Teachers, students, and other concerned citizens rallied in Milwaukee on Saturday to protest efforts by the Republican-dominated legislature to pass legislation they believe would restrict what Wisconsin’s schools can teach about race and racism. The rally was one of over 20 virtual and in-person events organized by local educators in a national “Day of Action.”
Several thousand have signed a pledge refusing “to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events — regardless of the law.”
“The fact that there are so many state legislatures [at least 15] considering legislation that will suppress the teaching of racism and sexism and even prohibit professional training in those areas was, in my mind, outrageous, and had to be publicly denounced,” said Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee Public Schools board.
Valerie Strauss writes at the Washington Post:
Ever since the May 2020 slaying of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis sparked a national social justice protest movement, many public schools have attempted to introduce and expand lessons on the systemic racism that has existed since the nation’s founding.
That sparked a backlash among conservatives. Republican-led legislatures are or have already passed legislation (whose wording is remarkably similar or identical, reflecting a coordinated effort) with such restrictions. On Thursday, Florida’s State Board of Education voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory in the state’s public schools.
Critical race theory is a decades-old academic framework that holds that racism is systemic, embedded in government policies and laws that are evident in any serious examination of American history. Critics say that racism is the work of individual bad actors, and, they say, teachers are improperly injecting race in the classroom. Teachers say it is impossible not to discuss race in any honest discussion or lesson about American history.
In fact, teachers and schools are not attempting to teach the academic theory, but to broaden how American history is taught to include recognition of the impact of slavery and racism on U.S. policies and the law (an earlier Post story):
The issues are widespread. Data consistently shows that students of color are more likely to be disciplined than their White peers and receive harsher punishments for the same infractions. Black and Hispanic students are less likely to be placed in advanced or enriched classes, starting in elementary school. Many experts say school curriculums have failed to adequately reflect the perspectives of Indigenous and marginalized communities. And students and parents themselves often report that school culture does not feel welcoming.
But some White teachers are backing off teaching about race, afraid of losing their jobs.
“The moment you make racism more than an isolated incident, when you begin to talk about it as systemic, as baked into the way we live our lives … people don’t like that,” said Gloria Ladson-Billings, president of the National Academy of Education. “It runs counter to a narrative that we want to tell ourselves about who we are. We have a narrative of progress, that we’re getting better.”
It is important to step back and recognize what is really going on with conservative backlash in the aftermath of the Floyd murder.
Prof. Ian Haney-López (“Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class“) spoke with Eclectablog’s Chris Savage and LOLGOP about the right-wing furor over critical race theory:
What the right is doing is it’s repeating with a new dog whistle the same theme it has been promoting for the last six decades. And that’s a theme that says, “Dear white voters, don’t pay attention to the economic royalty who are running this country. You should really be worried about dangerous and undeserving people of color.”
Bill Clinton once told Jon Stewart that Republicans use the strategy “because they think it works … And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.” For the last six decades, dogwhistles have not stopped working for them. And so….
Haney-López continues:
I also want to want to make clear that part of their strategy is to convey that message in code in a way that allows the hard right to pretend that this isn’t about race at all. That they’re not being racist. That this is in fact common sense. And so, that’s where dog whistles come in: illegal alien, welfare queen, terrorist, and now critical race theory. These are terms designed to trigger deeply rooted racist fears, but also to allow plausible deniability, to allow the right to deny that this is about triggering racist fears or anxieties at all.
“It’s a massive campaign of gaslighting,” says Haney-López.
Cue Mr. Abstract, the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater.
Jason Stanley of The Economist explains why the strategy has worked since the 1960s and why Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the latest conservative bugaboo (behind paywall):
Jennifer Richeson and Michael Krouse, both psychologists, along with their co-authors, have documented a delusion among white Americans about the racial-wealth gap. They show that Americans estimate that in 2016 the median black family had 90% of the wealth of the median white family rather than the truth figure of 10%. The research shows a bias toward what Ms Richardson calls a “mythology of racial progress.” As Ms Richeson writes in a recent article, “People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially better — and are approaching parity. This belief that the present has come close to parity is longstanding — in a Gallup poll for March 1963, 46% of white Americans agreed with the statement, “blacks have as good a chance as white in your community to get any job for which they are qualified.”
Many Americans believe we are nearing racial equality after a long progression of positive change. That means that any attempt to push for structural change to address inequalities will be met by profound disbelief. Those who argue for such changes get painted as radicals with a devious and destructive hidden agenda. This sort of moral panic helps maintain the status quo.
In essence, many White Americans can’t handle the truth. They don’t want their kids to hear about America’s “problems” or about “violent white backlash against emerging black political power” during Reconstruction. Or about 100 years of Jim Crow. It is why the Tulsa massacre virtually disappeared from history. Fear and racial animus are as volatile as nitroglycerin.