The party of free speech and local control is systematically using state governments to suppress any teaching in schools and universities that systematic racism has existed and continues to exist in the United States. Conservative legislatures in more than a dozen states have proposed or enacted laws to curtail the teaching about the role of racism in American society to ensure that white students never experience a moment of discomfort contemplating their favored status in housing, education, employment, medical care, and the legal system.
Conservatives have glommed onto the concept of “critical race theory,” a term that is certain to make your Fox News-watching uncle soil his trousers. CTR is a graduate school interpretation of American History that maintains that racism is embedded in virtually all the crucial institutions of American life and cannot simply be glossed over with a token paragraph here or there. Some of its tenets have filtered into high school and grade school curriculum.
The field of American History, which only developed into a professional discipline around the 1870s, was established largely by white men, some of whom openly espoused white supremacy in the early years, and apart from a few brave outliers like W. E. B. Du Bois, has been subject to critiques from scholars of color and other critics since only about the 1960s.
In the wake of the racial reckoning following the George Floyd murder, Republicans are desperate to preserve the Happy Days American History of the 1950s, in which white people cheerfully rose to the top through the Protestant work ethic and minorities appear only as bit players dusting the furniture in the background.
As former Vice President Mike “Go-Ahead-and-Hang-Me-If-It’ll-Make-America-Great-Again” Pence said during a speech on Thursday, “it’s past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism.” So just to be clear, the Republican position is that voluminously documented practices such as employment discrimination, redlining, restrictive housing covenants, higher interest rates on mortgages, underfunded schools, the routing of highways through black and brown communities, poll taxes, black codes, and the disproportionate number of black people killed by police are all a “left-wing myth” concocted by Marxist miscreants who love to hate America.
For decades right-wingers have been fulminating about “revisionist” historians but rarely do they address the history that such academics are seeking to revise. Up until the mid 1950s the preeminent historian of American slavery was a man named Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, a descendant of plantation owners whose portrait of the peculiar institution in the antebellum South was essentially one big happy family where “in general the relations on both sides were felt to be based on pleasurable responsibility.”
While luxuriating in the “pleasurable responsibility” of a life sentence of unpaid toil, sexual exploitation and whippings, the slaves also enjoyed the educational benefits of plantation life according to Phillips. “On the whole the plantations were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of the sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes represented.”
Perhaps Republicans would be happier if such traditional history was never revised. Some of the provisions of the laws they are proposing certainly make it seem so. A bill proposed in the Wisconsin state legislature, for instance, would strip any school deemed to have violated the prohibition on the teaching of institutional racism of ten percent of its annual state funding.
So let’s say an African-American teacher who studies the long history of racism in the country and whose family has personally suffered the impact of it over generations decides to share this knowledge with her classroom. The Republican Party of Wisconsin is trying to empower itself to punish that school for allowing that teacher to educate her students about a reality with which many of them may be unfamiliar. Will they grant themselves the power to fire such a teacher in their next round of bills? Perhaps after that they could pass laws prohibiting the hiring of instructors who appeared likely to teach such concepts. It would not be the first time such laws were on the books.