind of looked like and what kind of conversations also around race and public education where there was a lot of conversations about moving for the schools or what were considered good schools or not good schools and why, right, and that seemed very laden with assumptions about who was populating the schools and So, that had always struck my interest.

And I think that we had kind of talked about going around and maybe saying a little bit about some of our different examples of times that we remember something like moral and spiritual values education in the schools. And so I can start off with that because I think this shows some of the tension that I saw.

I think it's about 20, 000 people. And she has this one line in that article that I think is excerpted from the book that's so devastating. It's something like It gives the percentages. It's like it's about half white, I'm forgetting the exact percentages, but says it's this percent Asian American, this percent Latino.

And you could say it's diverse and you probably do if you're white but it doesn't feel very diverse to the 4 percent of black residents . And I think that just speaks so well to kind of set up some of the examples.

Lucia Hulsether: Yes!

Leslie Ribovich: Oh my gosh, I just, I made the connection.

Lucia Hulsether: We call it St. Lucia's Day in my family.

Leslie Ribovich: Okay, so here I am. I don't know if you can see.

Lucia Hulsether: Okay, so for our listeners, Leslie is sharing her screen. And is that you, Leslie?

Leslie Ribovich: That's me with the crown. And then, so this is me wearing the wreath with the candles for Santa Lucia Day.

And then my, the two other students who are those students of color on either side of me I don't remember exactly what they were doing. I should have looked. into this more before I gave this example, but they were sort of supporting part of the ritual of lighting the candles. Oh, I think, yeah, maybe they were lighting the candles.

Lucia Hulsether: Body shaming. Body shaming moral education happening in your classroom.

Leslie Ribovich: Exactly. Alongside this idea of kind of uplifting all of these different traditions, right, that was super interesting. And then at the same time I, or I guess actually not the same time, maybe like 10 years later. So my siblings are 11 and 13 years younger than I am.

And they went to public school in Pleasanton, California, which is. Also the Bay Area, but a little further afield, a little more suburban. And now it is more racially diverse, but at that time it was whiter. So yeah, that was 94 I think. And then they had these signs that were just posted all around the schools with things like respect, responsibility, honesty.

Lucia Hulsether: Oh my gosh, those are such good examples. Tina, I'm curious what your examples of character education that you have gone through are.

In eighth grade civics, I was we had to role play with a creative teacher and I was Hubert Humphrey. against my parents political persuasions.

Lucia Hulsether: Can you still say your lines?

Tina Pippin: Oh, no. Oh, no. But I remember the Humphrey campaign giving me this huge packet. They had buttons and stickers and, oh, it was fabulous. So I was able to indoctrinate my classmates with all that.

Lucia Hulsether: So you were the moral and spiritual values education.

Lucia Hulsether: it's hard to just choose one example. We had Character Counts at our elementary school, which was a it was a magnet school that was in a predominantly Black, poor inner city area. And I was one of the sort of handful of white students and not just white students, but students who were middle class who were bused in to take advantage of the arts programs there.

Leslie Ribovich: Were those connected to Character Counts?

Leslie Ribovich: Yes. And, oh my gosh, I want to dive into these examples so much, but I know we only have so much time. But so I think, I mean, so, I mean, it's so interesting. The Character Counts, Stuff that you're talking about, that is, that was one of the programs that really kind of initially got me interested in all of this idea of these pillars and different values and things to say, okay, the values are on the wall, who is supposed to see themselves in these values?

Or I'm thinking about now like having the Ten Commandments on the wall in schools, right? Who's supposed to see themselves?

Lucia Hulsether: They were literally on pillars, , the sort of like Greek architecture pillars.

Leslie Ribovich: Right, so there's this sort of, classic, Western civilization connected, of course, then to white supremacy thing going on, but then also who's supposed to see themselves in them, and who's supposed to see themselves as submitting to them, right?

So those are really interesting. And the thing about my examples.. You mentioned Lucia, all the sort of patriotic things that you all sing. We didn't even do the Pledge of Allegiance. And I was most recently teaching at Transylvania University, a wonderful liberal arts college in Lexington, Kentucky. And when we talk about this I once asked students and then I realized that this was a thing that was worth asking multiple classes. But I said, how many of you said the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school, whatever school you went to? and every single student raised their hand. And so I realized that even though we are separated by however many years the geographic differences really mattered there too.

And I think that we can see that in all of our examples, and that there's such a richness and diversity about what those religious, moral, and racial resources are that differ across time, across geographical space. And even just community to community.

Lucia Hulsether: This is a really good segue into the next question I wanted to ask you.

Leslie Ribovich: Absolutely. Thank you for that question. I'll go chronologically.

That separation in and of itself is an unequal produces inequality. And in, in many ways injustice. And this actually drew on the law school paper of Paulie Murray, the Protestant theologian, activist, lawyer who wrote a law school paper that the court didn't cite, but years later one of the lawyers ended up telling them that this idea of focusing on separation, not equality had been in their paper.

And the court comes up with a much more conservative ruling, very vague, saying that desegregation of schools will happen with, quote unquote, "all deliberate speed." And this basically means that individual districts and schools decide on their own and through their own processes when and how desegregation will take place.

Leslie Ribovich: Absolutely, right. So the idea of integration often ended up being upheld is this value that I think you can see in some of the examples, especially that Lucia and I gave around multicultural education, right? Like that there's this moment of integration that's where we're celebrating Kwanzaa, we're celebrating Santa Lucia Day, right?

They thought of it as being accessible to all, but it was really Protestant Catholics and Jews working together, which in some ways was monumental to have Catholics and Jews as part of the equation, right? But it still very much emphasized God and and was seen to be quote unquote, a religious activity.

And so the Supreme Court says that's unconstitutional. And then the following year in Abington v. Shemp, the court declares all Bible reading for devotional purposes and all school prayer unconstitutional. So not just state sponsored school prayer, but all school prayer.

And Schempp, and Lucia, I know you've written about this, but Schempp does make that important distinction in the concurrence between teaching religion and teaching about religion, right? And so the Court says that teaching about religion is acceptable, but teaching religion is not acceptable.

And so those are the cases and that was part of your question was why we should think about them together, right?

Leslie Ribovich: Yes, thank you. So I think when we think about them together we can see that what is going on and I kind of alluded to this when I talked about the democratic eschatology right but what's happening with Brown, there's a lot of really religious or activism by religious folks that's going into thinking about desegregation of schools as well as discourse around integration of public schools.

And so this is a moment Exactly when the schools are supposedly removing religion from schools, but they're using religious language in order to support their vision and their values of integration. And so there ends up being this kind of idea that religious discourse is inevitable when talking about these ideas of racial inclusion and racial equity and so I think that we, when we look at them together we're able to better understand some of the reasonings as well as some of the efforts and activism on the ground.

Leslie Ribovich: Absolutely. So Judeo Christian. The idea of the Judeo Christian tradition is something that really emerges a little bit in the late 19th century, but even more in the 20th century as this idea of, like, what America has always been and it's supposed to be something that's bringing together different religious groups, so Protestants, Catholics, and Jews most significantly but Part of what I show, and others have shown the degree to which the idea of the Judeo Christian is used as Cold War rhetoric.

Very Protestant, but it also has some really interesting Jewish and Catholic dimensions as well, but we see the way that the idea of the Judeo Christian ends up being used to talk about the Founding Fathers, for instance, as these exemplars of the American spirit and the Judeo Christian tradition, right?

So it already has that kind of supersessionist logic to it, and then that is also something that ends up getting used in settler colonial way in the in some of the curriculum.

Lucia Hulsether: One of the things you talk about in your book is " brotherhood theology" as a certain response to desegregation and also as a disciplinary mechanism for students. Can you tell us what is brotherhood theology as it's happening in New York City schools in the 50s and 60s and what's an example of it?

Leslie Ribovich: Right, yeah, so I would say the Brotherhood theology is kind of like the theology of the Judeo Christian tradition. And this connects a lot to the National Conference of Christians and Jews, which was the largest interfaith organization at this time that really is putting forward these ideas of Judeo Christian.

And so that there's something that there can be something shared to submit to, which then ends up being very useful in conversations about nationalism and things like that. And one example that I would give is there's this, amazing pamphlet or not a pamphlet. It's, I think of it as a pamphlet because it's like physically it was more of that size, but it's a little it's a little bigger than a pamphlet, but the statement on moral and spiritual values in the public schools.

A lot of it is, oh, some of the church and state argument that you end up seeing a few years later in Engle v. Vitale and Abingdon v. Schempp . And what ends up happening is a shift from the language of God to, more emphasis on the founding fathers and that sort of language.

So we at New York City Public School students should submit to or should respect the legacy of the founding fathers because we are in that heritage. So you very much have this language of fatherhood and brotherhood, but then now the founding fathers become the father, right?

They, in part, become these demigods for people to both emulate but also revere. And I'm really interested in that and what it means that this is happening exactly when desegregation is supposed to be happening, even if it doesn't fully happen. But what that means for the student in the predominantly Black and Puerto Rican school?

Tina Pippin: you mentioned how some communities and organizations push back on this. How did black and Puerto Rican communities push back and have alternative visions around what equity in the schools would be.

Leslie Ribovich: So one example that I love is Amy Bush Olatunji, who was a librarian at the County Cullen Library.

But she created her own celebration for Brotherhood Week and worked with students. And we were talking earlier about sort of creative pedagogy. She really engaged that idea of creative pedagogy and of starting with where the students were. So for Brotherhood Week, she didn't like what was going on in the schools.

There's not necessarily that much direct evidence of what she didn't like, but I think we can see what she maybe didn't like based on what she ended up doing. instead of having, for instance I have an earlier example of where all people from different cultures bring the food from their culture to a potluck for Brotherhood Week, right?

And so I think that's really interesting, concrete example of saying, hey, here's what Brotherhood Week was, here's another way to imagine it, instead of just this moment where we come together from our different cultures and then go back to our own spaces and not really think about the dominant culture that's shaping how we even come together in the first place.

Part of this is because New York City is just so big. It's the largest school system in the country. That was one of the reasons I was really interested in studying. It was just just so fruitful. There's so much there. But there were many community members who are Black and Puerto Rican who were involved in this, but then the education came out with programs like Open Enrollment, like I was talking about this one way transfer program where students of color and that also had to demonstrate that they didn't have health issues, concerns and problems. So it was literally this idea of like infection and contagion, right, of white students. That was some of the worries. So as the Board of Education kept coming up with programs like that and the Board of Education, by the way, is the one that wrote the moral and spiritual values statement that I was talking about earlier.

And they end up supporting community control of public schools. And there's been a lot written about Ocean Hill Brownsville and the teacher strikes that community control led to. And there's narrative that that, that community control failed . Having Black and Puerto Rican community members control the schools where their children went to school was a failure because it ultimately ended.

. And, you know, teaching Swahili in the schools, teaching different parts of Black history and I, to me, that is just a really interesting contrast to the Judeo Christian history narrative to instead have this idea of, okay, how do we talk about, how do, what happens if we center Black voices in these stories?

Lucia Hulsether: These are such good examples. I'm curious if you, as we turn towards a conversation about your own teaching and how you approach your work as a professor, of course not working in K through 12 schools, but working with young adults, working in educational institutions that are often quite normative in how they approach what it means to learn and teach and be a citizen. What would you say from this research has influenced your approach to teaching and learning?

But I think about what would some of these voices say? think about who is on the curriculum and what is some of the narrative. So I have that in the back of my head. I think I'm also very aware of classroom dynamics. So some of my, and this is maybe seems like, an odd example in that much of my teaching has been in a traditional college classroom, but I have also taught in in prison classrooms and I'm hoping to do so again.

And there was this moment where they sing, give me that old time religion. And I had the students getting up and acting it out, right. And then and they were nervous to stand. They didn't know, like, if they were allowed to stand in the classroom. And then I asked them to sing and I started singing and then they sing.

And it felt at first like this kind of amazing moment. But then I noticed the, one of the guards was kind of looking like, what are they? What are they doing? And I smi and I smiled. I was like, probably 23 at the time, and he kind of went away. And I hope that was it, but I sort of think, was what is my role as a white teacher.

These are people who are incarcerated. What am I able to kind of encourage them to do, but also what is my power in relationship to the authority and to the administration, right? Was there something in my, like, did my smile actually help them be okay? Was that not okay? Like, also, what does it mean to think about?

To think about sort of embodiment and getting up and thinking about some of these examples of of pedagogy that are more starting with students or starting with things like that. So those are some examples. And I know you had also been thinking were you also thinking a little bit about like assignments and things like that?

Lucia Hulsether: We'd love to hear some examples of assignments that you've really loved that maybe some listener could learn from.

And I think that, to me, is taking from the book, some of, and from the people that I've learned from and studying, like, what does it mean to not have this kind of, like, top down, imposing, here's the narrative that you're supposed to learn and what you're supposed to recite and spew forth instead thinking about, okay, how do we start from the students and see what they have to offer and how they want to shape the community.

And to get students to really be engaging and thinking with text in ways that be authentic to them, and so those aren't graded or anything. And then I think in terms of assignments that are more, more concrete, I've done a version of this assignment in a couple different classes but I'm really struck by the idea of thinking about what is possible. I worry sometimes that when we're teaching about race or teaching about racism, that there can be this kind of sense of like, there's the oppressed, and then there's the people who are privileged and like, that's it.

That's at least a dialogue that I end up hearing. And that really don't like that because I feel like it's not true, first of all, but also and doesn't speak to like the history of of human activity and agency and imagination, but also I think that it is limiting for our students.

And so the student had that quotation about decolonizing the imagination. Prison abolition is the decolonization of the imagination or something like that. And then the student drew someone's, like, a head and then all of these different ideas, like, exploding out of it. And I still keep that. She gave it to me to keep on my classroom walls and I'm very grateful for that.

Thinking about those together was really helpful to think about some of the moral valences.

Tina Pippin: Oh, thank you for these excellent examples. Oh, I could hear you talk for a little longer on these because I'm taking notes.

Lucia Hulsether: And how should we reflect on it if we can?

And then in Oklahoma with requiring Bible to be used in instruction and then in Texas there's also some new curriculum guidelines that are being proposed with. Different Bible stories and parts of the Ten Commandments as well as examples. It hasn't gone through yet, but,, to connect all of that to some of the anti DEI, anti, quote unquote, critical race theory not that anyone is actually reading Derek Bell or anything, but anti critical race theory anti DEI legislation.

I think, to me, the problem is that it's discriminatory, and it's not just that it's discriminatory against people who aren't Christian, although that's true, the version of the Ten Commandments that's being put up is definitely not like the Jewish study Bible version. For instance, there's a difference there between do not kill and do not murder.

And I think if anything, our discipline religious studies teaches us that defining religion is really fraught. And defining religion if you want to actually define and see where that term came from, it came from colonialism, it came from slavery, right? And then the courts and have used that term to really privilege the idea of the sincere believer. That's a shout out to Charles McCrary. But the idea of the white protestant sincere believer is really who tends to in court win. It's not always, but that if they can fit that frame of the sincere believer, which is a kind of white protestant frame. And so I think that saying religion, having to say what that means defining religion.

and as our example showed, even if it's diverse, what it looks like, moral formation is part of public schools. And I think also that we who may be opposed to these laws on having the Ten Commandments in public schools or whatever that we still probably should be having a robust moral conversation about what we want moral education to be and what we want education to be generally.

, I think that instead we can focus on some of the inequities and injustices that are at play in these examples. Like, I mean, the bill in Louisiana is making this big claim about the Ten Commandments as part of American history and is citing the Mayflower Compact. I mean, as I'm reading this, I'm thinking, wow, this really does look a lot like what was happening in, in a lot of my sources.

Leslie Ribovich: Yes, yeah.

Lucia Hulsether: So like maybe there's no explicit religion in terms of Judeo Christian ritual, but maybe there's still racism, which is totally interlocked with. the history of Christianity. Maybe that's in how charter schools are being structured. Maybe that's in tracking. Maybe that's in ideas of worth.

And so what would it even be to say that religion isn't there, given how entwined religion and racial politics are? are. Or to even aspire to that. You might be aspiring to a kind of white supremacy that you are not even self realizing about.

Leslie Ribovich: Absolutely. And I think also, just the idea that and Glamison himself was the, who, who said that quote, was a minister.

And of course, recognizing that there are masculinist and Christian origins there, but there also are some really, I think, powerful tools, and I don't think we can have some of those tools if we, want to shut out any possibility for what religion might be.

Lucia Hulsether: Absolutely. I'm thinking about how, and this is some of my research, but how in higher ed some of the language around multicultural and pluralist studies of religion, "We All Get Along and We Can Study Difference" was a white supremacist response to black radical student activism, telling black students to be nicer to their white "brothers."

Leslie Ribovich: At least that article of yours, Lucia, has like been very inspiring and students love it.

Leslie Ribovich: Absolutely. Yeah. So these are both examples that are. Community based, some parents some activists. that are in New York City. One is New Yorkers for Racially Just Public Schools, and one is New York Appleseed, and they're both projects that are thinking about integration now and what integration means.

So they're thinking about that, but then they're also thinking about what is actually in the curriculum and can we have culturally responsive teaching and have come up with some of these amazing guidelines. There's this there are I don't know how to describe it, like they're almost they're almost scorecard, they're, I think they're scorecards, but they're like that sounds more numeric than the thing that they are.

And these, looking at the parallels to what's being asked and what's being proposed is. I mean, it's really upsetting because like not a lot has changed. But it's also, I think a way for us some, in some of your questions there's been sort of a question of what can we learn from history for now I think one of the things we can learn is what people have tried.

And I think that these organizations are thinking really deeply about what's been tried and trying.

Tina Pippin: Well, Leslie, I'm aware of our time. Is there anything that we haven't asked you or you haven't been able to say that you'd like to before we ask our last question?

Leslie Ribovich: Well, I don't want to take more of your time. I know there was the gender question. I don't

Lucia Hulsether: know. I know, I sort of sped through it. Do you want to talk about, so one of the

Leslie Ribovich: I mean, we can or we don't have to. Or not. I think it's important.

Lucia Hulsether: So to sort of summarize to listeners, we sent Leslie a list of questions in advance. And one of them was that when I was reading her book, Tina, you probably, you might've thought the same thing.

What does your research, how does your research on race and religion implicate gender and how can that connection help us reflect on our moment now?

Leslie Ribovich: Thank you for asking it. I just was, when I saw that, I was like, yes I have been thinking about it.

Lucia Hulsether: I skipped it because I was like, oh we're running short on time, but if you're willing to answer it, I will ask.

And so there's also, there's always anxieties about gender because there are anxieties about who the next generation will be and schools, in a sense, are doing that reproductive work. And like, you can almost think about some of these curriculums as like the as the paternalistic, as the like almost like phallic teaching of materials.

You know, to describe what's going on.

And they, those, the Koreans became the, like, landlord of the church. They ended up owning the building. But the white folks tried to continue to control the narrative about what had happened. And instead of talking about the sexual politics of it and, like, admitting that they were now the tenants, not the landlords, they would produce these very, excessive articles about the church potlucks that they would have.

Leslie Ribovich: Yeah. And I think, and I'll say like, I think there's also things going on in the, community control movement and Black Power as well, that It's a lot of women grassroots activists and it was a lot of men that got attention. And that's a tried and true story of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think we see some of those dynamics happening there as well that are important.

That in the book I'm trying to name that at the same time that I'm trying to name, like, what are the worlds that are being imagined in these spaces? And some of the worlds may be masculinist, right? Like, what does that mean?

Tina Pippin: Yeah, I think there's a certain kind of eschatology at work in all this.

That's really interesting. Well, Leslie, I don't want to stop talking with you, but we need to.

Leslie Ribovich: I'm sorry I talk too much.

Leslie Ribovich: Okay, so when I was looking at this, I was like, well I'm really reading a lot of like mysteries and thrillers right now is what I'm reading, and I'm very excited that Tana French and Lucy Foley both have new books this summer, so that's great. That's what I'm in doing this summer mostly, and I read a lot of children's books I have an almost two year old so a lot of board books.

Lucia Hulsether: And then also feminist, like you have to suffer in order to be an artist thing that she explained in that book was so therapeutic for me to read while at Yale University where she also studied.

Leslie Ribovich: Yeah, I'm yeah, no, that book is amazing and Splinters is, it's like, it's about her divorce, but it's also about like, yeah, it's just, it's about kind of fragmentary narratives and things and it's just, it's wonderful. And then I read this book, Take My Hand by Dolan Perkins Valdez that it's a novel, but it's based on the story, stories about sterilizations of black girls in like rel later than we often think in the 20th century. And it's a, it's devastating, but it's just like this beautiful novel.

Tina Pippin: Okay, Lucia?

Lucia Hulsether: We have a like addiction and recovery theme because the thing I had the book that I started reading last night and so far absolutely lives up to the hype is Kaveh Akbar's book, Martyr.

Kaveh Akbar is a poet and writer who's, Collections Calling a Wolf and Portrait of an Alcoholic are, like, stunningly, I mean they're just stunning. They're arresting poetry and he wrote a novel, which I'm not going to try to, I'm not going to, like, degrade it by trying to describe it. You all should just read it. It's really good. I was up way too late last night. Tina?

Okay, thank you so much, Leslie. We really appreciate it.

conversation. I have so much to take with me forward for my own teaching.

Leslie Ribovich: Thank you for your time and for the opportunity to talk with you. It was really fun.

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