American Identity Redux

“This course on Black history, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory? Now who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on his banned high school elective AP Black history course

Sometimes I think racial tolerance in this country has never been worse since the Jim Crow era, and then I think that perhaps that only now is a pervasive pattern of American bigotry more visible. Still, as a student of social change, I am reminded that in times of uncertainty and rapid change, particularly where income inequality and impaired access to basic resources are at stake, people often circle their wagons among their peers and look to clearly identifiable demographic cohorts to blame. After the destructive sanctions and confiscations imposed on defeated Germany after WWI created an economic intolerable state, Hitler used “financially controlling greedy Jews” as his scapegoats. American White traditionalists, particularly those with less education, are feeling left behind. Immigrants, Blacks and Browns were getting preferences.

Were racial and religious minorities recapturing that mantle of blame here? “Replacement” theory would seem to support that view. Remember the 2017 summer chant of torch-bearing angry White protestors in Charlottesville? “They shall not replace us!” A call that soon became a favored Fox News storyline, particularly from the venomous Tucker Carlson, that seeped deeply into MAGA culture. Repercussions against affirmative action, an issue before the United States Supreme Court, began to echo. Has MAGA politics legitimized racism?

MAGA leaders, most importantly from one of the two GOP frontrunners for the 2024 presidential nomination (Ron DeSantis), declared that they would fight a “culture war” against leftwing antagonists attempting to “indoctrinate” their children with “woke” critical race theories. “Woke” was a little wink and a nod to White Christian nationalists without having an overt “White” supremacist reference. But everybody who heard that utterance understood. DeSantis was successful in causing the College Board to redefine their criteria for an acceptable high school Black Studies Advanced Placement course to eliminate what he felt were objectionable and controversial subject areas, what Black scholars describe as our contemporary “truth.”

As the above suggests, there has been particular focus placed on classroom discussions dealing with contemporary discrimination, racial inequality and even topics concerning our tortured history in the slavery and Jim Crow eras. There is a notion that White students (from elementary school to college years) should not feel latent guilt for racial and religious discrimination, and that according equal rights to LGBTQ+ people is offensive to a vast pool of evangelicals. But exactly how pervasive are these racial feelings? Survey results are most telling.

A “Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,585 U.S. adults interviewed online from Feb. 2 to 6, 2023. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey...” The questions centered around what students should or could be taught about American racial issues. Reporting for Yahoo!News (February 10th), Andrew Romano summarizes the results:

“[W]hite Americans are just as likely to favor (40%) as to oppose (41%) a ban on teaching Advanced Placement courses in African American studies in public schools — the same sort of ban that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently threatened to implement in Florida, unleashing a storm of national controversy.

“In contrast, Black Americans (65% oppose, 20% favor) and Democrats (70% oppose, 19% favor) are far more resistant to a DeSantis-style ban. Yet because white Americans outnumber Americans of color — and because a full 58% of DeSantis’s fellow Republicans support a ban — the overall number of Americans who are against banning AP African American studies (46%) does not even clear the 50% mark… The rest of the country either favors a ban (34%) or isn’t sure (20%)…

“A full 65% of 2020 Donald Trump voters favored the initial Florida ban; even more Joe Biden voters (75%) opposed it. But when asked about the revised curriculum — which no longer includes ‘contemporary topics such as Black Lives Matter, incarceration, queer life and the debate over reparations’ — the numbers flipped, with most Trump voters now saying they favor offering the AP course (53%) and a plurality of Biden voters saying they oppose it (44%).

“These gaps reflect a deeper divide between Republicans and Democrats — and, to a degree, between white and black Americans — over the role of race in America today. The right largely believes that racism is now personal, the product of one individual discriminating against another. The rest of the country mostly agrees that racism is still systemic, a force that continues to harm people of color, regardless of how isolated individuals treat them.

“Asked if there is ‘a problem with systemic racism in America,’ nearly every demographic group says yes more often than not: Democrats (by a 63-point margin), Black Americans (by a 61-point margin), adults under 30 (by a 28-point margin), independents (by a 26-point margin) and even white Americans (by a 13-point margin). Overall, far more Americans say yes, the U.S. has a problem with systemic racism (54%) than say no, it does not (30%).

“The only groups that say no more often than not are on the right: Republicans (by a 15-point margin) and Trump voters (by a 33-point margin)… As a result, the right — a group that is also disproportionately white — seems to be suspicious of any teachings that suggest systemic racism is a present-day problem and not just a thing of the past.

“For instance, the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows majority approval of ‘U.S. public schools including lessons on African-American history within the regular U.S. history curriculum’ among all Americans (67%), white Americans (65%), Black Americans (79%), Democrats (82%) and Republicans (58%)… Yet Republicans (40%) and white Americans (41%) are far less likely than Democrats (54%) and Black Americans (52%) to say the lessons that ‘U.S. public school students are currently taught about African-American history’ are ‘appropriate.’”

If one were simply to watch the abundant video evidence of racial discord and violence that occurs daily across the land, it is painfully obvious that we have a long way to go to achieve true equality. But if our children do not learn about it, cannot discuss it in their classrooms, exactly how are we ever going to erase these anomalies from the soul of our nation?

I’m Peter Dekom, and vanilla is most obviously the wrong color to apply to texts and lesson plans about racial divisions within our country.