Prominent writers are lodging deep objections to these restrictions, without any grounding in reality.
Prominent writers are lodging deep objections to these restrictions, without any grounding in reality.
H istory itself, nay, our very democracy, is under attack.
The assailant? State legislatures that have passed laws intended to keep critical race theory and associated “anti-racist” ideologies out of the public schools.
The Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a scholar of totalitarianism and 20th-century atrocities, has written a piece for The New York Times Magazine titled “The War on History Is a War on Democracy.”
At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum published a piece with the headline “Democracies Don’t Try to Make Everyone Agree.”
Applebaum summarizes what she thinks is the crux of the anti-CRT push in schools: “Schoolchildren should not be taught the history of racism in America; they should not learn about slavery; they should not be allowed to think about the long-term consequences. That, apparently, is now the consensus in a segment of the Republican Party.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this line of attack on anti-CRT bills is either woefully misinformed or willfully dishonest. It doesn’t interact at all with the intention or the text of the anti-CRT provisions. In sum, it is a hysterical smear.
Applebaum doesn’t even try to provide an example of the alleged campaign to erase slavery and racism from the nation’s curricula, even though there’s already been a lot of anti-CRT movement in the states.
But, hey, evidently, being a fierce proponent of open debate and historical accuracy frees one from the obligation of trying to understand the people you are criticizing or of providing actual evidence for your charges against them.
Snyder goes even further. He explains at length Russian efforts to minimize the Stalin-era famine in Ukraine and to squelch discussion of it — a gross offense against historical memory. This campaign is formalized in “memory laws” that forbid speaking the truth and protect “the feelings of the powerful” rather than “the facts about the vulnerable.”
“This spring,” Snyder intones, “memory laws arrived in America.”
Then he recites the supposed parade of horribles. He says the new anti-CRT rule adopted by Florida’s state school board seeks, like Russia’s 2014 memory law, “to silence a history of suffering” and “to forbid education about racism.”
Either Snyder doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he hasn’t taken the time to understand the state of play in Florida or he’s being deliberately deceptive.
The rule adopted by the Florida board says, in a passage that Snyder conveniently doesn’t quote, “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.”
This is like Vladimir Putin’s handiwork?
The rule, as Snyder does note, bans the use of materials from the 1619 Project and forbids the teaching of “the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
In this, Florida is prohibiting the teaching of controversial and divisive perspectives that, at the very least, aren’t necessary to give a student a full, rounded, and accurate picture of U.S. history.
Snyder says this means that “since Jim Crow is systemic racism, having to do with American society and law, the subject would seem to be banned in Florida schools.”
This is utter nonsense. First, the sentence prior to the one about systematic racism, quoted above, says that slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the civil-rights movement can’t be suppressed or distorted.
How is that consistent with a ban on the teaching of Jim Crow?
Indeed, it is written in Florida statute that students are to be taught “the history of African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery, the passage to America, the enslavement experience, abolition, and the contributions of African Americans to society. Instructional materials shall include the contributions of African Americans to American society.”
The rule adopted by the Florida board of education in no way supplants the statute but adds further guidance for teachers in how to implement it.
You wouldn’t know that from Snyder’s article, which is huffy about truth and accuracy without displaying any commitment to them.
He also heaps scorn on a Texas anti-CRT law but doesn’t bother to quote from or paraphrase the extensive, extremely wide-ranging list of people, events, and ideas that it says students should understand.
The list includes:
(7) the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong;
(8) the history and importance of the civil rights movement, including the following documents:
(A) Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech;
(B) the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. Section 2000a et seq.);
(C) the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education;
(D) the Emancipation Proclamation;
(E) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
(F) the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution
Again, this is the equivalent of a Putin memory law?
In addition, the Texas act says that if a teacher delves into a contemporary topic, he should “explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”
It forbids requiring school employees to participate in training that “presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex.”
And it forbids courses including, among others, these concepts:
(i) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
(ii) an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
(iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race
What exactly is Snyder’s objection here? Does he really want race and sex stereotyping in the schools? Courses that teach that one race is superior to another?
He jabs Texas for forbidding courses that require understanding the 1619 Project. “Teachers succeed,” he snarks, “if students do not understand something.” But the act refers to understanding Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta, among many others. Presumably, if teachers were to impart anything close to all this knowledge, the kids will be alright if they aren’t taught Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Other states that have acted against CRT have adopted similar language against discriminatory content. Idaho, for instance, says that schools shouldn’t force students to affirm
(i) That any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior;
(ii) That individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin; or
(iii) That individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin.
It is reasonable to object to the drafting of some of these laws as vague and overly broad, but it’s hard to see how any fair-minded person could object to the goal of preventing children from being taught — in the public schools! — that one race is superior to another or that people should be discriminated against on the basis of their race.
Here we are, though, with prominent writers lodging their deep objections, without any grounding in the reality of what’s happening in the states. Indeed, one has to guess that you are as likely to get an accurate picture of Stalin’s crimes in today’s Russia as you are a factual portrayal of the anti-CRT provisions and their consequences in Snyder’s tendentious, highly misleading essay.