Brian Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., was appointed by Governor Tim Walz’s state education department to help write the statewide “implementation framework” (similar to a curriculum) for Minnesota’s new “ethnic studies” standards. It now emerges that Lozenski has called for the “overthrow” of the United States.
Lozenski is no outlier. On the contrary, he has been the leading voice advocating the addition of a radical version of “ethnic studies” to Minnesota’s social-studies standards (citizenship and government, economics, geography, history, and now ethnic studies). Lozenski is also the key organizer and thought leader for the radical leftist advocacy groups that Governor Walz has effectively put in charge of rewriting Minnesota’s social-studies standards. While Lozenski’s call for the overthrow of the United States is the clearest expression of his radical stance to date, it’s hardly surprising. For years, conservative voices in Minnesota have sounded the alarm over the extremism of Lozenski and his allies. Maybe now, Walz will have to answer for putting Lozenski and his friends in charge of education in the state.
Yet Walz is apparently doing everything possible to avoid accountability. According to an earlier promise by the Minnesota Department of Education’s interim communications director, Anna Arkin, the ethnic-studies implementation framework was supposed to have been released in time for a public comment period from August 9 through August 22. Yet no framework has yet been published.
The most recent public meeting of the committee that is crafting the implementation framework came and went this past Tuesday, September 24. Once again, no framework was produced. (For more, see this important account by Catrin Wigfall.) Increasingly, it appears that, contrary to earlier promises, there will be no public release or public comment period before the October 31 statutory deadline to submit a finalized ethnic-studies implementation framework. There is good reason to believe that the implementation framework is being withheld from the public to prevent it from becoming an issue in the presidential election.
It is impossible to create an honest implementation framework for Governor Walz’s new ethnic-studies standards without making the radicalism of those standards crystal clear. At points, they are flat-out anti-American. This is disguised at the moment by the standards’ unfamiliar leftist jargon. All of this tallies with Lozenski’s call to overthrow the United States. The anti-Americanism of Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies standards is tied to concepts that come directly from his work. Once you piece together the puzzle, it’s evident that an honest ethnic-studies implementation framework can’t help but expose Walz’s education extremism. That is likely why his administration appears to be hiding the draft ethnic-studies implementation framework.
Let’s piece the puzzle together. First, we’ll examine Lozenski and his controversial statements. Then we’ll have a look at Minnesota’s new education standards to see how they emerge from Lozenski’s extremist views.
Minnesota’s version of ethnic studies, known as “liberated ethnic studies,” is more radical than that of any other state. The scholars and teachers who created liberated ethnic studies are based in California, but even California governor Gavin Newsom has distanced himself from the extremism of their approach. As a proponent of liberated ethnic studies, Lozenski was the founding organizer of Education for Liberation Minnesota, the first and only state-level branch outside of California of the liberated-ethnic-studies movement. Lozenski also provided legislative testimony instrumental to passing the 2023 bill that added ethnic studies to Minnesota’s education standards. On top of that, Lozenski’s scholarly work and opinion pieces have set the tone and agenda for ethnic studies in Minnesota.
Lozenski’s 2022 book, My Emancipation Don’t Fit Your Equation: Critical Enactments of Black Education in the US, is his most important academic work. On May 27, 2022, Lozenski recorded a Zoom video, posted to YouTube, about his book. That video event was called “Education in the Blacklight: Fugitivity, Abolition, and Accommodation.” The entire video is of interest, but the comments calling for the overthrow of the United States can be found from 54:30 to 57:00, during a discussion of the debate over critical race theory (CRT). A quick look at Lozenski’s treatment of CRT in his book will help to make sense of his video remarks.
Lozenski’s book shows that he is both aware and supportive of the application of CRT to education. Lozenski approvingly traces the line from Derrick Bell’s invention of CRT through Gloria Ladson-Billings’s application of CRT to schooling. Then he notes that movements to eliminate standardized testing, remove police from schools, and “decolonize” the curriculum owe much to CRT and related movements (for example, “black Marxism”) (see p. 136). For the most part, however, when Lozenski discusses educational movements and concepts that directly influence classroom content, he speaks not of critical race theory but of things such as “critical theory” (neo-Marxism, broadly speaking), “black nationalism,” and “the black radical tradition” (see pp. 72–74). In short, Lozenski considers CRT to be more about critiquing “systemic racism” than about supplying detailed curricula or lesson plans.
This brings us to Lozenski’s video discussion of CRT. He begins by saying that because of their “supremacist” education, CRT’s critics lack the cognitive capacity to understand CRT. Then he pivots to criticize advocates of CRT, resulting in the following statement:
And we’re also sometimes lying on ourselves when people say like, “Oh, we can . . . we use critical race theory in school.” We don’t use critical race theory in school. The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown, right. And so we can’t be like, “Oh no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories and divers[ity].” It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent. And we, we need to be, I think, more honest with that. And it’s funny that they [so-called supremacists], you know, they don’t understand critical race theory, but they actually tell some truth when they’re like, yeah, it is anti-state. You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. Okay, it is an anti-state theory that says, The United States needs to be deconstructed, period. Right. Like that’s, you know, and so I think, I think it’s an interesting argument there. And that’s why I’m a critical race theorist [laughs].
Lozenski wants to see America’s system of government “overthrown,” “done with,” “deconstructed.” He takes it for granted that he and other CRT advocates are anti-U.S. In fact Lozenski laughs with pleasure when he says that the reason he’s a critical race theorist is precisely because he seeks the overthrow of the United States.
Given the fact that Lozenski calls himself a critical race theorist, and given his book’s praise of CRT’s impact on the field of education, his saying “We don’t use critical race theory in school” doesn’t appear to be a claim that CRT plays no role in education. In context, Lozenski is chastising supporters of CRT for not being more honest in public debate about the radical nature of their theory.
CRT isn’t about adding a bit of diversity to the same old educational practices, he’s saying. It’s about recognizing the ineradicably racist nature of both America and its schools — and working to overthrow and transform them both. The liberated-ethnic-studies movement that Lozenski is part of is filled with open supporters of CRT. This is the audience he’s addressing, not the mainstream-media types who deny that CRT has anything to do with education. Lozenski is reminding CRT’s supporters that CRT is much more than a mere tool of standard education. Ultimately, it’s a revolutionary doctrine.
Katherine Kersten, a senior policy fellow at Minnesota’s conservative Center of the American Experiment, has been warning the public for years about the radicalism of Lozenski and his associates. The Center of the American Experiment also commissioned a review of an earlier version of Minnesota’s revised social-studies standards by distinguished historian Wilfred McClay, author of the acclaimed U.S. history textbook, Land of Hope. McClay not only called Minnesota’s standards “among the worst in the country,” he singled out the ethnic-studies strand for effectively calling into question the very legitimacy of America’s system of government.
In short, Walz has had many warnings and plenty of opportunities to pull back from the extremism of liberated ethnic studies — as Gavin Newsom has pulled back in California. Instead, Walz has continued to delegate power to Lozenski and his supporters, whom he has now charged with designing an “implementation framework” for ethnic studies.
Once you grasp the connection between Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies standards and Lozenski’s work, it’s easy to understand why publication of an implementation framework would be politically explosive for Walz. We’ll illustrate this by focusing on two concepts embedded in Minnesota’s ethnic-studies standards: racial capitalism and fugitivity. Right now, for most people, these terms are meaningless bits of jargon. Once explained by the implementation framework, however, both terms would suggest the need to overthrow and replace America’s system of government.
Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies standards, which include both standards in the narrow sense and accompanying “benchmarks” (more specific educational goals), require high-school students to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism.” Asking high schoolers to analyze this obscure neo-Marxist concept, baffling even for college students, borders on the outrageous. Even politically liberal reviewers of Minnesota’s standards have objected to the inclusion of the term “racial capitalism.” With the term having been incorporated into Minnesota’s standards, however, it is now the job of the state committee on which Lozenski sits to include an explanation of racial capitalism in the implementation framework.
The topic of racial capitalism is at the core of liberated ethnic studies and is therefore very much in Lozenski’s wheelhouse. Certainly, racial capitalism is a persistent theme in Lozenski’s work. It makes repeated appearances in his book, for example, alongside discussions of Cedric Robinson’s influential work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, which introduced racial capitalism as a concept. It’s a safe bet that Lozenski will have major input into the section of the implementation framework that explains racial capitalism.
As it happens, we already know how Lozenski would teach this idea because he explains it in the video about his book (the same video that contains his remarks about the need to overthrow the United States). At 8:35–14:36 of his “Education in the Blacklight” video, Lozenski imports excerpts from a video on racial capitalism made by “abolition geographer” Ruth Wilson Gilmore. (The original video is “Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore.”)
Very little material exists that explains racial capitalism in a way that most people — let alone high-school students — can understand. Gilmore’s video is that rare item that fits the bill. In the unlikely event that Gilmore’s video is not part of Minnesota’s ethnic-studies implementation framework, some rough equivalent would need to be.
Slowly, clearly, and carefully, using traditional Marxist jargon, Gilmore explains that all capitalism is racial capitalism. This means that from the very origins of capitalism, when only Europeans were involved, “the owners of the means of production” thought of their differences from those “whose labor they exploited” as racial in nature. (Here, drawing on Robinson, Gilmore is referencing early English prejudice against the Irish.) Gilmore goes on to explain that differences between capitalists and workers inevitably turn into some sort of race-like prejudice. She then concludes, “This is another way of saying, we can’t undo racism without undoing capitalism.”
Not coincidentally, Gilmore’s point on racial capitalism returns us to Lozenski’s remarks on the need to overthrow the United States. Recall that for Lozenski, CRT’s claim that the United States as constructed is irretrievably racist leads inevitably to the need for overthrow. The concept of racial capitalism points in the same direction for the same reason. If capitalism is inevitably racist, then overthrowing capitalism is the only solution. That is the conclusion Lozenski is hoping young Minnesotans will draw from ethnic studies.
Now consider the following benchmark in Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies standards: “Apply methodologies of fugitivity to map-making, economics and education.” What the heck is “fugitivity”? While the concept does make an appearance in the work of some contemporary radical academics, Lozenski himself makes far more use of it than most — particularly as applied to the topic of education. Fugitivity is a major theme of Lozenski’s book (see pp. 25–32).
Lozenski defines fugitivity as breaking the law or violating codes of legitimacy in pursuit of the kind of education that will dismantle an unjust system. Lozenski derives the term from slaves who broke the law to educate themselves but also from abolitionists and slaveholders who broke the law to help teach them. In Lozenski’s view, the same kind of resistance to an unjust system is called for today. According to Lozenski, for example: “Today, fugitivity looks like teachers who quietly go outside of the State-mandated curriculum to bring ethnic studies into their classroom.” It also applies, he says, to teachers who intentionally violate state CRT laws.
So the term fugitivity is designed to delegitimize our system and undermine respect for the law. Students are called upon to think of themselves as disobedient slaves resisting and outwitting a racist system by educating themselves in radical politics. Again, the concept is entirely consistent with Lozenski’s ideas about “overthrow.” Truly, Minnesota’s ethnic-studies standards are the very opposite of civics. Instead of cultivating love of country, respect for law, and eagerness to participate in our system, Walz’s standards inculcate hatred of country, contempt for law, and the desire to dismantle the system.
We’ve touched on only two of the radical themes in Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies standards. There’s plenty more where that came from, but what we’ve examined suffices to show that Lozenski’s call for the overthrow of the United States is no fluke. On the contrary, Lozenski’s extremism is entirely consistent with the tone and tenor of the standards themselves, which, with the support of Governor Walz, Lozenski and his allies have largely shaped. The extremist product of Walz’s education policy is sure to be revealed by an implementation framework that explains the radical concepts in the standards. That, I believe, is why Walz and his people are withholding the framework from the public.
I wrote about Minnesota’s troubling social-studies standards well before the current presidential campaign. I expect to continue writing about them well after the campaign. I’ll be happy whenever and wherever the public wakes up and starts asking some serious questions about the troubling direction of Minnesota’s standards. A campaign that will decide America’s future seems as good a time as any to begin.