“54% of American adults between the ages of 16-74 read below a 6th grade level. So that means we have an epidemic of illiteracy,” professor Brittney Cooper told MSNBC’s Ari Berman in a January segment on book banning. It is not just a push from the right to deputize parents for policing public education, but to “systematically undereducate” the public. “If you make people ignorant, then it becomes much easier to control them.”
“I don’t know of any problem that has ever been solved by an actual choice to remain ignorant,” Cooper lamented. Many of the books being banned are alleged to teach “critical race theory,” yet, most “are written by and about people of color.”
Jamelle Bouie concurs in his New York Times column. Conservatives he calls out mean to legislatively censor history in the name of protecting children from uncomfortable details of the American story. Particularly, details of slavery and the battle for civil rights. Broadly drafted bills in several states mean to “suppress debate and stifle discussion in favor of the rote memorization of approved facts.”
Bouie writes:
Last month, for example, the Indiana House of Representatives approved a bill — not yet signed into law — that would limit what teachers can say regarding race, history and politics in the state’s classrooms. Under the law, schools could be held liable for mentioning any one of several “divisive concepts,” including the idea that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish responsibility, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin or political affiliation.”
The bill would allow parents to allege a violation, file a complaint, sue and even collect damages (up to $1,000). It would also, in the name of transparency, create curriculum review committees for parents and require schools and teachers to post lists of material on websites for parents to inspect.
In South Carolina, lawmakers have introduced a bill — known as the Freedom from Ideological Coercion and Indoctrination Act — that would prohibit any state-funded institution from stating that “a group or an individual, by virtue of his or her race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, heritage, culture, religion, or political belief is inherently racist, sexist, bigoted, ignorant, biased, fragile, oppressive, or contributive to any oppression, whether consciously or unconsciously.” If signed into law, this bill could make it illegal, for instance, for teachers and college professors in the state to criticize members of a white supremacist group since that affiliation might count as a “political belief.”
Schools that “repeatedly distort or misrepresent verifiable historical facts” or “omit relevant and important context” or “advertise or promote ideologies or sociopolitical causes or organizations” could face a loss of state funding, state accreditation or tax-exempt status. As for what these violations would actually look like? The bill does not say.
Book banning and the policing of American history are efforts to put the civil rights genie back in the bottle over a half century after the 1960s ended Jim Crow, and after subsequent movements by marignalized groups once considered deviants gained broader acceptance and protections.
In the latest backlash, the sort of parents who decry children wearing masks want to erase those gains by making their kids wear educational blinders.
For decades, conservative parents, expecially evangelical ones, sent their children to religious schools to prevent their kids’ exposure to ideas that might challenge views they learned at home. This is nothing new. Only more widespread, public, and enforced now in public schools by censorship laws.
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