We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.
— Karl Marx, Letter to Ruge (1843)
Epistemology of History
Let me start by stating the obvious, historical facts can often sustain multiple legitimate interpretations, but no interpretation is free from scrutiny, evidence, or methodological standards. Yet this does not mean all interpretations are equally valid. Historians evaluate competing interpretations against evidence, sources, logic, and explanatory power.
Seeing as no living person today was around to bare witness to any event of the nineteenth century and earlier, our entire understanding of the events of the 1800s, 1700s, and on, come from accounts of other people, i.e., their interpretations, including all their personal motivations and biases, of things that they might have literally seen with their own eyes. Think about it, even the most primary historical sources simply cannot record everything with total objectivity because they all come from real people who produced them within a specific context. Although it sometimes seems not to be so, every historian is, at the end of the day, a human being that has lived their own life with all its unique and subjective experiences; this holds true for every author of every historical record just the same.
All original historical accounts, technically speaking, are interpretations. Without these interpretations we would be incapable of connecting events and determining causalities. Indeed, we would be utterly unable to separate facts from meaning, to think critically and question sources, look for multiple differing perspectives, etc. Put simply, history would be unintelligible—we would not be able to understand it—without interpretations of factual events.
Why do I bring this up? Because words and terms have meaning, both definitively (via definitions) and interpretively (via our subjective life experience). When we conflate (by accident) and equivocate (on purpose) terms with clear, well-defined, and accepted meaning, we are abandoning all possible objectivity and adopting the most vulgar form of distortion, one aimed at personal, often political, gain at the expense of fact.
Academic historical revisionism is one such term that has been intentionally twisted and equivocated. In my humble opinion, it is the most damaging equivocation because it is the root equivocation of all other equivocations. In slightly-less abstract terms, if you can twist the reinterpretation of original interpretations and conflate the exploration of differing and new perspectives with the blatant negation of factual events, you can justify the most diabolical things imaginable.
Historical revisionism is not the same as political reactionism. Offering the most objective definition I can, historical revisionism is the process of re interpreting and re assessing historical events, causes, and their consequences in light of new evidence, methodologies, perspectives, and critiques of existing interpretations. Political reactionism, on the other hand, is an orientation that seeks to preserve, restore, or return to social, political, economic, or cultural arrangements perceived to have been weakened, lost, or displaced by changes in society. The truly sad thing is there are many well-read, highly-educated people directly aware of the very distinct meanings of the two who will lie to your face and falsely conflate them with intention, whom I will address in the following paragraphs.
The historian James M. Banner Jr. so eloquently sums it up:
At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other, debating the purposes and uses of historical knowledge, choosing different subjects to pursue, and arguing about how to pursue them. That is, in the infancy of their intellectual pursuit, historians were engaged in what we know as “revisionist history”—writing coexisting, diverse, and sometimes sharply clashing accounts of various subjects, accounts that challenged and sought to alter what had been written about them before. Accordingly, historians take it as indisputable that interpretive contests are inherent in all of their efforts to advance historical understanding. What’s more, historians are of the abiding conviction that robust, free arguments about the realities, significance, and meaning of the past should be cherished as an integral element of an open society like the one ours strives to be.1
As Dr. Banner explains, revisionist history is simply history, as a revisionist historian is simply a historian. His last sentence is key: “historians are of the abiding conviction that robust, free arguments about the realities, significance, and meaning of the past should be cherished as an integral element of an open society like the one ours strives to be (my emphasis).” This is not to say that all revisions are necessary or accepted, or even equal, merely that all who engage with history are practicing historical revisionism.
Political Theory of Knowledge
The issue is not whether every revision of history is correct. The issue is whether people are permitted to revise, reinterpret, and question historical narratives at all. The challenge for anyone who seeks true progress is to learn to distinguish between genuine academic revisionism and historical negationism—a pejorative revisionism that actively and intentionally distorts, denies, minimizes, or misrepresents well-established historical facts, always for ideological, political, or propagandistic purposes.
The line between the two has been intentionally blurred by politically-motivated, traditionalist actors who’ve focused their efforts on painting any non-traditional historiography as “presentist moralism” trying to rewrite the past to serve present-day ideological agendas. It is a rejection of any new historiography and every approach to history that goes beyond traditionalism. It is not just disagreeing with different historical approaches but an outright refusal to engage critically with different perspectives.
There is no federally-mandated historical curriculum in the United States . . . yet. This means that every state has control over how and what history is taught through legislation passed by state politicians and through social studies standards mandated by state boards of education. All states have requirements for the American Revolution and Civil War to be taught, but all states can, and many have, pass specific laws dictating how things like chattel slavery and North American Indigenous history have to be presented to students.
Blue dots represent states that have banned CRT, as of March 11, 2026
Map showing the Union, Confederate, and Border states. Every state that joined the Confederacy has banned instruction in Critical Race Theory.
As of March 2026, 20 states have either restricted or outright banned any instruction deemed as Critical Race Theory. It may not be surprising, then, to find out that the 11 secessionist states that constituted the short-lived Confederate States of America have banned any instruction deemed too critical of “American values”.
The banning of interpretive frameworks, analytical approaches, or lines of inquiry is wrong and dangerous because (1) if what is offerred as revision is incorrect, weak, or in any way subjective to the point of historical negationism, it will be rejected by any serious scholar who respects objectivity; and (2) it is incredibly contradictory, by seeking to negate a particular interpretation of history, traditionalists have done the exact thing they so-claimed to be against in their opinations: they are changing—in this case, denying and distorting—the history of the United States for political and ideological reasons.
Delegitimization of Critical Frameworks
What we have seen so viciously ramp up the last 40 years is political reactionaries doing everything they can to revise history in such a way that any critical-interpretive approach to the study of history is instantly rejected as “Cultural Marxism,” a fundamentally idealist explanation of social change. Rather than examining how transformations in the mode of production, class relations, technology, demographics, and political institutions produce corresponding shifts in culture, it treats ideas and intellectuals as the primary movers of history. In doing so, it abandons a materialist analysis in favor of a narrative in which professors, journalists, activists, and cultural figures possess a conspiratorial power to reshape society at will. One can make the connection between “Cultural Marxism” and “Judeo-Bolshevism” as political demonization campaigns rooted in anti-Semitism.
Furthermore, it has been too successful in reducing different academic frameworks for different fields of study into one term that has been twisted to mean blanket un-Americanism. Terms that we are going to have to reclaim. First, however, we need to gain a proper understanding of what those terms actually mean and do, one that can only be gained by studying their history.
First and foremost, Critical Race Theory was never taught in American K-12 public schools, ever.2 CRT is a well-developed sociolegal framework for understanding, and eventually solving, issues that stem from systemic racial discrimination. It approaches history from a legal perspective to offer new insights on structural barriers impeding a more equitable society, thus synthesizing aspects like the sociological Marxist approach known as conflict theory, the interdisciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School, as well as the Intersectional and multiracial feminism first championed by law scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.3
Critical Race Theory is taught to grad students (adults), not middle and high schoolers, certainly not children in elementary school. Further, “CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people.”4 Simply put, CRT views the superstructural pillars upholding American society—things like the criminal justice and education systems—as being “laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race.”5
CRT is not a method of historiography. It really isn’t interested in revising history to fit the worldview it offers; rather, CRT is much more interested in a critical historical analysis of societal institutions as opposed to individuals or individual groups. CRT exists to provide new insight into our current day and to critique systemic oppression in established liberal society.
And that takes us back to the beginning. Let me reiterate, there is no one correct way to interpret and analyze history. A Marxist historian can be wrong; a CRT scholar can be wrong; a feminist historian can be wrong; a traditionalist historian can be wrong—they will all be wrong at some point. But to refuse to engage outright with critical interpretations reveals a distinctly vulgar form of political reactionism, in which a particular interpretation of history, as opposed to historical accuracy itself, is protected.
The greatest threat to historical understanding is not that people reinterpret the past. It is that political actors convince us that some interpretations should never be examined, some questions should never be asked, and some methods should never be employed. A society that accepts those restrictions is not defending history from ideology; it is surrendering critical thought to it.
Case Study in Reactionary Negationism: Carol Swain
The danger posed by attacks on critical inquiry is not confined to fringe commentators or overtly ideological actors. It is often advanced by individuals with substantial academic credentials and institutional authority, whose public arguments adopt the outward form of scholarly reasoning while diverging from its evidentiary and interpretive standards. Carol Swain provides an instructive example of this dynamic.
Dr. Swain has been one of the most prominent voices occupying the “public intellectual” pseudosphere in contemporary debates over education, race, and historical interpretation in the United States, and a consistent critic of Critical Race Theory.
In a 2021 article for the Texas Public Policy Foundation defending Texas legislation restricting instruction associated with Critical Race Theory, Swain frames the public response to CRT as a sudden awakening. She writes:6
If the public had been largely unaware of the pervasiveness of critical race theory in America’s public schools, the shock waves of Virginia’s election have made sure people, particularly parents, are now paying attention.
This claim is presented without supporting empirical citation or reference to studies establishing the “pervasiveness” of CRT in K—12 education. The statement, rather than functioning as a conclusion derived from evidence, serves as a foundational premise structuring the remainder of the argument. As such, it treats “pervasiveness” as self-evident rather than analytically demonstrated, despite its clearly empirical character. If you are going to make the claim that Critical Race Theory is pervasive implying that CRT is being taught in public schools around the country, you have to back that up with studies quantifying it.
Swain then turns to Texas House Bill 3979, presenting it as a corrective to what she characterizes as distortions in public debate. In describing critics of the bill, she writes:
Opponents of the law claim it says students should never feel “discomfort” from learning that, for example, Texas hero Jim Bowie owned slaves. Therefore, teaching this fact would be banned.
She further summarizes the relevant statutory language as preventing instruction that would require students to experience psychological distress:
a teacher … may not … require or make part of a course that … an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.
The interpretive issue here is not whether legislative text can be summarized, but how selectively it is framed. The bill also specifies broader restrictions concerning race and sex stereotyping in educational contexts, including provisions that limit claims about meritocracy, the founding of the United States, and the relationship between slavery and American political ideals (Tex. H.B. 3979, 87th Leg., R.S., § 1, subsec. (h-3)(4)(ix)—(x), 2021).7 These provisions complicate any reduction of the statute to a single principle concerning emotional discomfort.
Swain herself explicitly encourages readers to consult the legislation directly. Yet her presentation isolates a subset of its language while omitting adjacent clauses that materially affect interpretation. This selective engagement is not unique to Swain, but it becomes analytically significant when used to support broader claims about the intent or scope of entire intellectual frameworks.
You might ask: who are these “opponents” she is referring to? Perhaps, she might be taking aim at politicians or a scholarly peer? Swain’s opponents are not so distinguished, she wrote her piece as a response to the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle newspaper.
Swain extends her critique of CRT beyond legislative interpretation, advancing categorical claims about its content and effects. She writes:
The teachings of CRT go beyond simply learning America’s history and, in fact, require white people to accept blame for all economic and social disparities experienced by people of color today.
And further:
Not only does CRT discriminate against white people, but it hurts minorities, too. It forces young black and Hispanic children to accept they will always be victims and that under our current system, there is nothing they can do to improve their lot in life. It also advocates lowered standards for minorities and strips them of agency. Teaching CRT is not just unconstitutional — it is demonstrably false and cruelly immoral. CRT has no place in our schools.
These claims are presented as definitive characterizations of CRT, yet they are not accompanied by engagement with CRT’s foundational legal scholarship or its major theoretical texts. Instead, CRT is defined through a set of inferred political consequences—particularly claims about moral culpability, psychological harm, and educational outcomes—rather than through its internal conceptual structure as a body of legal and academic literature.
The absence of direct engagement with primary CRT scholarship is particularly relevant given the strength of Swain’s concluding assertion that CRT is “demonstrably false.” That claim is stated without accompanying methodological demonstration or citation to peer-reviewed refutation within legal studies, sociology, or related fields.
In support of her broader argument, Swain ultimately cites commentary rather than academic research, including material published through policy-oriented institutions; in this case, the exact same organization she wrote her piece for. In one instance, she writes:
As for the laughable lie that CRT isn’t found in schools, of course it is.
The supporting material she provides is drawn from advocacy-oriented sources rather than established educational research literature. This matters not because such sources are inherently invalid in political discourse, but because they are used here as evidentiary support for claims that are empirical in nature and therefore require substantiation within appropriate scholarly domains.
One of the secondary sources invoked in this discourse to defend the above quote is authored by Roy Maynard, who self-describes his educational trajectory in explicitly non-academic terms, noting that he was “more interested in reading real books than textbooks,” that he “ignored assignments, skipped classes and eventually dropped out.” His contribution to the argument rests not on empirical research or methodological analysis, but on anecdotal experience presented as interpretive authority regarding educational practice.
Taken together, the argumentative structure is, at the very least, consistent. Claims about CRT and educational practice are advanced at a high level of certainty, but the evidentiary base shifts away from peer-reviewed research and toward selective statutory interpretation, policy advocacy material, and anecdotal testimony. The significance of this pattern is that it highlights how standards of evidence are so unevenly applied depending on whether the object of critique is treated as legitimate scholarly discourse or as a pre-emptively disqualified framework.
Within the terms established earlier in this essay, this represents a shift from interpretive engagement to epistemic displacement: CRT is not analyzed, but rather reconstructed as a set of politically charged conclusions, and then rejected on that artificial basis. Replacing the original framework of the argument with an externally constructed representation that forecloses sustained engagement is the mechanism through which reactionary negationism operates.
The Stakes of Interpretive Freedom
What the preceding analysis demonstrates is not simply that historical interpretation is contested, or even that political actors frequently misrepresent academic frameworks. These points are, in themselves, unremarkable. The more fundamental issue is structural: the conditions under which interpretation remains intelligible as interpretation.
Historical inquiry depends on a continuous tension between evidence and meaning. If that tension collapses in either direction—toward pure relativism on one hand, or toward pre-emptive exclusion of interpretive frameworks on the other—then historical knowledge ceases to function as a critical practice. It becomes either indeterminate or predetermined.
The Swain case study illustrates the latter failure mode. Much more insidious than mere disagreement with CRT or particular legislative interpretations, we are dealing with the transformation of a contested scholarly framework into a rhetorically stabilized object of political condemnation, insulated from the rigorous evidentiary standards that would normally govern its critique. In this condition, “criticism” no longer operates as an internal correction within a shared field of inquiry, but as an external act of disqualification that determines in advance what may count as legitimate analysis.
This is why the distinction between revisionism and negationism, established earlier, is not semantic but methodological. Revisionism operates within the horizon of shared evidentiary commitment: it disputes interpretation while retaining the possibility of correction through evidence, argument, and counter-evidence. Negationism, by contrast, reorganizes the object of inquiry itself so that evidentiary engagement becomes structurally secondary to pre-established conclusions about what the object “really is.”
When this logic is extended beyond isolated cases, it produces a broader political epistemology in which certain methods of inquiry are treated as inherently suspect, and certain interpretive frameworks are rendered illegible before analysis begins. The result is not the protection of historical truth, but the narrowing of the permissible space of historical reasoning.
The central claim of this essay is therefore straightforward: historical understanding is not threatened primarily by the existence of competing interpretations, but by the normalization of practices that determine in advance which interpretations are admissible as objects of serious engagement. A society that permits such pre-emptive exclusions is not preserving intellectual rigor. It is reorganizing inquiry itself in ways that weaken the conditions under which rigorous thought is possible.
The greatest danger to critical thinking, then, is not disagreement over history. It is the systematic restriction of what counts as a legitimate way of thinking about it.
NOTES:
1. James M. Banner Jr. et al., “All History Is Revisionist History,” National Endowment for the Humanities, accessed May 30, 2026, https://www.neh.gov/article/all-history-revisionist-history.
2. Lisa Harrison, Ellis Hurd, and Kathleen Brinegar, “But Is It Really about Critical Race Theory?: The Attack on Teaching about Systemic Racism and Why We Must Care,” Middle School Journal 52, no. 4 (August 8, 2021): 2—3, https://doi.org/10.1080/00940771.2021.1953840.
3. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, accessed May 31, 2026, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf, 149.
4. Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons, “Why Are States Banning Critical Race Theory?,” Brookings, November 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/.
5. Ibid.
6. Carol M. Swain, “Critical Race Theory Bans Protect Our History and Students,” Texas Public Policy Foundation, November 11, 2021, https://www.texaspolicy.com/critical-race-theory-bans-protect-our-history-and-students/.
7. Texas House Bill 3979, 87th Leg., R.S., § 1, subsec. (h-3)(4)(ix)—(x), 2021 Tex. Gen. Laws 5, LegiScan, accessed May 31, 2026, https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979/id/2407870/Texas-2021-HB3979-Enrolled.html.