Race to the Bottom

An estimated 60,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched along 

Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1925.

Race to the Bottom

Classrooms Bans of Criticizing Racial Injustice 

What do Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have in common these days? Republican legislators, backed by Republican governors are passing or contemplating passing constitutionally questionable statutes that threaten schools with being cut off from state support if they teach or allow teaching that certain people are, consciously or unconsciously, practicing or allowing the practice of any form of racial oppression. They have labeled this racist and ignoble “pursuit to ban” as banning “critical race theory.”

Writing for the May 31st Los Angeles Times/Associated Press, Bryan Anderson explains this ugly trend: “Teachers and professors in Idaho will be prevented from ‘indoctrinating’ students on race. Oklahoma teachers will be prohibited from saying certain people are inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously. Tennessee schools will risk losing state aid if their lessons include particular concepts about race and racism.

“Governors and legislatures in Republican-controlled states across the country are moving to define what race-related ideas can be taught in public schools and colleges, a reaction to the nation’s racial reckoning after last year’s police killing of George Floyd. The measures have been signed into law in at least three states and are being considered in many more.

“Educators and education groups are concerned that the proposals will have a chilling effect in the classroom and that students could be given a whitewashed version of the nation’s history. Teachers are also worried about possible repercussions if a student or parent complains.

“‘Once we remove the option of teachers incorporating all parts of history, we’re basically silencing the voices of those who already feel oppressed,’ said Lakeisha Patterson, a third-grade English and social studies teacher who lives in Houston and worries about a bill under consideration in Texas…

“Rep. John Torbett, a Republican who leads North Carolina’s House education committee, said the legislation was intended to promote equality, not rewrite history. ‘It ensures equity,’ Torbett said during a hearing this month. ‘It ensures that all people in society are equitable. It has no mention of history.’” Right… uh huh… sure.

We’ve already been white-washing history in textbooks, as one Texas classroom tome referred to slaves as “immigrants,” or as Tulsa schools somehow forgot about the 1921 genocide of over 300 African Americans in the relatively affluent Greenwood neighborhood. How many Americans know about the forced march of Native Americans from the Carolinas to Oklahoma, known as the Trail of Tears that began in 1838? Or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882? Or the internment camps for Americans of Japanese heritage during World War II? Or the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in 1916 and following? Assuming these “critical race” statutes withstand constitutional scrutiny, none of these matters could lawfully be discussed in the relevant classrooms. Could Brown vs Board of Education (Supreme Court racial integration ruling in 1954), the Voting Rights and Civil Rights federal statutes passed in the 1960s or the need to deploy to deploy federal troops to enforce those laws against systematic regional racism be taught in schools? The above photograph would run afoul of this ban, if effected.

What is fascinating, in a bad way, is how many right-wing laws are being passed – from anti-abortion laws, greater freedom to carry unlicensed guns in public, voter suppression statutes, “cancel culture” reversals, gerrymandering and now “critical race theory,” by red state legislatures. All this knowing that voting demographic trends are very much moving in the opposite direction, a fact which is amplified by the passing of rigid populist GOP elderly being replaced by the overwhelmingly more tolerant and diverse rising generations of young voters. 

Catering to a Trumpian but dwindling “base,” the GOP now has to stack the deck to delay their demise by fostering voter suppression, embracing substantial untruths about voting and elections, stacking the Supreme Court to solidify a right-wing agenda, a tribunal already out of touch with the electorate but likely to last for decades and pass these generally unpopular new laws. We are about to find out how far the newly configured Supreme Court is willing to go to reverse decades of precedent and nullify the freedoms enunciated within the body of the Constitution itself.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if this anti-democracy trend will continue, be sustained or if the democracy which we believe we have simply dies as the nation implodes in an orgy of reversionistic anti-constitutional legislative autocracy.