Op-Ed: Here's what's at risk if Indiana bills on teaching race-related topics become law.

Copying other states around the country, Indiana lawmakers have proposed Senate Bill 167 and House Bill 1134, legislation that would restrict teaching race-related topics and content, or even having conversations about these, in K-12 schools and teacher preparation programs.

Although these bills exempt “teaching of historical injustices,” they are silent on contemporary racial issues. Given the provisions for civil litigation targeting underfunded schools and underpaid teachers, this legislation would have a chilling effect on conversations about race, sex, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation.

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Because these intentions are not explicitly stated in the legislation, it is important for Indiana citizens to recognize how these legislative efforts would promote ignorance of race-related content.

For example, no state standards or textbooks claim “that (no) sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation is inherently superior or inferior to another sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation” or that “an individual's moral character is necessarily determined by the individual's sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation.”

No teachers would claim that white people are inherently racist, or that white people should feel shame because of past injustices.

However, it is well known that when learning about injustices, members of privileged groups often hear and believe that they are being taught that they are racist, and they may often feel shame.  This is a result of the way in which they mistakenly assimilate the information, not the way in which the information is presented.

If this legislation is enacted into law, though, students and parents will feel emboldened to complain about the content of instruction based on their own responses, regardless of the actual content.

As a result, few schools or teachers would be willing to address topics related to racial disparities in income, employment, health care, policing, or incarceration. Nor would they be likely to address present-day homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, or anti-Asian violence, all of which require acknowledging that people are treated differently based on racial, religious, and other characteristics.

The bills could even be interpreted to prohibit teaching that some political positions — such as Nazism or white supremacy — run counter to the nation’s ideals. The prohibition of teaching that people may be treated differently based on sex, meanwhile, would run counter established public policies such as gender-segregated restrooms, sports teams, or military roles.

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And to state the obvious, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and political affiliation are core parts of our identities. Demanding that teachers actively ignore dimensions of a student’s personhood will create lasting psychological damage and handcuff teachers from addressing content in ways relevant to students in their local communities.

In addition to explicitly or implicitly excluding such topics from schooling, the legislation would have a number of secondary consequences, such as violating the tradition of local control of schools; further driving people of color and other underrepresented groups away from the teaching profession; and preventing students and teachers from fully participating in the public life of a democracy, which often requires discussion of difficult topics, particularly around race.

The point of threatening Indiana’s underpaid teachers with litigation because someone might mistakenly feel inferior is a calculated effort by politicians to silence teachers and create classrooms devoid of content that acknowledge the deep divisions in our society.

The kind of collective ignorance represented by SB167 and HB1134 would poison shared social understandings, our capacity to understand the perspectives of others, and any semblance of informed conversations about the complex issues that we face together as a society.

SB167 and HB1134 constitute a threat to our democracy by forcibly hollowing out Indiana’s school curriculum. An ignorant Indiana is a steep price to pay to advance the fortunes of politicians attempting to score political points by manufacturing a crisis. Instead, we urge our legislators to be as passionate and committed to solving real problems in education, such as retaining our Hoosier teachers through increasing their pay.

Alex Cuenca, Keith Barton, and Kathryn Engebretson are social studies professors at  IU School of Education in Bloomington