No matter how much Republicans talk about critical race theory and being “anti-woke,” nothing should blind us to the fundamentally white supremacist intent of their ongoing efforts to restrict public school education on matters of racial inequality and exploitation. The efforts by Florida state Republicans to pervert education in his state are a standout example, with The Washington Post reporting that a state Senate bill:
sets new standards for school curriculum, requiring districts to teach “the history and content” of the Declaration of Independence and proper forms of patriotism. Teachers and lesson plans may not imply that any “individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” the legislation states.
HB7 is even more expansive, giving parents and state regulators considerable authority to ban books or teachings that cause discomfort, including carefully reviewing lessons about “the Civil War, the expansion of the United States … the world wars, and the civil rights movement.”
A separate bill in the Senate, SB1300, would also appoint a state-trained reviewer in each school district to look over curriculums and textbooks, and establish procedures for any parents or resident to file objections to material they find offensive.
The Florida shenanigans illuminate a central point about the GOP’s war on history teaching — it’s very much not simply about promoting a distorted version of the past, but rather about the power of white Americans over non-whites in the present. It’s no exaggeration to say that conservatives and the Republican Party want to ensure that public schools act as incubators for white supremacism, which necessarily involves minimizing any teaching of racism in America’s past and present, so that a social and power hierarchy in which whites are on top is rendered both invisible and unchanging. The centrality of protecting (white) children from “discomfort” gives the game away, because the idea that white kids might feel guilty about slavery and racism is only a concern if white kids identify with racist Americans in the past. But why would white kids feel truly guilty if they aren’t racist? And if they do have racist attitudes, isn’t the purpose of a good civic education to challenge such feelings? The tacit assumption that they are as prejudiced as their parents betrays the backwards mentality of the GOP. Ultimately, conservative parents and politicians aren’t worried that white kids will feel guilty; they’re worried that white kids will feel anger — at them and their inexcusable racism.
But still more striking is what the “discomfort” rhetoric seeks to hide. Rather than white kids being made to feel guilty about racism, the far likelier — and powerful — effect of learning about racism is sympathy for racism’s victims. Even more powerfully, such sympathy might naturally lead to identification with people of other races — a potential blurring of the lines between white children and minority children that is key to the racist backlash against public education. Of course, such identification has the virtue of being rooted in the reality of our common humanity and our highest ideals as a people, while attempts to derail and subvert such basic human connection is at the heart of the white supremacist project.
Given the tremendous stakes, it’s incredible to me that the Democratic Party has not already organized a full-scale pushback against this movement to indoctrinate white school kids into white supremacism while inculcating non-white kids in a web of disinformation and propaganda. As Ronald Brownstein discusses in a recent essay, these efforts mirror and complement the current GOP onslaught against voting rights for minority Americans. The associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund tells Brownstein that, “This is the next wave of voters, so the indoctrination that we see occurring right now is planting the seeds for the control of that electorate as they become voters. They are trying to manipulate power and exert their influence at both ends of the spectrum by limiting those who can cast ballots now, and by indoctrinating those who can cast ballots later.”
Just as voter suppression tactics aim to relieve brown-skinned Americans of the franchise, propagandistic renderings of American history and reality are aimed at relieving brown-skinned young Americans of any sense that structural racism exists in the country and may be affecting their life prospects. Brownstein notes that, “Though the measures have been promoted mostly as a defensive tool (to prevent white students from feeling guilty), many see in them an equally important offensive goal: discouraging the growing number of nonwhite students, as they reach voting age, from viewing systemic discrimination as a problem that public policy should address.”
For elected Democrats to look at what’s happening in schools across the country, and dismiss it simply as “culture war” distraction that’s not worth engaging in, is to completely misunderstand how these public education conflicts are deeply tied in to struggles over political power. The GOP isn’t expending all this energy for nothing; Republican politicians understand the short- and long-term political benefits of what Democrats might dismiss as a side show. But how we think about our history and what is encouraged or discouraged to be discussed in classrooms inevitably shapes the political context of American life.
Among the various ugly strands involved in this assault on truth and free thought in American schools, the idea that Republicans are seeking to preemptively disempower young Americans of color through the teaching of white supremacist-inflected history is particularly abhorrent. Not only should this be opposed on purely moral grounds, it also strikes me as political dynamite to use against the racist GOP. No American parent whose child is on the receiving end of this propaganda effort will be happy to learn that one of America’s political parties is committed to ensuring that their children grow up disempowered and primed to be exploited by a white supremacist minority. This is enraging stuff, and any Democrats’ failure to speak to it and counter it is a profound betrayal of their constituents.
The current GOP effort is an affront not only to minority children, though, but to white children as well, who not only are being inculcated in the tenets of white supremacy, but implicitly being sold on the lie that their lives will be prosperous only so long as they remain atop the political heap. It is an effort to poison their minds and corrupt their souls, but also to make them pliant future victims of the GOP’s plutocratic economic policies. In fact, the Democrats can easily make the opposite case as the GOP is — that vast numbers of white Americans will continue to live in poverty or straitened circumstances because the GOP has convinced them it’s better to feel superior to African-Americans and other minorities than to actually have better life prospects, like affordable college education, free health care, or a minimum wage that allows for a life of dignity. By advocating propaganda in place of history, the Republican Party aims to hinder young Americans’ ability to interrogate the white supremacism that is central to the GOP’s electoral strategy.
Likewise, Democrats can’t simply stand by and let the GOP wreak havoc on the education not just on the children of their constituents, but on the education of likely future Democratic voters. Simply put, Democrats need to appeal to and defend this rising multi-racial majority, both as a matter of morality and of self-interest. For any Democrat to assume that changing demographics will automatically translate into an imminent Democratic majority ignores not just GOP efforts to engineer white minority rule in perpetuity, but the fact that there isn’t some magical reason that minority Americans tend to skew Democratic. Rather, it’s for the substantive reason that Democrats have, far more than the GOP has ever done, advocated for the equality of all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity (not to mention gender and sexual identity). To the degree that Democrats do not double down on this record, they risk (rightly) losing the loyalty of millions of current and potential voters.
At the same time, the potency of the GOP’s foul narrative that any gain by brown-skinned Americans necessarily means a loss for white Americans needs to be countered and defused. In this age of accelerating voter suppression and unhindered gerrymandering, the Democrats need a strategy to win over enough white voters so that the Republican project of minority rule can no longer sustain itself. Right now, the GOP is reinforcing its white supremacist narrative by pretending that U.S. history, if taught accurately, constitutes anti-white propaganda. Engaging in this fight over history education would give Democrats a prime opportunity to articulate a countervailing and unifying vision for America, based on our actual history, that sees recognition and confrontation of past — and present — racism as key to transcending it for a nation that works better for everyone, regardless of the color of their skin. The way forward involves giving every American child the tools to transcend the sins of their fathers and mothers, not doom them to repeat those sins or be their future victims.
Republicans clearly see the benefits of riling up their base with lies rooted in the idea that the “wrong” sort of history aims to denigrate white people and make white kids feel guilty about being white, and that they’re defending white Americans from the treasonous libel of anti-American liberals. But what I’m arguing for shouldn’t be confused with “fight fire with fire” tactics — though that’s admittedly part of it. This is one front in a larger fight about whether the United States will become a true multi-racial democracy, or whether it will be increasingly strangled by the minority rule of conservative whites. For the Democrats to break the back of GOP legitimacy, they will need to articulate a unifying vision for the country that captures the imagination and allays the fears of both non-white and white Americans. They must aim big, at no less than destroying the power of white supremacism in this country.
They have material reality on their side already — our current situation of extreme inequality, with its deep roots in racism, is holding us back collectively, save for the wealthiest among us. But beyond this, they also have morality and right on their side. While white supremacism remains deeply entrenched in the U.S., the primary importance the Republicans are according to “culture war” issues aimed at invigorating white resentment and white rage should remind us that even the Republicans see these advantages as impermanent and in constant need of reinforcement. And why wouldn’t this be the case? Allying yourself with a cause that brought the country such calamities as slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow carries obviously toxic, self-defeating downsides for anyone not fully bought-in to its retrograde ideas. This isn’t just a vague ideology, like conservatism. It’s an ideology that’s indefensibly evil. We know this not only from its past and current effects, which have resulted in mass murder and exploitation over the course of centuries, but because it goes against basic notions ideas of our shared, common humanity. Against the cynicism and cruelty of the GOP vision, Democrats need to keep the faith that our common humanity will serve as a powerful force in binding us back together, however slow and difficult that effort may be.