Teachers, Children & America – the Victims of the Culture Wars

“‘What’s going to happen if I teach this?’ — because the penalty is so steep.” 

A teacher’s reaction to the real-world application of a statutory ban on teaching “critical race theory.”

Germany still hangs its national head in shame over the atrocities it committed against Jews and others during World War II. 13 million innocents were enslaved and slaughtered in its concentration camps. Germany’s textbooks are rife with complete accounts of this horrific period. German children cannot graduate from high school without a mandatory trip to one of these camps, preserved and enhanced with historical photographs and ugly proof of the genocide. To post-WWII German politicians, this course of instruction is very much a part of Germany’s “never again” pledge to the world… and to its people. 

Fellow Axis partner, Japan, still pretends that it did not rape and massacre innocents in its brutal occupation of China beginning in 1937 (politely referred to as the Second Sino-Japanese War), including the notorious “rape of Nanking”: “In November of 1937, the Japanese army secured the city of Shanghai, and headed for China’s new capital, a safe zone, called Nanking. The city immediately surrendered, as they were ill-equipped to defend themselves. After the city had been officially captured in early December, a six-week raid on the city began. This consisted of mass murder, rape, pillaging, and destruction of the city. Despite the unconditional surrender of the Chinese military, the Japanese forces targeted and then systematically killed any man known or suspected of serving in the army.” Crimemuseum.org. Scholars believe that as many as 50,000 women were raped, and “In 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo estimated that over 200,000 Chinese were killed in the massacre.” Wikipedia. To this day, Japan denies its proven atrocities.

We seem to be following the Japanese model. Indeed, you have to look deep and far in our textbooks to find mention of American autocracies against indigenous peoples as white Europeans helped themselves to Native American lands, gathering up tens of thousands from 1830 to 1850, tearing them from their tribal lands in the eastern United States and force marching them (many to their deaths) to “reservations” in the Western states. The “Trail of Tears.” Today, under 1% of Americans identify themselves as such indigenous peoples. What happened to the rest? 

Our history with African slaves and their progeny is even darker. Even after the Civil War, black Americans have suffered ultra-violence from resentful whites, been denied the right to vote, access to quality education and faced discrimination in every aspect of their lives. The civil rights legislation that followed the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court school integration case still limps along in a world where equality among races is still questioned and resisted by a sizeable proportion of America. 

If you can even find reference to the event in any textbooks, there is bare mention of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred over 18 hours from May 31 to June 1, 1921, in which a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly Black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to History.com, “The event remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history… The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. A 2001 state commission examination of events was able to confirm 36 dead, 26 Black and 10 white. However, historians estimate the death toll may have been as high as 300.” Those remaining survivors witnessed far more murders than officially recorded.

But the new shift of Republican issue mongering, the legacy of a party thoroughly coopted by Donald Trump’s populist movement, is to engage in legal opposition to teaching facts that might embarrass the republic, even where indisputably true. The fear voiced is that impressionable children might garner a negative view of American history. To Republicans embracing this approach, America must not be criticized in our public classrooms.

There is an underlying “truth” to these culture wars: that racism in America ended for all time with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Really? Writing for the November 22nd Associated Press, Travis Loller and Acacia Coronado address one particularly disturbing aspect of these red state culture wars, that statutory ban of so-called “critical race theory” and other controversial subjects: “At least a dozen states have passed measures this year restricting how schools teach about racism, sexism and other topics. Though educators are still waiting to see how they will be enforced, the vagueness of some of the measures, coupled with stiff penalties including potential loss of teaching licenses, already is chilling conversations on race in schools and, in some cases, having consequences that probably go well beyond the intent of those approving the measures…

“In Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race [in November] promising to ban ‘critical race theory,’ a term that has become a stand-in for concepts like systemic racism and implicit bias [or that white privilege exists]. His Democratic opponent faced criticism for saying parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach.

“[These new] measures that restrict how race is addressed in classrooms have spread confusion and anxiety among many educators, who in some cases have begun pulling books and canceling lessons for fear of being penalized… Education officials have canceled a contemporary issues class in a Tennessee district, removed Frederick Douglass’ autobiography from reading lists in an Oklahoma school system and, in one Texas case, advised teachers to present ‘opposing’ views of the Holocaust.” 

Indeed, as teachers have been fired, teachers and school districts assessed heavy fines by the relevant state attorney general, many teachers have simply stopped teaching anywhere near these “controversial” subject areas. In a nation of rising minorities plus the explosion of white supremacist-armed-and-trained militia (vastly more than any comparable movement on the left as the FBI has acknowledged), forgetting to teach our high school grads the truth leaves them exposed to the fabrications of extremists and those who deny what is undeniable. It also opens the door to recruiting our young into this new populist world of racial and ethnic intolerance, exclusion and hatred. Do we really want another civil war?

I’m Peter Dekom, and that George Santayana admonition – that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat its mistakes – resonates deeply within these culture wars.