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mywitchcultblr · 2 years

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Alabama House Bill 322

In April, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed into law a bill preventing transgender students from using facilities like restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. An amendment to the law also bars kindergarten through fifth grade educators from engaging in classroom instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity in a manner that is not “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”

Florida House Bill 1557

One of the most highly publicized measures of the year, Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law – dubbed by its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law – will prevent public primary school teachers from engaging in classroom instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity.

Public school educators through high school will be prohibited from addressing either topic with their students in a manner that is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” Parents will also be given greater authority to take legal action against school districts they believe to be in violation of the law.

Florida House Bill 7

Florida’s Individual Freedom Act prevents workplaces and schools in the state from requiring training or instruction that may make some people feel they bear “personal responsibility” for historic wrongdoings because of their “race, color, sex or national origin.”

The measure has also been called the “Stop WOKE Act” by the state’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, where woke is used as an acronym for “Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees.”

Indiana House Bill 1041

The now-law prevents transgender women and girls through high school from competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, in March vetoed the measure, writing in a letter that he believes the bill does not solve a problem that exists in Indiana. The state legislature later voted to override the governor’s veto.

South Dakota Senate Bill 46

In February, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) signed into law the year’s first transgender athlete ban.

Under the law, transgender women and girls through high school are barred from playing on sports teams that match with their gender identity. Students and schools that “suffer any direct or indirect harm” from the law being violated are permitted to take legal action.

South Dakota House Bill 1012

Much like Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” this new South Dakota law was designed to “protect students and employees at institutions of higher education from divisive concepts” related to race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity or national origin

Under the measure, colleges and universities are not restricted in their ability to teach certain courses or subject matter, but “forced” or “compelled” speech in college orientations or trainings is prohibited.

Tennessee House Bill 1895

In April, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed into law a measure to pull funding from state schools that allow transgender students to play on sports teams consistent with their gender identity, doubling down on an existing Tennessee law which already bars transgender athletes from playing on sports teams inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth.

The new law requires Tennessee’s education commissioner to “withhold a portion of the state education finance funds” from local school districts that fail or refuse to determine a student-athlete’s gender using the student’s “original” birth certificate.

Tennessee Senate Bill 2153

In May, Lee signed an additional law prohibiting “males from participating in public higher education sports that are designated for females.” The legislation requires Tennessee colleges to determine a student-athlete’s gender using the student’s “original” birth certificate.

Under the law, any government entity, organization or athletic association is barred from taking “an adverse action” against a school that complies with the law or a student who reports a violation.

If evidence of a violation is found which “deprives a student of an athletic opportunity or causes direct or indirect harm to the student,” the affected student will have a private cause of action for injunctive relief, damages and “any other relief available under law.”

Tennessee House Bill 2454

This law expands an existing requirement that internet vendors block “obscenity and pornography” on school computers. Previously, an exception to the law was education material. That is no longer the case.

LGBTQ+ advocates worry the law will be used to restrict access to resources about LGBTQ+ issues and identities, which Tennessee lawmakers have made clear they believe are inappropriate for children.

Utah House Bill 11

The new Utah law bars transgender women and girls from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity.

Gov. Spencer Cox (R) vetoed the measure, which requires school sports teams be determined by the players’ sex assigned at birth, in March.

“Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live,” Cox wrote in a veto letter at the time. “And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly.”

Cox’s veto was later overridden by the legislature.

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mariacallous · 1 year

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The strategy behind this Republican battle is to fight off the federal state until they have re-established federal power themselves

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been grabbing national headlines with his relentless attacks on so-called “woke”. In addition to his Stop-Woke (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, which prohibits educational institutions and businesses from teaching students and employees anything that would cause anyone to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin, he has barred University of Florida professors from giving evidence against the state’s voting law, claimed that professors at public colleges have no right to freedom of speech, and organizing a “hostile takeover” of the New College of Florida, one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. But he is far from the only Republican politicians to attack the education system.

UCLA Law School’s CRT Forward Tracking Project has tracked 567 anti-critical race theory (CRT) efforts introduced at the local, state, and federal levels. According to the World Population Review, there are currently seven states that have banned CRT, while another 16 states are in the process of banning it. That constitutes almost all states with a Republican governor. While CRT is a highly specific academic theory that is almost exclusively taught at some law schools, the anti-CRT laws are incredibly broad and vague and target all levels of education. In my state, Georgia, House bill 1084 bans the use of so-called “divisive concepts” (eg race and gender) from teaching and, although it includes several exceptions and stipulations, these are so broad and vague that many teachers will simply stay away from these “divisive concepts”.

Although all bills explicitly ban the teaching of classic racism, ie that “one race is superior to another race”, they also ban the teaching of institutional or structural racism, ie the idea racial discrimination is not just the consequence of a few racist individuals (“bad apples”) but that it is structural, engrained in the country’s key institutions – from election laws to law enforcement. The idea is simple: if kids are not taught about institutional racism, and the white supremacy it upholds, they won’t question it later when they are voters. As Orwell knew, historical revisionism is always a project for the future.

Both legal professionals and laypersons have noted that “the bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover”. This is not because of incompetence or oversight but by design. The vagueness serves, at least, two goals. First, and foremost, it makes the laws hard to interpret, which leads those targeted (from teachers to principals) to be extra cautious. Second, the vagueness provides deniability, both to the courts and to more moderate supporters. In fact, the prime goal is not for the state to censor teachers and schools but for them to self-censor. That is why it was only a minor setback when a Florida judge struck down the “Stop Woke” law, calling it “positively dystopian”. Across the state, teachers and universities had already started to self-censor. For instance, the University of Central Florida (UCF), the state’s largest university, removed all anti-racist statements from departmental websites, while several of its professors decided to cancel scheduled courses on race out of fear of breaching the “Stop-Woke” law.

Although most of the current laws are targeting public institutions in Republican-controlled states, they are part of a national agenda. In his first speech as re-elected House speaker, Kevin McCarthy pledged to fix “woke education indoctrination in our schools”, while former President Donald Trump has made the “issue” a priority for his 2024 campaign. Building upon the misguided ideas of his 1776 Commission, whose work was cut short by Trump’s lost re-election bid, the former president not only wants to stimulate “patriotic education” but also cut federal funding for any school or program that includes “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on to our children”. And, make no mistake, university administrators will not risk losing millions of federal funding for a “gender” or “race” class, not even at the private Ivy Leagues in solidly blue states.

The recent Dobbs ruling has shown once again that “states’ rights” are not a Republican principle but a defensive, and temporal, strategy to fight off the federal state until they have re-established federal power themselves. We cannot expect individual schools and teachers to fight this battle alone. We also shouldn’t expect the educational establishment to stand up for academic freedom, as was made clear by the recent decision of the College Board, which stripped down its AP curriculum for African American Studies to appease DeSantis.

To counter the highly organized conservative attack, we need a concerted and integrated campaign from all individuals and organizations that support academic freedom and liberal democracy, from the AAUP to the ACLU, and we need it sooner rather than later, as the damage is already being done – one in four of all teachers across the country have already altered their lesson plans due to anti-CRT laws. After all, as Orwell has taught us, how we see the past determines our future!

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beloved-not-broken · 1 year

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Why isn't God intervening?

Between the public drag show ban in Tennessee and the sweeping censorship of children's books in Florida, the U.S. is becoming increasingly hostile to the LGTBQ community, especially transgender kids. As an out-and-proud trans adult living in the South, I'm starting to fear for my safety.

So of course the thought of "where's God in all this" has crossed my mind. ("Right here!" would be the instinctive Sunday school answer, but I definitely need more assurance given the circumstances.)

Hearing soundbites of politicians spew vile, angry rhetoric about people like me has already made me pessimistic about the fate of the LGBTQ community in this country; discovering that "The ACLU is tracking 399 anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S." (as of writing this post) made me want to crawl into a cave and never come out again.

Which brings me back to the question I asked to begin with: why isn't God intervening? Well, there are signs that God is working behind the scenes. And as we know from Romans 8:28, God works all things for good—even in situations that were intended for evil.

Very few anti-LGBTQ bills are actually being passed.

Organizations like the Human Rights Campaign have successfully fought most of the bills that were introduced on the state level across the U.S. According to a recent press release:

"In 2022, politicians in statehouses across the country introduced 315 discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ bills and 29 passed into law. Despite this, fewer than 10% of these efforts succeeded."

Psalm 50:6 says that "[God] is a God of justice," so clearly divine intervention is happening here.

Individuals, families, and organizations are challenging these bills in court.

The Legal Defense Fund has filed a lawsuit challenging the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (“Stop W.O.K.E.”) Act in Florida, which was designed to limit the discussion of race, gender, and sexuality in colleges and universities.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging a law in Arkansas that would prevent trans kids from receiving needed medical care, and would allow insurance companies to deny coverage to any Arkansas resident seeking gender-affirming medical care.

Plus, media outlets like Vice have come up with practical steps that we can take to fight for the rights of LGBTQ people across the U.S.

Proverbs 31:8-9 says that we should...

"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy."

Clearly, God is behind these efforts, too.

Similar laws have been passed and repealed before.

In an interview with NPR, Jules Gill-Peterson (a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University) said that laws like the drag show ban in Tennessee have been passed before, and they were eventually repealed. Who's to say this won't happen again?

It sounds a lot like what Ecclesiastes 3:15 says about the cyclical nature of life:

"Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account."

No matter how often history repeats itself, God (the righteous judge) will always win.

What's happening across the country is terrifying, but take heart—God knows what's going on and is intervening behind the scenes. 💜

#cw transphobia #anti trans bills #encouragement #shame and doubt #does god love the lgbtqia+ community #scripture

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kammartinez · 11 months

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We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

It is strange…that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up against the present propaganda in the schools and crushed it. This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom. —Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

On January 20, Florida’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr., tweeted out a chart justifying the state’s decision to ban schools from teaching a newly created advanced placement course in African American Studies. The graphic singled out the curriculum’s inclusion of Black queer studies, intersectionality, Black feminist literary thought, reparations, and the Movement for Black Lives as “obvious violations of Florida law.” It also identified scholars whose work was included in an earlier iteration of the curriculum as radical propagandists bent on smuggling “critical race theory” (CRT), Marxism, and deviant sexuality into high-school classrooms.

Despite the fact that the College Board had not yet released the final curriculum to the public, Diaz and the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, claimed it violated Senate Bill 148, better known as the “Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” or the Stop W.O.K.E. Act. Sponsored by Diaz and signed in April 2022, the law prohibits teaching anything that might cause “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” or “indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view inconsistent…with state academic standards.” In other words, introducing and teaching race, gender, sexuality, and anything remotely resembling critical race theory was strictly prohibited.

When the College Board released the final curriculum eleven days later, it had changed substantially. Most of the material the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) found offensive was removed or downgraded from mandatory to optional. The revised 226-page curriculum eliminated queer studies, critical race theory, mass incarceration, and a section titled “Black Struggle in the 21st Century,” made the Black Lives Matter movement and reparations optional research projects, and added a project topic on “Black conservatism.” The names of all the offending authors—including myself—were removed.

The College Board insisted that it had not bowed to political pressure, despite a trove of email exchanges with the FDOE discussing potentially prohibited content and a final letter from the FDOE thanking the board for removing topics the state had deemed “discriminatory and historically fictional.” The fact is that the College Board stood to lose millions of dollars if Florida canceled its AP courses. Although a federal judge blocked portions of the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that restricted academic freedom in public colleges and universities, the law still applies to private businesses and K–12 education.

Rather than accept a watered-down curriculum bereft of the theories, concepts, and interdisciplinary methods central to Black Studies, students, teachers, scholars, and social justice activists fought back. On May 3 they organized a nationwide day of action calling out the College Board and defending the integrity of Black Studies. Apparently it worked. A week before the national protest, the College Board announced plans to revise the curriculum yet again. As of this writing, however, no specific changes have been announced.

The right’s vehement opposition to Black Studies is predictable. Black Studies has been under attack since its formal inception on college campuses in the late 1960s, and repression of all knowledge advancing Black freedom goes back much further. Most state laws prohibiting enslaved Africans from learning to read and write were introduced after 1829, in response first to the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World—an unrelenting attack on slavery and US hypocrisy for maintaining it—and then to Nat Turner’s rebellion two years later. Back then the Appeal was contraband: anyone caught with it faced imprisonment or execution. Today it is a foundational text in Black Studies.

The historian Jarvis R. Givens found that during the Jim Crow era Black school teachers often “deployed fugitive tactics” and risked losing their jobs in order to teach Black history.1 In Mississippi, organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) taught contraband history in “freedom schools,” while the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) established “freedom libraries” throughout the state stocked with donated books—many on Black history by Black authors. Between 1964 and 1965, white terrorists burned down the freedom libraries in Vicksburg, Laurel, and Indianola.2

Who’s afraid of Black Studies? White supremacists, fascists, the ruling class, and even some liberals. As well they should be. Not everything done in the name of Black Studies challenges the social order. Like any field, it has its own sharp divisions and disagreements. But unlike mainstream academic disciplines, Black Studies was born out of a struggle for freedom and a genuine quest to understand the world in order to change it, presenting political and moral philosophy with their most fundamental challenge. The objects of study have been Black life, the structures that produce premature death, the ideologies that render Black people less than human, the material consequences of those ideologies, and the foundational place of colonialism and slavery in the emergence of modernity. Black Studies grew out of, and interrogates, the long struggle to secure our future as a people and for humanity by remaking and reenvisioning the world through ideas, art, and social movements. It emerged as both an intellectual and political project, without national boundaries and borders. The late political theorist Cedric J. Robinson described it as “a critique of Western Civilization.”

A chief target of this critique has been the interpretation of history. Battles over the teaching of history are never purely intellectual contests between ignorance and enlightenment, or reducible to demands to insert marginalized people into the curriculum.3 Contrary to the common liberal complaint that schools “ignore” the history of slavery and racism, Black and Native people have long occupied a place in school history curricula. Generations of students learned that white people settled the wilderness, took rightful ownership of the land from bloodthirsty Indians who didn’t know what to do with it, and brought the gift of civilization and democracy to North America and the rest of the world. During most of the twentieth century, students were taught that Negroes were perfectly happy as slaves, until some conniving Republicans and carpetbaggers persuaded them otherwise. Leading history books by Ivy League professors repeated the myth, and in the first epic film in the US, D. W. Griffith depicted the “great and noble” Ku Klux Klan redeeming the South from rapacious, ignorant Negroes and shifty carpetbaggers, obliterating all vestiges of the Black struggle to bring genuine democracy to the South and the nation.

Black scholars and their allies consistently contested these narratives. In “The Propaganda of History,” the last chapter of his epic text Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois called out the ideological war on truth masquerading as objective scholarship. He believed in reason but came to see its futility in the face of white supremacy, colonial rule, and “one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion.”

Du Bois wasn’t out to make a name for himself in the field of nineteenth-century US history. He was trying to understand the roots of fascism in Europe and in his native land. He saw the battle over the interpretation of history play out in the streets, statehouses, courts, and newspapers for decades—often with deadly consequences. The rise of the second Ku Klux Klan was inspired in part by a national campaign to erase the history of Reconstruction. The chief catalyst was Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, the same year the renowned Black historian Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.

Respectable white supremacists such as the Ladies Memorial Associations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, waged their own soft power campaign, building monuments to the defenders of slavery in the region and around the nation’s capital. The movement to erect statues celebrating Confederate war heroes took off in the early twentieth century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction because it took over three decades of white terrorism, political assassination, lynching, disfranchisement, and federal complicity to destroy the last vestiges of a biracial labor movement, ensuring that white supremacy and Jim Crow could reign supreme.

What the right demonizes as CRT bears no resemblance to actual critical race theory, a four-decades-old body of work that interrogates why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality. Racism, these theorists argue, isn’t just a matter of individual bias or prejudice but a social and political construct embedded in our legal system. Taking a page straight from the anticommunist playbook, the right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle, turning an antiracist academic project into a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their “race.”4

The chief architect of this strategy is Christopher Rufo, currently a senior fellow at the archconservative Manhattan Institute, who in the wake of the mass protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd declared that the spread of critical race theory was behind the unrest. By his own admission, Rufo sought the “perfect villain” to mobilize opposition to the antiracist insurgency and had no qualms about distorting CRT to do it. Ignoring the scholarship while naming the scholars, notably Kimberlé Crenshaw and the late Derrick Bell, he presumed that these three words “strung together” would signify “hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” As he explained to his Twitter followers in 2021, the plan was to rebrand CRT and

eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Rufo’s ploy soon became White House policy. He helped draft Trump’s now-rescinded Executive Order 13950, issued on September 22, 2020, which warned of a left-wing ideology threatening “to infect core institutions of our country” by promoting “race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating.” The document pitted this invented ideology against the principles of “color blindness” derived from a distorted reading of Martin Luther King, Jr. to justify eliminating workplace diversity and inclusion training in federal agencies. It helped spawn a wave of anti-CRT legislation. According to a recent study released by UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program, from the start of 2021 to the end of 2022 federal, state, and local legislative and governing bodies introduced 563 anti-CRT measures, almost half of which have been enacted or adopted. At least 94 percent of the successful measures target K–12 education, affecting nearly half of all children in the country’s public schools.

These measures target not just CRT but liberal multiculturalism and, more pointedly, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and any modern academic discipline that critically studies race and gender. (From here on I will refer to this scholarship collectively as “critical race and gender studies,” make specific references to Black Studies or CRT when appropriate, and use “we” occasionally when explaining what scholars in these fields do.) Most of these bills allegedly intended to protect education from politics share identical language because they derive from model legislation drafted by well-funded right-wing think tanks, including the America First Policy Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for Renewing America, Alliance for Free Citizens, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Stanley Kurtz, a leading critic of the African American AP course who masquerades as an investigative journalist for National Review, ironically named the model anti-CRT legislation he drafted for the Ethics and Public Policy Center “the Partisanship Out of Civics Act.”

Some of the text of that legislation was lifted from the section of Executive Order 13950 prohibiting the teaching of “divisive concepts.” These concepts include the idea that one race or sex is “inherently superior” to others; that the US “is fundamentally racist or sexist”; that a person, “by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive” or “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”; that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race”; and that some people “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” The assumption here is that confronting the history of American racism would provoke feelings of guilt and shame in white kids and their parents. Such legislation never considers the psychological distress Black, brown, and Indigenous students frequently endure as a result of whitewashed curricula, tracking, suspensions and expulsions on the slightest pretext, even abuses by law enforcement inside their own classrooms.

Such allegations against critical race and gender studies strain credulity. No serious scholar believes that someone is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” solely “by virtue of his or her race or sex.” We teach the opposite: that race is neither fixed nor biological but socially constructed. Modern categories of racial classification were Enlightenment-era European creations that relied on a false science to claim that discrete “racial” groups share inherent traits or characteristics. We reject such claims as essentialist and recognize that behaviors and ideas attributed to race, gender, class, and sexuality are not inherent but ideological, and therefore dynamic and subject to change. We use evidence-based research to show that policies that further racial, class, and gender inequality need not be intentional, and that anyone can be antiracist, regardless of their race.

The belief that hierarchies of race and gender are based on “inherent” characteristics is the basis for white supremacy and patriarchy. Such ideologies have been used to justify conquest, dispossession, slavery, segregation, the exclusion of women and Black people from the franchise, wage differentials based on race and gender, welfare and housing policies, marriage and family law, even the denial of women’s right to bodily autonomy. Many conservatives backing anti-CRT legislation do subscribe to the idea that certain differences, especially regarding gender, are “inherent”—that is, fixed and immutable. CRT and Black Studies do not.

Likewise, to accuse CRT of teaching that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic” are racist is to turn its interpretation of US history on its head. What Black Studies and critical race theory reveal is the extent to which wealth was accrued through the labor and land of others. The foundational wealth of the country, concentrated in the hands of a few, was built on stolen land (Indigenous dispossession), stolen labor (slavery), and the exploitation of the labor of immigrants, women, and children.

Finally, critical scholars of race and gender categorically reject the claim that any individual “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” The language is intended as an attack on the idea of reparations, but advocates of reparations hardly claim that all present-day white people are “responsible” for slavery. Rather, they acknowledge that enslavement, land theft, wage theft, and housing discrimination resulted in extracting wealth from some and directly accruing generational wealth to others. Slavery and Jim Crow—more precisely, racial capitalism—suppressed wages for white workers, and the threat of interracial worker and farmer unity compelled the Southern oligarchs to pass antilabor laws and crush unions. The result was the subjugation of all working-class Southerners, including whites.

The right-wing movement to remake education is not limited to K–12. Nearly a fifth of the 563 anti-CRT measures introduced and 12 percent of those enacted target colleges and universities. In Florida, DeSantis has launched a successful coup against the administration of New College, replaced a majority of the board of trustees with handpicked allies, and begun to totally overhaul the curriculum, wiping out all vestiges of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The latest attack on Florida’s state university system, Senate Bill 266, which DeSantis signed into law last month, is a flagrant attack on academic freedom and faculty governance. The Board of Governors is charged with reviewing state colleges and universities for violating the Florida Educational Equity Act, which forbids teaching “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.” The law also prohibits faculty or staff from advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion, promoting or participating in political or social activism, or granting preferential treatment “on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or religion.” And it gives boards of trustees the power to review the tenure status of any faculty member on demand, which means that even tenured professors are subject to arbitrary dismissal.

Buried in this law and shrouded by the state’s “anti-woke” rhetoric is another agenda: transforming the state college system into an engine of market fundamentalism beholden to business interests. One of its objectives is “to promote the state’s economic development” through new research, technology, patents, grants, and contracts that “generate state businesses of global importance,” and to create “a resource rich academic environment that attracts high-technology business and venture capital to the state.” In 2020 the governor and the state legislature established and lavishly funded the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International University, tasked with promoting “a better understanding of the free enterprise system and its impact on individual freedom and human prosperity around the world, with a special emphasis on the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean.” SB 266 further elevated the Adam Smith Center by giving it all the powers of an academic department, including the ability to hire tenure-track faculty and offer majors and minors.

A matter of days before issuing Executive Order 13950, Trump announced the formation of the federally funded 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education” and portray the US in a more positive light. Advisors for the commission blamed colleges and universities for distorting history and promoting “destructive scholarship” that sows “division, distrust, and hatred among citizens…. It is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.”

The commission issued its first and only report less than two weeks after the insurrection at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. It denigrates popular democracy, whitewashes the history of slavery, says nothing about Indigenous peoples or dispossession, and claims that “progressivism” and “identity politics” are at odds with American values, not unlike communism and fascism.

Perhaps its most egregious fabrication is turning Martin Luther King Jr. into a colorblind libertarian. The report recasts the civil rights movement as a struggle for individual liberty and equal opportunity that, with the death of King, lost its way when it embraced “group rights,” “preferential treatment” for minorities, and “identity politics.” This is the same King who in his book Why We Can’t Wait (1964) supported “compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro” because “it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up”; the same King who called on the federal government to divest from the war in Vietnam, invest in the war on poverty, recognize racism as a source of inequality, and acknowledge “the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

The stunning distortion of King’s ideas should surprise no one, King least of all. He knew something about the politics of history. On the occasion of Du Bois’s hundredth birthday in 1968, King delivered a speech at Carnegie Hall on the significance of Black Reconstruction’s challenge to the “conscious and deliberate manipulation of history.” Du Bois, King observed, proved that “far from being the tragic era” of misrule and corruption, Reconstruction

was the only period in which democracy existed in the South. This stunning fact was the reason the history books had to lie because to tell the truth would have acknowledged the Negroes’ capacity to govern and fitness to build a finer nation in a creative relationship with poor whites.

Multiracial democracy, or what Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” represented the greatest threat to the classes that ruled the South and the nation. It still does. DeSantis, Trump, Governors Greg Abbott and Kim Reynolds, the 1776 Commission, the Center for American Freedom, the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and their copious allies all claim that their war on critical race and gender studies aims to present US history in a “positive light.” Why then not teach the history of movements that tried to make sure every person enjoyed freedom and safety and fought to end slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and sex discrimination? If “patriotic education” embraces the principles of freedom and democracy, why not introduce students to courageous people—like Benjamin Fletcher, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Johnnie Tillmon, George Jackson, Fran Beal, Barbara Smith, and others—who risked their lives to ensure freedom, democracy, and economic security for others? Why not create a curriculum centered on the abolitionist movement; on Indigenous nations as early models for US constitutional democracy; on the formerly enslaved people who crushed the slaveholding republic, tried to democratize the South, and fought the terrorism of lynching, the Klan, and the Black Legion; on the suffragists and labor organizers who expanded our democratic horizons and improved working conditions?

But in our current neofascist universe, this is “woke” history. The right masks its distrust of multiracial democracy by calling it “progressivism” and its opposition to antiracism by labeling it “identity politics.” According to this logic, antiracism has sullied America’s noble tradition. Ruby Bridges Goes to School, books for young readers on Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and his children’s book, Antiracist Baby, have all been targeted for bans as subversive literature. There is no commensurate movement to ban books that promote racism, like Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which asserts frequently that Black people are innately inferior to whites—physically, intellectually, and even imaginatively; Edmund Ruffin’s defense of slavery, The Political Economy of Slavery (1857); or books and articles by Samuel Cartwright, Josiah Nott, George Fitzhugh, Louis Agassiz, Herbert Spencer, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, or Daniel G. Brinton, the eminent anthropologist who in his book Races and Peoples (1890) wrote, “That philanthropy is false, that religion is rotten, which would sanction a white woman enduring the embrace of a colored man.”

The point of these attacks is to turn antiracists into enemies and the people identified as “white” into victims. Marginalized white working people, who are victims of stagnant wages, privatized health care, big pharma, and tax policies that redistribute wealth upward, are taught instead that they live in what was once the perfect country until woke forces took over and gave their hard-earned income to the Negroes and immigrants who are now trying to take their guns. It would be a mistake to think of such rhetoric as a “culture war.” This is a political battle. It is part and parcel of the right-wing war on democracy, reproductive rights, labor, the environment, land defenders and water protectors, the rights and safety of transgender and nonbinary people, asylum seekers, the undocumented, the unhoused, the poor, and the perpetual war on Black communities.

As I write these words, the predominantly white Republican Mississippi state legislature is stripping the predominantly Black city of Jackson of political authority and revenue. Many of the same states adopting anti-CRT laws are also passing anti-trans bills and extreme abortion bans, and relaxing gun laws. The Tennessee state legislature expelled two young Black representatives, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for joining protesters demanding stricter gun laws after a mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school. And Texas governor Greg Abbott is planning to pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of killing the antiracist activist Garrett Foster during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.

Colin Kaepernick, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and I put together a new anthology, Our History Has Always Been Contraband, to respond not only to these right-wing lies and attacks but also to an ill-informed mainstream discourse over the meaning, purpose, and scholarly value of Black Studies. Despite the claims of even well-meaning and sympathetic pundits, Black Studies courses are not designed to serve Black students alone but all students. The point is not to raise self-esteem or make students feel guilty, nor is Black Studies merely a diversity project. The essays and readings we gathered make clear that Black Studies sits not at the margins of social inquiry but at its very center. As we face a rising tide of fascism, we must remember how we got here: by protest, occupation, rebellion, and deep study. As long as racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, class oppression, and colonial domination persist, our critical analyses will always be considered criminal.

#history #education #racism #politics #censorship

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fernreads · 1 year

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School teachers in Florida’s Manatee county are removing books from their classrooms or physically covering them up after a new bill went into effect that prohibited material unless deemed appropriate by a librarian, or “certified media specialist”.

If a teacher is found in violation of these guidelines, they could face felony charges.

The new guidelines for the Florida law, known as HB 1467, outline the books be free of pornographic material, suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material, and appropriate for the grade level and age group.

In order to determine if the books meet these guidelines, certified media specialists must undergo an online training developed by Florida’s department of education.

With only a few or even one media specialist present in each school, the process to vet books is lengthy.

Scrutiny of teaching material in Florida schools heightened under the leadership of the rightwing Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, whose administration says it is actively working to “protect parental rights”, which includes a prohibition on childhood education on gender, sexual orientation and critical race theory.

DeSantis has emerged as a legitimate rival to Donald Trump in the Republican party. The former US president has already declared his 2024 candidacy for another White House run, while DeSantis is widely expected to do so later this year.

As part of his appeal to the party’s rightwing base DeSantis has sought to portray himself as a culture war warrior, cracking down on LGBTQ rights and taking conservative stances on the fight against Covid-19 and a host of other issues such as immigration.

In 2021, he announced the Stop Woke (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act to “give businesses, employees, children and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination”.

Teachers have condemned the new guidelines.

The Manatee Education Association union president, Pat Barber, told local TV station Fox 13: “We have people who have spent their entire careers building their classroom libraries based on their professional and educational experience and understanding of the age of the children they teach.”

Barber added: “Now, their professional judgment and training are being substituted for the opinion of anyone who wishes to review and challenge the books. We’re focused on things that cause teachers to want to walk away from education because they can’t focus on their mission of educating children.”

Some teachers are even covering up their library books with paper.

Don Falls, a history teacher at Manatee high school, told the Herald-Tribune newspaper: “If you have a lot of books like I do, probably several hundred, it is not practical to run all of them through [the vetting process] so we have to cover them up.”

More school districts in Florida are expected to follow suit as a result of such policies this year. The state’s education department issued a deadline of 1 July 2023 for when “the superintendent of schools in each district must certify to the FDOE Commissioner that all school librarians and media specialists have completed this training”.

#censorship #education #us schools #libraries #florida #desantis #article #full article

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kamreadsandrecs · 11 months

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#history #racism #censorship #politics #education

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Florida has blocked the College Board from testing a pilot Advanced Placement African American Studies (APAAS) curriculum in the state under Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE” Act. According to a letter obtained by National Review, Florida’s Department of Education’s Office of Articulation said the curriculum “is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

The pilot course, which has been tested at 60 schools across the United States, aims to expand the advanced coursework offered by the College Board into the study of the African diaspora in the U.S. The course has run afoul of DeSantis’ widespread ban on teaching “critical race theory” (CRT) in K-12 classrooms. CRT is an analytical framework that seeks to dissect the manner in which racism has shaped American legal theory and institutions. The concept has been co-opted in recent years by right-wing reactionaries to fearmonger about any and all discussions of race and discrimination.

The “Stop Woke” act, signed into law by DeSantis in 2022, essentially prohibits instruction on race relations or diversity that imply a person’s “status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.” The bill also bans both schools and workplaces from “subjecting any student or employee to training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individuals to believe specified concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”

In November, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker issued a temporary injunction on a portion of the law that attempted to place similar restrictions on higher education. Despite several challenges to the law on grounds of First Amendment rights, Florida has continued to lead the charge against comprehensive education on the racial history of the U.S. Several other states have passed similar legislation, including Texas, Idaho, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Oklahoma.

DeSantis has centered his administration around governance through culture war grievances. The governor passed a similar law last year, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that granted the state broad powers to implement prohibitions on instruction on issues of gender and sexuality in Florida schools. Under the guise of his anti-CRT crusade, the Governor is reshaping Florida education in the image of the far right, recently announcing a plan to forcibly overhaul the New College of Florida, and transform it into a conservative institution. With increasing pressure on teachers and professors to avoid topics like race and gender lest they face the wrath of the state government, that transformation is effectively taking place though government-enforced censorship.

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espanolnews · 2 years

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La ACLU presentó una demanda el jueves con el objetivo de desafiar el proyecto de ley HB 7 de Florida, también conocido como Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees, o Stop WOKE Act.La ley, presentada en diciembre de 2021, trabaja para prohibir que las escuelas enseñen la teoría crítica de la raza en las aulas. La demanda está encabezada por un grupo de maestros y estudiantes representados por la ACLU, quienes argumentan que la Ley Stop WOKE es una violación de las enmiendas Primera y 14.La demanda, que fue presentada en un tribunal federal, nombra como demandados a la Junta de Gobernadores del Sistema Universitario del Estado de Florida y al comisionado de la Junta de Educación de Florida, así como a otras juntas directivas de varias universidades públicas."Todos los educadores y estudiantes tienen derecho a enseñar y aprender sin censura ni discriminación", dijo Leah Watson, abogada sénior del Programa de Justicia Racial de la ACLU en un comunicado de prensa. "La Primera Enmienda protege ampliamente nuestro derecho a compartir información e ideas, y esto incluye el derecho de los educadores y estudiantes a aprender, discutir y debatir temas relacionados con el racismo y el sexismo sistémicos".La noticia de la demanda de la ACLU se produce inmediatamente después del anuncio de una demanda contra el gobernador de Florida, Ron DeSantis, por parte del exfiscal del área de Tampa, Andrew Warren, quien fue suspendido por su posición sobre el aborto y los derechos de las personas transgénero.El miércoles, Warren presentó una demanda contra DeSantis, diciendo que el líder republicano violó sus derechos de la Primera Enmienda cuando lo destituyó de su trabajo después de que Warren dijera que no estaba de acuerdo con la legislación sobre el aborto apoyada por DeSantis.DeSantis firmó un proyecto de ley en abril que prohíbe el aborto después de 15 semanas, y en junio, la Corte Suprema anuló Roe contra Wade, que había brindado protección nacional para el acceso al aborto. Esa decisión permitió que leyes que prohibían el aborto como la de Florida entraran en vigor. DeSantis también ha luchado para promulgar una legislación particular que bloquearía la atención de afirmación de género para niños transgénero, aunque Florida no tiene leyes actuales que restrinjan la atención médica para niños transgénero.El gobernador de Florida, Ron DeSantis, habla durante la Cumbre de Acción Estudiantil Turning Point USA celebrada en el Centro de Convenciones de Tampa el 22 de julio de 2022 en Tampa, Florida. DeSantis enfrenta una demanda del fiscal expulsado del área de Tampa, Andrew Warren. Imágenes de Joe Raedle/Getty Warren, quien fue elegido fiscal estatal del condado de Hillsborough en 2016, firmó varias lo que llamó "declaraciones de valor" en las que expresó su oposición a la legislación que "se estaba considerando y aprobando que violaba los derechos constitucionales de las personas", le dijo a Katie Phang de MSNBC. en El show de Katie Phang la semana pasada. En respuesta, DeSantis lo destituyó de su cargo.“Si al gobernador se le permite hacer esto, ¿qué queda de democracia? Si al gobernador se le permite tomar represalias contra mí por hablar, qué queda de la Primera Enmienda”, preguntó Warren en una conferencia de prensa en Tallahassee.Según un informe del espanol, la demanda alegó que DeSantis no justificó la suspensión con ninguna actividad delictiva real y argumentó que el gobernador tomó represalias porque Warren expresó sus opiniones, a lo que DeSantis se opuso.“Por supuesto, DeSantis es libre de expresar sus puntos de vista y sus desacuerdos con Warren tantas veces como quiera. De hecho, la Constitución Federal garantiza que lo sea”, según se informa en la demanda. "DeSantis fue demasiado lejos". Warren dijo en El show de Katie Phang antes de la presentación oficial de la demanda, "Estoy siendo castigado no solo por casos que no se me han presentado, sino por casos sobre leyes que ni siquiera existen o que ni siquiera son válidas en el estado de Florida.

Esta es la policía del pensamiento orwelliana donde estoy siendo castigado por no hacer cumplir leyes que ni siquiera están en los libros todavía".semana de noticias se ha comunicado con un representante de DeSantis y la ACLU para obtener comentarios adicionales.

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cksmart-world · 2 years

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SMART BOMB

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

August 23, 2022

HERE COME THE BODY POLICE

Conservative lawmakers and their constituents go bonkers and get a bad rash when transgender girls compete in high school sports — no news there. In Red State America it goes against God's plan and it's just not right. Now there's a new wrinkle in our paranoid transphobia: If a girl is an exceptional athlete she could be investigated for being just too good. (Sound familiar ladies?) The Utah Body Police would swoop in if a female athlete is suspected of having a Y chromosome. Case in point: Disgruntled parents, who remain unidentified, bitched to the Utah High School Activities Association that a girl ran so fast at a track meet that she totally smoked their kids. School sleuths probed the gender of the athlete “who wasn't feminine enough” without her parents knowledge. Call it a warlock hunt. But school records back to kindergarten revealed she had always identified as a girl. Utah is one of 18 states banning trans girls from high school sports. But last week, a state judge temporarily blocked the draconian law, saying, “This is plainly unfavorable treatment.” Duh. The part that wasn't blocked creates a School Activity Eligibility Commission — Body Police — that will include a medical data statistician and a physician with expertise in gender identity. It's a Brave New World.

DON'T CALL ME 'WOKE' DAMNIT!

Whatever you do, don't call a Republican, “woke.” It's as bad as “commie” and it's worse than that scorned epithet, “liberal.” Recently Gov. Spencer Cox was ambushed when Time magazine ran a story about him with the headline, “The Red-State Governor Who's Not Afraid to Be 'Woke'.” Oh man, what a nightmare — in Time magazine, no less. It'll follow him to the grave and he could get his fingernails pulled out at CPAC. Here's how nasty things are: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act, that will give businesses, employees and parents “tools to fight back against woke indoctrination.” Originally, 'woke' was an African-American term referring to awareness of social and racial injustice. But it was appropriated by white conservatives who needed a new weapon. Fox propagandist Tucker Carlson sees woke as a scary movement or a “religion” aimed at undermining American values: “It’s not rational,” he said. “It’s utopian. It’s crazy. It’s superstition. It’s witchcraft.” Yep, those sneaky progressives are brainwashing us and we don't even know it. Next thing you know, we'll be teaching kids about slavery and white privilege and then we'll all be woke and want stuff like health insurance and day care — as Tucker says, it's crazy.

WALKING ON THE GREAT SALT LAKE

Thank the lord for great leaders like Utah's Sen. Mitt Romney who has finally come up with a plan to save the Great Salt Lake: “We've got to find answers and then take action.” OK, it may lack a few specifics but it's the best plan yet since Gov. Spencer Cox said, “Pray for rain.” That plan, apparently, has fizzled. True, it has rained a little but the Rain Gods are not really cooperating. We need Biblical Rain — something between... say Moses and Noah. Rather than rely on prayers, Romney pushed a bill through the Senate for $10 million to seek solutions for the lake that is at a historic low. It's so low, that when Romney and Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson toured the lake last week it appeared as though they were walking on water. We wouldn't kid about a thing like that. On closer inspection, Romney's Great Salt Lake Recovery Act finances more study — but no action. The lake bed, much of which is already exposed, contains deadly levels of arsenic that are now blowing into the lungs of Salt Lake Valley residents. Beyond that, a dried up lake means no stopover for 10 million migratory birds and the Wasatch ski resorts will no longer get the “lake effect” that is critical for the “Greatest Snow on Earth.” Better start prayin'. Or maybe a rain dance — yeah, that's the ticket, a rain dance.

Post script — That's it for another star-studded week here at Smart Bomb where we keep track of Liz Cheney's kills so you don't have to. Good ol' Liz, the conservatives conservative, has emerged as the real patriot in the rotting GOP — think Annie Oakley — and progressives can't hide their glee. So far she has targeted Trump as an insurrectionist; Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley as unfit for office; minority leader Kevin McCarthy as devoid of the honesty to become speaker of the House. And she vowed to take aim at Republican candidates who back Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. For speaking up against the would-be autocrat, Cheney was crushed in the Republican primary last week by the MAGA — aka Magettes — cowboys and cowgirls in Wyoming. Think Joan of Arc. All Magettes hate Cheney for her role as chief inquisitor of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 as it probed the former president's role as ring master of the apes planning a coup. Think Jane Goodall. Cheney now says she will dedicate herself to making sure Donald Trump never gets anywhere near the Oval Office. In doing so she has cast herself as the tip of the spear hoping to lead the Republican Party back from insanity. Think J.K. Rowling. It is fantasy, after all.

Well Wilson, the Body Police are coming and folks are gonna have to get their chromosomes in order. Let's play something for the old, white transphobic guys on Capitol Hill that'll shake 'em up a bit. We know the band has just the number for it:

I met her in a club down in old Soho Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry-cola C O L A cola She walked up to me and she asked me to dance I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Lola L O L A Lola la-la-la-la Lola Well I left home just a week before And I'd never ever kissed a woman before But Lola smiled and took me by the hand And said dear boy I'm gonna make you a man Well I'm not the world's most passionate guy But when I looked in her eyes well I almost fell for my Lola La-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola I pushed her away, I walked to the door I fell to the floor, I got down on my knees Then I looked at her and she at me Well that's the way that I want it to stay And I always want it to be that way for my Lola La-la-la-la Lola Girls will be boys and boys will be girls It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Lola La-la-la-la Lola Well I'm not the world's most masculine man But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man And so is Lola Lola la-la-la-la Lola la-la-l

(Lola — The Kinks)

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xtruss · 2 years

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“Critical Race Theory” Is Being Weaponised. What’s The Fuss About? America’s Culture War Is Raging In Education

— July 14th 2022 | United States | Schools For Scandal | The Economist

“It’s like a bomb went off,” says Christopher Rufo. Mr Rufo himself helped light the fuse. After George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, discussions about racism spread throughout schools, he says. Mr Rufo labelled those discussions “critical race theory” (crt). Controversy around crt has continued to grow—recently expanding beyond race to matters of sex and gender.

With the help of Mr Rufo, now a director of an “initiative” on crt at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank, critical race theory, once an obscure academic topic, became a prominent Republican issue in a matter of weeks. Mr Rufo appeared on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson show in September 2020. “It is absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government,” he said, and was being “weaponised against the American people”. He implored President Donald Trump to issue an executive order banning crt. “All Americans should be deeply worried about their country.”

Suddenly the little-known theory was on the lips of conservative pundits and politicians across the country. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist, saw the impact in focus groups. A journalist from the Wall Street Journal called to ask about crt when it was just starting to percolate, she recalls, but she had not heard anything about it. Then, during the next focus group, “it was all anybody talked about”.

Forty-two states have introduced bills or taken other actions to limit crt in classrooms; 17 have restricted it. North Dakota passed its law in five days. School-board meetings have become ferocious. Protesters claim that children are being forced to see everything through the lens of race. The Manhattan Institute now supplies a guide for parents fighting against “woke schooling”, and the Goldwater Institute, another conservative think-tank, provides model legislation. Banning crt in schools was a core part of Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign in Virginia last year, and may have helped him win.

“And I see this really wild racially segregated, very aggressive, very Maoist training documents…” — Christopher Rufo

Understanding what all the fuss is about requires answers to three questions. What is crt? How widespread is its teaching in schools? And, third, to the extent that it is taught, is this good or bad?

The origins of crt go back to the 1970s. The legal theory stressed the role of “structural” racism (embedded in systems, laws and policies, rather than the individual sort) in maintaining inequality. Take schooling. Brown v Board of Education required schools to desegregate with “deliberate speed” nearly seven decades ago. Yet despite accounting for less than half of all pupils in public schools overall, 79% of white pupils attend a majority-white school today.

Progressives stretched the scope of crt before conservatives did. The theory has spread into concepts like “critical whiteness studies”: read “White Fragility”, by Robin DiAngelo, and you might think white people can hardly do anything about racism without inadvertently causing harm to non-whites. Two years ago this newspaper described the way crt has evolved to see racism embedded in everything as “illiberal, even revolutionary”.

Now Republicans have co-opted crt, also enlarging it to embody far more than its original intent. Mr Rufo brandished it to attack diversity training. “Anti-crt” bills have spread to other topics. “Critical race theory is their own term, but they made a monumental mistake,” says Mr Rufo, “when they branded it with those words.” He proudly recounts how he has used the language as “a political battering ram, to break open the debate on these issues”.

The issues have certainly gained ground. In April Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed hb7, known as the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (woke) Act”. The clamps down on the hiring of “woke crt consultants” in schools and universities, and crt training in companies. In June Florida’s education board banned teaching crt and the 1619 Project, a set of essays published by the New York Times that puts slavery at the centre of the American story. The same month a bill in Texas was sold by its governor, Greg Abbott, as “a strong move to abolish critical race theory in Texas”. It bans the 1619 Project and discussions of several race- and sex-related topics in schools.

The anti-crt movement has also begun to worry about the way schools teach gender and sexuality. This includes claims that educators are encouraging children to change their genders. A month before the Stop woke Act, Mr DeSantis signed the “Parental Rights in Education” law, which critics call “Don’t Say Gay”. It prevents discussions about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Mr DeSantis claims both bills prevent “woke” ideology in schools.

More recently, social-emotional learning (lessons aiming to teach pupils non-cognitive skills such as managing emotions and being self-aware) has also been in the firing line. Some claim these lessons are used to indoctrinate pupils with crt.

In other words “crt”, to its opponents, has become code for any action that centres on the experiences of the disadvantaged (including non-white, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people) at work or school. Opponents claim that pupils are being taught that white children are inherently racist, and that white pupils should feel anguish about their skin colour because of their ancestors’ actions. Another complaint is that pupils are being taught to hate America: that by emphasising the arrival of the first slave ship as the true founding moment of America in 1619, rather than in 1776 (as the 1619 Project does), crt-type curriculums focus on America’s faults rather than its exceptionalism.

Is this stuff actually being taught in schools? Some say it’s all a figment of Republican imagination, and call it a witch hunt. “#CriticalRaceTheory is not taught in K-12 schools”, tweeted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (aft), a labour union, a year ago. Yet it so happens that both the aft and the National Education Association, America’s largest labour union, have announced support for teaching crt in public schools.

Whether framed as crt or not, educators are incorporating progressive ideas about race, gender and more into the classroom, not least in response to changing demography. In 2000, white pupils were 61% of the public-school population. Now they are 46%. (About 90% of American children attend public schools.) A study from the University of California, Los Angeles (ucla), found that the strongest predictor of whether a district had an anti-crt policy was whether it had experienced a large decrease in white pupil enrolment (10% or more) over the past 20 years. Schools are changing, and so is the discourse within them.

Amy Bean of Scottsdale, Arizona, felt lied to when her principal told her that crt was not taught in her child’s classroom. It was right there in the book, “Front Desk” by Kelly Yang, that her nine-year-old had been assigned. The book focuses on a ten-year-old girl, Mia, whose parents immigrated to America from China, and work and live in a motel. In one chapter, a car is stolen from the motel. Mr Yao, the Asian motel owner, assumes a black person committed the crime. “Any idiot knows—black people are dangerous,” he says. When the police arrive, they interrogate Hank, a black customer, but not others. Later Mia asks Hank about this. “Guess I’m just used to it. This kind of thing happens to me all the time,” he says. “To all black people in this country.”

This passage was not explicitly about critical race theory, but it was clearly about racism and plants a seed about racial inequality. Ms Bean, a self-described conservative, was upset when the principal denied crt’s existence in her daughter’s classroom. She would have liked the opportunity to talk to her daughter about it first or debrief her afterwards, she explains.

Some progressive policies have clearly gone too far. San Francisco’s school board is a notable example. Rather than striving to get children back into schools during the pandemic, it fretted about renaming 44 schools named after figures linked to historical racism or oppression. The list included Abraham Lincoln. Voters fired three members of the board.

There have been other perplexing cases. In 2017 a parent in North Carolina accused a teacher of asking white students to stand up and apologise for their privilege. This was never proved. More recently, public schools in Buffalo, New York, found themselves in a controversy over their Black Lives Matter curriculum. Some say it is anti-white. Others say that the quotes from the curriculum were taken out of context.

Research and polling suggest that crt, as defined by conservatives, has indeed spread, but is not as pervasive as critics fear. A media analysis by ucla found that 894 districts (representing about 35% of all pupils) experienced a conflict over crt between autumn 2020 and summer 2021. According to a poll by The Economist and YouGov in February, most people do not think crt is being taught in their local schools. Among those asked, 45% claim to know what crt is, and 25% of total respondents have a negative opinion of it. But only 21% think children in their community are being taught it: 14% of Democrats thought so, and 35% of Republicans.

While progressivism may be increasing its reach within schools, crt has hardly permeated state-sanctioned curriculums. American history textbooks are still mostly focused on the accomplishments of white men, says Patricia Bromley, a professor of education at Stanford University who analysed thousands of textbook pages. Recently Florida’s department of education rejected more than 50 maths textbooks (about 40% of those submitted for review) that the state claimed contained crt or the like. Follow-up investigations found little mention of race or crt in them. Curriculums have also grown less political. State standards have become more neutral over time, says Jeremy Stern, a historian at the Fordham Institute, an education think-tank.

What is really happening in schools, then? Largely an increase in availability of one-off courses on racism that pupils can elect to take. Seventeen states have increased teaching about racism and related topics through legislation. Many states insist that African-American or local indigenous history should be taught in schools, though pupils are not required to enrol. Connecticut (where 50% of public-school pupils are non-white) will require its high schools to offer African-American, Puerto Rican and Latino studies from this autumn. The 1619 Project is being taught in many districts despite outright bans in some states. Some changes, however, are mandatory. New Jersey and Washington passed laws last year requiring diversity-and-inclusion classes for pupils or training for staff—the kind of thing that critics see as vehicles for crt.

California is the first state to mandate an ethnic-studies course, beginning with the high-school graduating class of 2029-30. The history course features the experiences of non-white communities (78% of California’s public-school pupils identify as non-white). Two Stanford University studies found that the pilot programme in San Francisco improved attendance and graduation rates for Hispanic and Asian low-achieving pupils. The statewide programme has faced its fair share of controversy. Some Jewish groups felt that it did not focus enough on the Jewish experience or the realities of anti-Semitism. A revised version attempts to plug those gaps. Whether the programme can be successfully adopted statewide is unclear.

“…since much of what has been packaged as Critical Race Theory is not reflective of that or even interested in it.” — Kimberlé Crenshaw

Is bringing such issues into the classroom a good or bad thing? Americans’ response, as on so much else these days, is polarised. The Understanding America Study, a nationally representative survey by the University of Southern California, found that a majority of Democratic parents said it was important for children to learn about racism (88%), but less than half of Republican parents did (45%).

Many of the schemes described as crt by conservatives (ethnic studies, social-emotional learning) were implemented so that pupils would feel represented in school. Black, Hispanic, Native American and some Asian pupils underperform overall compared with their white peers. These pupils form more than half of public-school enrolment in America.

California’s ethnic-studies programme is one example of how learning about one’s own ethnic history can improve pupil achievement. A study from the University of Arizona also found that participation in a Mexican-American history course was associated with higher standardised-test scores and increased likelihood of high-school graduation. Some researchers and educators consider coursework of this sort to be a key component for improving academic achievement.

If this flavour of crt is beneficial, many pupils will never have a chance to find out. Anti-crt laws have stoked much anxiety. Matthew Hawn, a white high-school teacher in rural Tennessee, was fired for showing a video about white privilege and assigning an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer on race relations, to his majority-white pupils. James Whitfield, a black high-school principal outside Dallas, Texas, resigned after being accused of “teaching crt”. (He sent an email offering his school community support after George Floyd’s murder and took part in diversity training.) Some educators fear accidentally defying the law: the language is often vague and the consequences are severe. Punishments can include dismissal, fines or revocation of state funding for schools or districts, and potential lawsuits.

Not all school districts are concerned, though. “Urban districts are not feeling the heat,” says Michael Hinojosa, superintendent of Dallas’s school district in Texas, which is mostly black and Hispanic. “When you get out to the suburbs, that’s where a lot of the vitriol is.”

Many parents of school-age children today attended school in the 1980s and 90s when white pupils were the majority and diversity was less discussed. America has a history of responding poorly to social change in schools. Desegregation in the 1950s and 60s led to violent protests, as did busing—to bring black pupils to white schools—in the 1970s. In 1978, at the time of a growing gay-rights movement, a ballot initiative in California tried (but failed) to ban gay and lesbian teachers.

The crt battles could be the latest iteration. And although schools may be majority non-white, voters are older and whiter. The Economist/YouGov polling found that, though Democrats of all ages largely favour crt as a concept, the vast majority of older Republicans and independents dislike it.

Some conservatives see opposition to crt as a way to galvanise support for “school choice”, a policy that allows public money to fund pupils in other public or private schools. The culture wars “could be extremely helpful for promoting school choice”, says the website of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. Advocates of school choice say it improves options, especially for non-white pupils who often attend under-resourced and under-performing schools. Others claim that school choice is really about racial segregation. The anti-crt movement is about dismantling public schools, says Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the foundational scholars of crt as a legal theory.

The campaign against crt has turned out to be remarkably sticky. “It is putting a name or acronym on a broad set of ambiguous anxieties around changing conversations on race, gender, woke,” says Ms Longwell, drawing conclusions from her focus groups. “crt has become a catch-all for that.”

— Sources: The Economist

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