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From New Yorker

From Vox

Workers in Jackson make repairs at the site of a water main break on East Pascagoula Street.

“In some areas, we’ve got 100-year pipes,” says Charles Williams, former head of the Jackson Public Works Department. “They’ve been in the ground for a very long time, and we’ve been patching the system due to lack of availability of funds.”

As a result, issues like water main breaks have become more common, contributing to stoppages in service and cracks that make it easier for contaminants to get into the water. Williams estimates that in the past year alone, there have been more than 100 water main breaks.

Equipment at the city’s water treatment facilities — including machines at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, which froze during February’s winter storm — are old too, causing further delays in making sure the water is clean and drinkable. Much of this equipment hasn’t been properly weatherized either, so it’s especially vulnerable during cold snaps.

“If you don’t make the critical upgrades and the desired maintenance, it’s going to break,” Williams says.

While the EPA has deemed Jackson’s water safe to drink as long as there isn’t a boil water notice, it’s also called for major repairs at its treatment facilities in order to better address potential contaminants. In 2015, annual water reports showed that lead levels in the city’s water were nearly 50 percent higher than the acceptable standard, the Clarion Ledger reported. Government analyses in June 2016 also found that more than a fifth of Jackson homes had water that exceeded the federal government’s “action” lead level, according to the Guardian.

Earlier this year, city officials laid out a plan for increasing staffing at treatment plants and fixing machines there. The estimated costs include $70 million to address maintenance at two treatment plants and $100 million to repair the distribution system — though Williams notes that the full price tag of a water overhaul is likely to be much higher. (Lumumba’s $2 billion estimate for complete repairs to Jackson’s water and wastewater systems easily dwarfs the city’s annual $300 million budget.)

One reason the city hasn’t been able to fix its water issues is that it just hasn’t had the funds to do so. Over time, the city has seen its population and tax base decrease, significantly reducing its revenues for utilities and other services, as the Christian Science Monitor explained:

As in other metro areas nationwide, school integration led to white flight, and in later decades other factors including rising crime rates fueled a further exodus to the suburbs among Jackson’s white and Black middle class alike.

With them, too, went a large portion of a tax base that Mississippi’s largest city has historically depended upon.

Federal funding for water infrastructure has also sharply dipped since the 1970s, forcing states and localities to try to cover these gaps. (According to the US Water Alliance, federal funding accounted for 63 percent of capital spending on water infrastructure in 1977, a number that’s since dwindled to less than 10 percent.)

To raise more infrastructure funds, Jackson previously instituted a 1 percent hike to its sales tax in 2014, which brings in roughly $14 million a year. It also received $47 million as part of the American Rescue Plan earlier in 2021, some of which is being allocated to water-related repairs. And state lawmakers granted Jackson $3 million in funding for water plant fixes.

These measures still aren’t enough to solve Jackson’s water problems, though. And given the funding shortages it’s experienced, the city has focused on using its limited water budget to stem the damage rather than fixing it wholesale.

More federal funding could be significant in helping the city address the overwhelming expenses it still has, if it’s properly targeted. ”This kind of package from the federal government is truly our only hope,” Jackson City Council President Virgi Lindsay said recently.

The infrastructure bill may not be targeted enough to be effective

Getting much-needed funding to Jackson will depend on how Mississippi ultimately chooses to dole out its infrastructure money.

The EPA manages two programs to send federal dollars to states to help fix their water systems: the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. But the amount they typically parcel out is small compared to the scope of needs in a city like Jackson. Under the Senate-passed infrastructure plan, much of the federal money for water systems would flow through those programs, which are administered by the states, rather than going directly to cities and municipalities in need.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba addresses the city’s water problem during a press conference on March 8.

In 2021, the federal government sent $1.1 billion to states via the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) and an additional $1.6 billion via the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF). Mississippi received about $26 million of those funds, which it is distributing to local governments in the form of loans and grants. (Because of how the state revolving funds are set up, they also include more money than the annual federal allocations places receive. In total, Mississippi’s drinking water fund has roughly $37 million to distribute in 2021, for instance.)

According to the Associated Press, “Jackson has received almost $20 million over the past four years and is seeking an additional $27 million [in 2021]” from the DWSRF.

In the past, residents and organizers have raised concerns about whether Jackson’s water needs were getting adequate attention from the state government: During February’s water crisis, Mississippi officials moved slowly to submit a disaster declaration or offer additional aid to the majority-Black city.

And while Jackson received $47 million in federal stimulus funds from the American Rescue Plan, the state approved only $3 million of another $47 million in funding that the city had asked for to recover from its water emergency, a situation that has led some residents and activists to question if racial bias has been playing a role in some officials’ treatment of the city. Previously, the state legislature sunk another proposal for a sales tax increase to raise more infrastructure funds as well.

“If it was a majority-white city of the same size, I don’t think people would have drug their feet to come help,” Bertram Roberts says. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has pointed to how much federal money the city was poised to receive when discussing the state’s decision to allocate just $3 million earlier this year.

Money from the DWSRF and CWSRF, meanwhile, is separate from the support Jackson got from the state and federal governments following its water emergency, and it’s allocated through state agencies.

Jackson, Mississippi Struggles With Lack Of Water 3 Weeks After Winter Storms Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Charles Williams (not pictured), former head of the Jackson Public Works Department, estimates that in the past year alone, there have been more than 100 water main breaks.

According to data from the EPA’s Project Benefits Reporting System, which was shared with Vox by the Environmental Policy Innovation Center’s Katy Hansen, Jackson received about $20.2 million of $253.9 million in funds allocated via the DWSRF between 2010 and 2020, roughly 8 percent of the total pot of money. Jackson’s 170,000 residents also make up roughly 6 percent of the state’s total population of 3 million, though factors other than a city’s size, such as a place’s reliance on low-cost financing, contribute to need for these funds. (Data from the Mississippi Department of Health also showed that the initial loan awards for the city were $23.8 million between 2010-2020, in addition to an emergency loan it received of $467,000.)

Whether the money in the infrastructure bill will effectively be distributed to places in need like Jackson is an open question. Jim Craig, Mississippi’s Director of Health Protection, noted that state legislation would end up determining how the process would work, and added that officials have approved past loans to the city that have exceeded the $5 million maximum loan amount that had been set for the program.

A report from the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) co-authored by Hansen, a senior water adviser at EPIC, previously looked at 10 states’ allocation of DWSRF money and found that several states struggled to deliver this aid equitably: Smaller localities and places with a higher proportion of people of color have historically received less money from the program both because they had less resources to pursue this funding and because much of it was dispensed as loans instead of grants. The study did not include Mississippi, though Sri Vedachalam, EPIC’s director of water, noted that the dynamics of the report were likely to be relatively consistent across states.

“We see this pattern where money is given to certain types of communities while others struggle to secure that type of money,” says Vedachalam. Because states have significant control over where these funds go, the boost the bill provides doesn’t necessarily guarantee that Jackson would receive sufficient extra money.

How the infrastructure bill could help

The bipartisan infrastructure plan includes about $48 billion in new funds for water-related repairs. As detailed by the US Water Alliance, there is $11.7 billion allocated to the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund over five years, $11.7 billion allocated to the Clean Water State Revolving Fund over five years, and $15 billion allocated to addressing lead service lines over five years that will be distributed via the Drinking Water Fund. There’s also an additional $10 billion total that focuses on emerging contaminants.

In all, Mississippi is expected to receive $429 million over five years for water infrastructure were Congress’s legislation to become law, the Clarion Ledger reported.

Although the federal government still gives states significant leeway to determine how Drinking Water Funds and Clean Water Funds are targeted, there are some provisions in the legislation that make it more accessible for “disadvantaged communities,” which are classified in Mississippi as having lower median income.

Nearly half of the funding for the Drinking Water Fund and the Clean Water Fund will be available as grants, which could mean that this money is more accessible to localities that can’t take on loans, including lower-income cities, for example. In the new bill, 49 percent of the new funds in both are available as principal forgiveness loans or grants. Additionally, the bipartisan bill would require that a larger proportion of the funding in the Drinking Water Fund be directed to disadvantaged communities.

US Water Alliance
A US Water Alliance breakdown of the water funding in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The amount of money in the bill — which includes more than $2 billion in spending on both the Clean Water and Drinking Water Funds each year, with an additional $3 billion focused on lead service lines annually — is huge, but far from enough to meet the enormity of the problem.

For replacement of lead service lines alone, for example, the NRDC estimates that costs could be as much as $45 billion, so the $15 billion in the bill only begins to address that problem. For water infrastructure more broadly, the costs are also expected to be quite a bit higher than the roughly $48 billion in new funds included in the bill, notes Scott Berry, director of policy and government affairs at the US Water Alliance.

States also still have pretty broad discretion in determining which projects to prioritize. For now, while Mississippi prioritizes projects on an array of criteria including compliance with drinking water regulations and a cost/benefit analysis, there’s relatively wide latitude in what that could entail. This prioritization, depending on how it’s applied, could leave Jackson without the funding it requires, with state officials instead directing federal funds to other water projects in the state.

Still, this would be one of the largest federal investments in water infrastructure in decades, and what policy experts see as a vital “down payment” on needed repairs.

“It is one of, if not the single largest investment in water infrastructure in 50 years,” Berry tells Vox. “That’s not nothing. Will it solve all of the country’s water infrastructure problems? Emphatically no.”

The costs of failing to address America’s water struggles

The consequences of failing to address this problem are dire.

Without access to clean water, Jackson residents are forced to seek out alternative water sources, while continuing to pay sometimes exorbitant water bills. It also means people are deprived of a resource that’s fundamental to their daily lives, a stark reality in a developed country like the US.

“It was definitely shocking to know that we didn’t have clean drinking water to cook with, to just take care of our families,” said Cassandra Welchlin, head of Mississippi’s Black Women’s Roundtable, of Jackson’s February water stoppage.

And even when access to water is secure, there’s a different set of worries that people encounter when drinking contaminated water. Lead in drinking water can lead to high blood pressure, brain damage, and kidney problems, for example. Multiple studies have found that the health care risks posed by lead contaminants may have serious effects for children’s growth and reproductive health as well.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
A water and food distribution site set up at the planetarium in Jackson, Mississippi, seen in March. There are still 2 million people in the US who don’t have access to clean running water.

According to the NRDC, as many as 20 million people are likely getting some of their water from lead pipes, along with others who are sourcing their water via very old equipment.

In 2016, Pittsburgh detected high levels of lead in its water, spurring the city to begin replacing the thousands of lead service lines it still has. In 2021, New Orleans is still grappling with aging infrastructure and repairs to a water treatment facility that opened more than 100 years ago. In 2019, Newark also found elevated lead levels in its drinking water, pushing the city to replace its pipes with new copper ones.

Across the country, the scale of the issue is alarming: Per a report from the US Water Alliance, there are still 2 million people in the United States who don’t have access to clean running water at all, a problem that disproportionately affects “low-income people in rural areas, people of color, tribal communities, [and] immigrants.” A 2018 study led by UC Irvine water economist Maura Allaire also found that “in any given year from 1982 to 2015, somewhere between 9 million and 45 million Americans got their drinking water from a source that was in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Science reported.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill has the potential to funnel much- needed funds across the country, but precise implementation will be critical to ensure that different localities really benefit.

“I am hopeful that the federal infrastructure funding will address our needs. It absolutely has to,” says Welchlin. “We can’t afford to have another water crisis.”

Educators are confused about how to navigate new laws that ban discussions about race in the classroom.

This year, American history might look different in Iowa classrooms.

In early June, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill that restricts what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and at public universities, particularly when it comes to sexism and racism. It bans 10 concepts that Republican legislators define as “divisive,” including the idea that “one race or sex is superior to another,” that members of a particular race are inherently inclined to oppress others, and that “the U.S. and Iowa are fundamentally racist or sexist.”

The law, which is already in effect, has sparked confusion and distress among educators, some of whom say it is so broad and the language so ambiguous, they fear they might face consequences for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism in the context of US history.

“Teachers need to know what the legislation means for us, and they have been asking, ‘Is the district going to support us and have our back?’” Monique Cottman, who’s taught elementary school and middle school for 15 years in the state, told Vox.

Rachel Mummey/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds speaks during the FAMiLY Leader summit in Des Moines on July 16. Reynolds recently signed a bill restricting what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and public universities.

Cottman is a teacher leader with the Iowa City Community School District, a role that requires her to regularly coach about 50 teachers on classroom instruction strategies, curriculums, and lesson plans. This year, it involves the added work of creating a comprehensive list of FAQs for teachers about the new Iowa law — because there are a lot of questions.

Since at least 2014, when students went to the school board to demand an ethnic studies course, Cottman and other teachers in the district have worked to make anti-racism part of the curriculum, but with the new law, a lot of the momentum they have built has been undercut. “Teachers who would have thought about me last year aren’t listening to teachers like me at all because of fear,” she said.

Cottman isn’t alone in her predicament. Educators across the country are figuring out how to navigate laws like Iowa’s that have turned anti-racist education — often lumped together under the catchall term “critical race theory,” an academic framework scholars use to analyze how racism is endemic to US institutions — into a boogeyman. While critical race theory opponents fear that the framework places blame for inequality on all white people, proponents argue that their goal is to use the lens to identify systemic oppression and eradicate it. Educators who want to teach with an eye toward anti-racism say that their lessons simply reflect an honest history of the country’s founding and development — including the contributions of and the discrimination against marginalized people — which has traditionally been glossed over in textbooks and curriculums.

But in the past six months, seven other states — Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina — have already passed legislation similar to Iowa’s, and 20 others have introduced or plan to introduce similar legislation, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. Meanwhile, in states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, state boards of education and local school boards have denounced, if not totally banned, teaching critical race theory and/or the 1619 Project, a collection of essays that examines the foundational contributions of enslaved Black people to the US.

Teachers are already facing consequences, too. While debates over critical race theory were going on in the Tennessee state legislature, a high school teacher was fired after teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “The First White President” and playing the video of the spoken-word poem “White Privilege.” A Black principal in Texas was recently suspended without explanation after a former school board candidate complained that he was implementing critical race theory, promoting “extreme views on race” and “the conspiracy theory of systemic racism.”

In higher education, entire courses that grapple with inequity were dropped from course rosters or made optional. And even in states where anti-critical race theory legislation hasn’t been passed, education leaders are facing pressure.

The first Black superintendent in a Connecticut district resigned after parents and community members complained to the school board that he was trying to indoctrinate students with critical race theory. (According to reports, he had been championing diversity and inclusion training and spoke out against conspiracy theories surrounding the US Capitol insurrection.)

The country is only just beginning to see this culture war play out, educators and curriculum specialists told Vox. “On one hand, there will be many teachers, particularly in states where the bills haven’t passed, who will continue to do justice work in their classrooms,” said Justin Coles, a professor of social justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “But others are going to resort to glossing over key issues in our history that are deeply intertwined with race and racism, overlooking nuance.”

While teachers like Cottman will continue to teach with an anti-racist lens despite these laws, more teachers are expected to be silenced. “Because of the current social climate,” Coles said, “it will be more acceptable to manipulate the truth and denounce folks who make deep conversations about oppression part of their classrooms.”

Ultimately, the laws, and the discussions around them, have created chaos for teachers who don’t know what they should and shouldn’t be teaching. A lot of the anti-racist discussions that educators had brought into the classroom following the uprisings of 2020, and even prior, could be in danger of being removed. And the people who will feel the greatest impact are students.

With these bans, “learning will be incomplete since [children are] only being taught half-truths,” Coles said. “The classroom will become unsafe spaces for marginalized students since they can’t discuss their lived experiences. These bans make it harder for our country to change.”

How critical race theory bans made their way to schools — and how they’re playing out

The pushback to anti-racist teachings began shortly after last summer’s social justice protests that swept the country, when many Americans started to grapple with the racism embedded in institutions like policing. In August 2020, conservative activist Christopher Rufo declared a “one-man war” against critical race theory, appearing on Fox News and claiming that federal diversity trainings (which he wrongly identified as critical race theory) were dividing workers and indoctrinating government employees.

It didn’t take long for then-President Donald Trump to seize on Rufo’s narrative, going as far as issuing an executive order that banned racial sensitivity training in the federal government. When Trump lost the presidential election a few months later, Republicans in state legislatures picked up the cause, drafting and introducing bills that placed limits on government agencies, public higher education institutions, and K-12 schools teaching “harmful sex- and race-based ideologies.”

At the core of these state bills is the desire to prevent discourse about America’s racist past and present. Last year, amid a deadly pandemic and social justice protests, students had questions about the police shootings of Black and brown civilians and why the coronavirus was disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, and teachers couldn’t ignore talk about a president who threatened “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” As Texas high school teacher Jania Hoover wrote for Vox this July, “The reality is that kids are talking about race, systems of oppression, and our country’s ugly past anyway — from media coverage to last summer’s protests to even this very controversy itself, my students are absorbing these conversations and want to know more.”

The past year, and the social justice movements leading up to it, left a lot of teachers rethinking how they taught history, challenging the colonialist narratives long embedded in elementary and high school curriculums. For example, a third-grade textbook Cottman was required to use only tells a partial story of Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in Louisiana. Bridges was 6 years old when federal marshals escorted her and her mother into the school building as mobs of white people surrounded them, rioted, and yelled threats and racial slurs.

The textbook states that the marshals “protected her from angry people who lined the streets and stood outside the school.” It makes no mention of why those people were “angry” or who they were, leaving out the key context that white people fought for decades to keep Black children from schools because of the belief that Black people were inferior, a detail that Cottman needed to bring forward during classroom discussions.

Courtesy of Monique Cottman
The story of Ruby Bridges, in a textbook for third-grade students in Iowa, makes no mention of white people and their role in opposing integration in schools.

Another story in a similar textbook tells about a girl who was kidnapped from Greece and sold into slavery in ancient Rome; according to the text, she chose to remain enslaved because her owners treated her well and they all felt like “family.” “Students kept taking away that as long as slave owners are nice to their slaves, there’s nothing wrong with slavery,” Cottman said.

“If teachers continue to do what they’ve been doing, no one wins,” Cottman added. “They need to be interrogating why some of their lessons are problematic.”

Courtesy of Monique Cottman

“Roman Diary: The Story of Iliona” in a sixth-grade McGraw-Hill Wonders textbook.

As bills opposing critical race theory made their way to state legislatures this spring, confusion over what the theory was and what the bills meant overshadowed Americans’ desire to have nuanced classroom discussions about race. A July Reuters/Ipsos poll found that fewer than half of Americans (43 percent) said they knew about critical race theory and the surrounding debates, with three in 10 saying they hadn’t heard of it at all. Respondents were even less familiar with the New York Times’s 1619 Project (24 percent). Yet a majority of Americans said they support teaching students about the impact of slavery (78 percent) and racism (73 percent) in the US. State laws banning critical race theory in public schools received less support (35 percent). On all fronts, there was a partisan divide, with Republicans more interested in banning talk about slavery, racism, and the teaching of critical race theory and the 1619 Project.

In Iowa, Cottman, also a co-founder of Black Lives Matter at School Iowa, says a handful of parents in support of the ban have already reached out to teachers about the 2021-22 curriculum, but they are not the majority. Parents in support of anti-racist education have also voiced their support at school board and community meetings.

But the vocal minority, coupled with the new law, weighs on teachers and administrators. Though Iowa City is known as the bluest part of the red state, Cottman says she has talked to a number of teachers who are fine with the curriculum as is; she has also spoken to those who are concerned about losing their jobs if they talk about race.

One group of high school teachers decided to stop teaching Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker’s short story “The Flowers” (a story about a young Black girl who comes across a dead body, presumably a Black man who had been lynched, while picking flowers in the woods) after parents were up in arms about it on social media, for fear of further controversy.

Last fall, Cottman says her school ordered 1,000 copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You in an effort to improve their American history coursework. But once some parents got wind of the effort, “the book became optional, most teachers chose to not use it,” Cottman said.

Teachers in other states are also dialing it back. Joseph Frilot, a middle school humanities teacher, learned from his curriculum manager that all of the content he developed about Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement won’t be part of his lessons this year in light of the Texas law that limits discourse on racism and sexism. “A huge chunk of the curriculum that I created was about oppression and resistance, so all of that will be excluded from our curriculum,” Frilot told EdWeek. “Am I allowed to be the transparent and honest educator that I’ve been over the years?”

In Tennessee, where one of the first anti-critical race theory bills was passed, teachers have requested guidance on how they should reframe their lessons and leading class discussions. The guidance from the education department, released in August, clarifies that teachers can introduce topics like racism and sexism as part of discussion if they are described in textbooks or instructional material, but teachers remain concerned that the law limits them from teaching the true history of the state and country. The state’s guidance also lays out major consequences for schools and educators found in violation: Schools could stand to lose millions in annual state funds, and teachers could have their licenses denied, suspended, or revoked.

Some teachers, though, plan to keep anti-racist lessons alive despite these new laws. Cottman tells teachers that even under the new law they aren’t required to say anything to parents, nor are they obligated to solicit parents’ feedback before lessons, but she reminds them that it is “vital” to make sure that parents feel welcome and that “two-way communication is established early in the school year.” When teachers have expressed worry about their classroom libraries, Cottman said she tells them “they do not need to remove any books from their classrooms. If there’s an anti-racism book on the shelf, a student has the choice to read it.”

Lakeisha Patterson, a teacher in Houston, said she plans to continue to talk about how “African Americans were considered less than human,” and the social justice caucus of the San Antonio teachers union is encouraging lessons that foster inclusion and nonwhite perspectives on history.

“For many Black teachers, we aren’t even expressing financial concerns,” Cottman said about the possibility of getting fired for incorporating race discussions in classrooms. “We’re just pissed off that we’re constantly being silenced.”

What anti-racism education looks like in states without bans

States and districts without anti-critical race theory legislation have greater latitude to experiment with anti-racist teaching. For Jesse Hagopian, a high school history and ethnic studies teacher in Seattle, the moment is ripe and long overdue. Beginning in September, Hagopian will be co-teaching the school’s two-year-old Black studies course, the result of organizing in the wake of the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016.

“If anyone is asking, the answer is yes, we are teaching critical race theory,” Hagopian said. “Most educators didn’t know what critical race theory was until Republicans made it their main reelection vehicle. But many of them are now looking it up and realizing how it is aligned with their principles, which I think is wonderful.”

On Hagopian’s syllabus is a wide array of texts to help students center the contributions that Black people have made throughout history, including Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, A Different Mirror, excerpts from A People’s History of the United States, Jazz and Justice, and the YA version of The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks. Each text will help bring nuance to the Black experience. “We’re going to learn about Black intersectional identity — all Black people don’t have the same experiences so it’s important to understand sexism, ableism, and all forms of oppression,” Hagopian said.

He has also made clear what his class is not about. “I’m not teaching white kids to hate themselves. I’m teaching them to understand how racism is systemic and that they can be part of a multiracial struggle to bring about change,” Hagopian said. “That’s empowering to white students, not shaming them.”

Young children at a rally hold signs that read “I am not an oppressor.” Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
A demonstration against critical race theory being taught in schools in Leesburg, Virginia, on June 12. The pushback to anti-racist teachings began shortly after last summer’s social justice protests that swept the country.

Hagopian is not alone in his efforts. While some states are trying to repress anti-racist education, others are mandating that teachers expand on it: The California Board of Education approved a statewide ethnic studies curriculum for high school students this March, and “Indian Education for All” standards will go into effect in Wyoming schools next school year. Meanwhile, in July, Illinois became the first state to mandate Asian American history for elementary and high school students, and Connecticut required all high schools to offer African American studies and Latino studies by 2022, with Native American studies being required in all schools beginning in the 2023-24 school year.

While anti-racism education advocates see these initiatives as promising steps forward — anti-critical race theory laws are also facing legal challenges — teachers in less progressive districts still face an uphill battle if they want to include nuanced discussions of race in their classrooms. For many of these teachers caught in the culture war, what they want most is to give children an education that reflects America’s true, complicated history.

“As a Black woman in Iowa public schools, this is my calling as a teacher and as an advocate,” Cottman said. “I believe fundamentally that students, and teachers, need to know the truth.”

On July 18, 2020, Kanye followed up Jafa’s leak by tweeting, then deleting, a track list for the album, with its title changed to Donda, along with a release date for the album set just six days hence, on July 24. However, much of the early information about the album and its contents seemed destined for retraction: Not only did Kanye rescind the initial release date, but of the 20 original songs he listed in his deleted tweet, only eight wound up on the final version of the album. A few days after his first tweet, he tweeted again, this time with a largely different track list, featuring 12 songs, six of which made the final album cut.

The initial July 24, 2020, release date came and went without comment, but throughout the next year, Kanye continued to drop hints and clips of songs he was planning to include, only some of which made it onto the final album. (In: “Believe What I Say.” Out: 2020 single “Wash Us In the Blood.”) Meanwhile, the second half of Kanye’s 2020 was raucous: In July he announced his last-minute presidential candidacy, shortly after which his wife Kim Kardashian revealed that Kanye, who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, had undergone a mental health evaluation following his first candidate rally.

As Kanye rushed to get his name on the ballot in time for the election, and as his marriage grew shakier, the album and its promotion fell by the wayside. By the beginning of 2021,
the album seemed to be permanently on ice. Just weeks after Kardashian filed for divorce from Kanye in February, however, reports surfaced that Kanye was back in the studio and working on Donda. From there, a hype blitz unfolded, with various artists like Tyler the Creator and Pusha T promoting the album or their work on it.

On July 20, 2021, Kanye dropped the new planned release date during game six of the NBA finals, courtesy of a Beats ad premiering during the game that featured the album single “No Child Left Behind.” Kanye’s label Def Jam confirmed in a follow-up tweet that the album would be dropping in just three days, one day shy of a year from its original planned release date. Promotions followed: The city of Atlanta declared June 22 Kanye West Day as his first star-studded stadium livestream party, held that evening at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium, made headlines.

Then, despite reports that Kanye had stayed behind after the first Atlanta party to work on finishing the album, the July 23 release date came and went. Kanye scheduled a second livestream listening party at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on August 5 and pushed the release date back yet again — this time to August 6. When that date came and went, confusion mounted as Donda’s preorder date shifted from August 13 to August 15 to August 22 to September 3. A third and final livestream party summoned fans to Chicago’s Soldier Field on August 26; it smashed the livestreaming viewership record, which had already previously been smashed by the August 5 listening party.

Amid the confusion over the album itself, the livestream parties offered an enticing glimpse of chaos in motion: Each listening party previewed a slightly different version of the album, with different mixes, track orders, a growing number of tracks, and different guests contributing different verses to different songs.

In addition, a coterie of A-listers turned up to join the parties, including Jay Z (who wrote his guest verse the day of the June 22 show), Pusha T, and Donda’s two controversial guest artists, Da Baby and Marilyn Manson. Da Baby has been heavily criticized for homophobic comments made during a recent Instagram Live session; Manson is currently facing lawsuits from multiple women alleging sexual assault; he has denied the allegations. Never one to shy away from spectacle, Kanye reportedly also wanted Trump to appear onstage with him.

For the final listening party, Kanye built a replica of his childhood home and then lit it completely on fire — and himself along with it. It was all a part of the act, and he’s fine — but this is likely the kind of theatrical flourish that has since spawned numerous TikTok conspiracies holding that Kanye used his listening parties to channeling everyone’s spiritual energy for some dark occult ritual.

After that dramatic display came a true head-turner: Kim Kardashian, whose divorce from Kanye is not yet finalized and who has remained close to the rapper, appeared onstage with Kanye, clad in a white Balenciaga wedding gown, albeit not the same gown she wore when the couple tied the knot in 2014. Even so, the apparent wedding recreation twist spawned intense speculation about whether the couple is reconciling. Not now, or maybe not yet? Seems complicated!

Considering all of the fun Kanye seemed to be having — and all the money he was making; the second party alone reportedly generated $7 million just from merch and ticket sales — it seemed plausible that he could have continued to host the listening parties indefinitely, continually tweaking the album’s soundscape and structure. In fact, one popular fan theory speculated that’s exactly what he intended to do, by creating “an album that has materialized itself into existence without being officially released.”

But then, according to Kanye himself, the timeline for the album’s release got taken out of his hands by the record label, Universal Music Group (UMG) — and things got even wilder.

Rap beef that can be packaged and sold pushed the Donda project over the top

The drop came two days after Drake, siding with himself in an ancient Pusha T/Kanye/Drake war, announced on August 27 that he would be dropping Certified Lover Boy in a week’s time — on September 3, the same day as the latest of Kanye’s many ever-shifting release date for Donda. Fans immediately were alert for a fight, since Kanye has been a longstanding ally of Pusha T in Pusha’s complex ongoing beef with Drake, and the threeway feud has recently heated up. Drake apparently dissed both Pusha and Kanye, calling them old and burned out in his guest verse on the Trippie Redd single “Betrayal,” which dropped August 21.

That same day, Kanye seemed to respond to Drake’s takedown in a since-deleted Instagram by screenshotting a group chat in which he called someone, probably Drake, a “nerd ass jock n****” and retorted, “You will never recover[,] I promise you.” Two days later, he went even further, briefly doxxing Drake by apparently posting, then deleting, the Canadian rapper’s Toronto address on Instagram. Drake’s fans later retaliated by vandalizing Kanye’s childhood home, the same one he theatrically burned to the ground on Soldier Field.

It all spelled beef with a capital B — but it also potentially spelled embarrassment for one or both of the rappers. Perhaps UMG producers considered Drake’s album release date to be a deadline; after all, for Kanye to continue his long, unblemished streak of debuting albums at No. 1 — to date, a nine-album streak matched only by Eminem — he probably shouldn’t go toe-to-toe with a Drake release in the same week.

Thus, abruptly and without any advance notice or fanfare, Donda appeared around 8 am ET on Sunday morning — hardly the kind of rollout you’d expect after such an intense and unusually long period of anticipation. Just hours later, Kanye exhaled a primal scream of rage on Instagram, declaring UMG had released the album without his consent:

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It’s true that “Jail pt 2” initially did not appear on the streaming version of the album, perhaps due to the fact that its two guest artists, Marilyn Manson and DaBaby, have recently been embroiled in serious controversies. Shortly after Kanye’s post, the album itself apparently vanished briefly for some listeners before reappearing in full with all 27 tracks intact, including “Jail pt 2.”

As of now, it’s unclear whether Kanye intends to take further issue with UMG over the album’s release. Instead, plenty of artists are taking issue with Kanye over the final cut, most notably Soulja Boy and Chris Brown, who each had their guest verses cut from the finished product.

But despite all of the turbulence surrounding Donda’s release, the ultimate outcome seems to have been a giant win for Yeezy: He’s back in the spotlight for his music once more, and fans are here for it.

Donda is far from groundbreaking, but all things considered, it’s surprisingly buoyant

Critics largely seem to be exhausted by Kanye and the hype cycle that surrounds him. That fatigue might have torpedoed Donda’s reception in the media; Kanye’s dalliance with Trumpism also likely hasn’t helped. Many critics hate Donda and seem to be gleeful about hating Donda.

In part, the critic/public divide might be built around different expectations for very different streaming experiences. One of the chief critical complaints about Donda is that it’s aesthetically all over the place, disjointed both stylistically and thematically: “Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue,” wrote Pitchfork’s Dylan Green, “a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.”

Although the words of Kanye’s late mother, recorded from a 2007 speech, serve as a motif throughout, they rarely create a throughline or connect to the ideas in the individual songs themselves. For every bop like “Jail,” “Believe What I Say,” or “Heaven and Hell,” for instance, there are cringey duds like “Praise God” (Baby Keem’s “I bada the boom, I bada the bing” rap is arguably the album’s low point) or “Remote Control,” which originally featured a whole Kid Cudi verse and a whole Soulja Boy verse before Ye inexplicably replaced both with Ye himself, singing apathetically about hovercrafts and CEOs.

But in an age where shuffled playlists take priority over complete albums, it may not matter that Kanye’s 27 songs aren’t exactly cohesive. Spotify, where Donda was streamed most, prevents all of its ad-supported mobile users from streaming albums in their original track order unless they have Spotify Premium — so most people didn’t experience Donda as a start-to-finish narrative. Twenty-seven songs is enough to guarantee a few surefire hits for nearly every listener — enough for a few songs to satisfy most fans, even if the album feels underwhelming as a whole.

Even taken as a single entity, Donda has its pleasures. The roster of guests is truly impressive, from artists like The Weeknd and Roddy Ricch to top-level producers like “No Church in the Wild” producer 88Keys and veteran BoogzDaBeast. The album’s collaborations lend it much-needed depth, but they’ve also brought Kanye criticism, specifically for the lack of women collaborators. Short guest spots from Ariana Grande and Shenseea, so the argument goes, can hardly counter the overt misogyny of many of Kanye’s contributors. And while Kanye seems to use songs like “Lord I Need You” to work through the Kimye breakup, and of course channels his mother throughout, there seems to be little effort otherwise to make space for women’s voices or presence.

That’s not to say that Donda has no political conscience. Most prominent is the idea of separation and disrupted community, often brought about by incarceration. “Jail” and “Jail pt 2” tackle this idea somewhat cheekily (“God gon’ post my bail tonight”). But by the time Kanye is quoting the son of convicted gang leader Larry Hoover, whose bid for a reprieve from his life sentence failed earlier this year, the carceral state seems more like a collective, rather than an individual punishment.

Both Kanye and Kim have made prison reform, freeing inmates, and helping ex-inmates a cornerstone of their public platforms in recent years, so Hoover Jr.’s presence on Donda is an extension of that work. But it’s also an extension of Kanye’s individual grief for his mother, a displacing of his personal sorrow so that it joins with a larger collective sorrow for those loved ones with whom reunification is impossible.

Despite these moments of mourning, however, and the frequent intrusion of church organs as backing instruments, the album overall has a persistently mellow vibe. It’s as though Kanye’s spirituality has rendered him serene in the face of his own emotional vicissitudes. That overall upbeat outlook keeps Donda feeling lighthearted and self-aware — and when Kanye’s at his best, his wry self-awareness always engages his audiences. “Made the best tracks and still went off the rail,” he sings on the album standout, “Hurricane.”

That self-awareness just doesn’t carry over through much of the album. But perhaps that’s because Kanye’s just feeling too zen and self-assured — justifiably — to deliver the dramatic emotional shifts of previous albums. The album’s emotional zenith, “Come to Life,” packs enough of a punch to make itself felt as an expression of Kanye’s hope and sense of renewal, but the album’s overall trajectory ascends so little that it’s less of a soaring climax and more a gesture toward a fuller, more beautiful album — perhaps one that exists in an alternate universe where Yeezy hadn’t been pulled in wildly different directions throughout the past few years, and where his creative genius could have been focused on polishing Donda to its true potential.

Sure, lines like “Okay, okay, I’m not okay” aren’t his strongest effort. But considering that Donda was made during a pandemic, by an artist who this time last year was raising widespread alarm about his deteriorating mental condition, Donda feels pretty healthy. After watching Kanye’s increasingly erratic antics for the last year, it’s almost refreshing that Donda is so, well, normal — normal for Kanye West, that is.

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