A law against teaching the truth
Idaho has made it illegal to teach about slavery in schools and universities.
Idaho’s governor, Brad Little, has a bill signed into law that aims to restrict critical race theory from being taught as a subject in schools and universities.
We know there’s some dumb critical race theory out there, such as the Robin DiAngelo version for instance, but Idaho apparently interprets it very broadly.
The bill, H 377, prevents teachers from “indoctrinating” students into belief systems that claim that members of any race, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin are inferior or superior to other groups. Signed into law last week, H 377 also makes it illegal to make students “affirm, adopt or adhere to” beliefs that members of these groups are today responsible for past actions of the groups to which they claim to belong.
The issue isn’t that contemporary people are responsible for what people did in the distant past, it’s that some of us benefit from it while others continue to be profoundly ripped off by it.
Since the publication of The 1619 Project in the New York Times, a number of school districts and school boards across the US have begun to adopt elements of critical race theory in their curricula.
As a result, Republican state legislatures have begun to push back, sending bills through statehouses that attempt to quell the momentum of teaching slavery and other such moments of American history as dark periods of the country’s past that continue to affect American life today.
Because what, they were actually bright happy periods that don’t continue to affect American life today?
Here’s the thing: the former slaves were never compensated for the generations of stolen labor. That’s all you need to know, really. Reconstruction was defeated and after that the former slaves and their children and grandchildren and so on were treated all too much like slaves, except without the protection that an expensive investment usually gets. It’s just idiotic to try to pretend that slavery doesn’t “continue to affect American life today.”
The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has recently spoken out against The 1619 Project specifically, as the Biden administration is considering $5.3m in American History and Civics Education grants for anti-racist scholarship.
In a letter to the US secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, McConnell wrote that families in the US. “did not ask for this divisive nonsense”, and that a decision to move forward was not made by voters.
“Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” McConnell wrote.
You know who’s inherently evil? Mitch McConnell.
H/t Studebaker Hoch
I mean, I don’t exactly disagree with his statements if taken at face value. We needn’t vilify white people for being white or for the actions of their ancestors.
That said, American exceptionalism can die in a fucking fire. Teach history warts and all; teach the aspirations *and* the failures (some intentional) to meet them.
CRT just gives the Republicans a way to talk about race without seeming inherently racist. A dog whistle handcrafted by the self-flagellating white saviours like DiAngelo.
My bold.
Trying to come up with an Approved, Official, Unifying history might be harder than they think.
Applied fairly, this standard would prevent the teaching of the Glorious Westward Expansion version of US history as well, as it is predicated on White “superiority” over both conquered/exterminated original inhabitants, and enslaved, stolen Africans, and their descendents. If the rarely questioned axiom of White superiority, used at the time by those who carried out genocide and enslavement, was both factually and morally wrong, then much of US history becomes unreadable as anthing but a bloody, racist power grab, and can only be taught as such. Not that it wasn’t exactly that, but the windowdressing of White/European “superiority” helps to camouflage the ugly truths these white-washers are trying to hide.
On second thought, maybe it won’t be so hard after all. They won’t apply this standard fairly, or honestly, and this will leave the Heroic, Republican Approved version largely intact. Do the proposed standards make any mention of “truth,” or “accuracy?” That should be of concern too, along with “the unity of the nation and the well-being of the state of Idaho and its citizens.” Sometimes the truth hurts. Sanitization of unpleasant truths is indoctrination. They would prefer a happy lie, in which case they’re not so much interested in the teaching of history, as mythology.
Long ago and far away I read something by someone (sorry, that’s all I have from memory) who analyzed the content of history courses taught in schools, and concluded that it was “a catechism of American social realism”.
I don’t know about that, partly because I’m not sure how to understand the claim.
For instance, taking “slavery continues to affect American life today” to mean, at bottom, that the shape of American life exists along a causal chain that includes the practice of chattel slavery in the past, arguing with the statement is indeed obviously wrongheaded. That what is depends on what was shouldn’t really be controversial, now should it? This does, however, set a rather low and uncomfortably low bar for the present tense. If all it takes is being able to draw a causal line between two things, regardless of temporal separation, then that brings a whole lot of things into the present tense. I would feel somewhat odd saying that British taxes on tea continue to affect American life today, despite the same apparent justification.
Mostly I’m just curious under what conditions the claim could cease being true. That is, given that it is currently true, what would have to change to make it false? With causation as the apparent determiner, escape seems impossible.
‘the former slaves were never compensated for the generations of stolen labor.’
In the UK slaveowners were actually compensated for losing their stolen labour; the loan the government took out to pay slaveowners for the loss of their slaves took until 2015 to pay off.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/12/treasury-tweet-slavery-compensate-slave-owners
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Investment of this windfall, along with investment of the profits of slavery, created the technological infrastructure we still rely on today. And the effects of the slave economy on our current life are not based only on the profits of slave businesses, but also on how slavery functioned as a business–our current economic structure is based on financial and management techniques originally developed on plantations.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/slavery-and-capitalism/
Different framing maybe? The biggest predictor of success in the United States is what class you started in and a really good predictor of that is whether or not your ancestors were enslaved. Though that’s just determining starting conditions.
I mean, when was the last time you’ve heard of a rich black person being murdered by cops?
So, that bill also prohibits indoctrination into white supremacy then?
guest @ 5 – good point. That was all that was seriously talked about here, too – compensating the owners.
Nullius – really? Are you really unsure how to understand the claim? The meaning seems pretty fucking obvious to me.
Nullus: #5 rather clearly answers your question. Plus, your question ignores the reality that Reconstruction was destroyed and, as noted in the OP, Jim Crow and all the benefits to the powers that be helped build our economy. Throw in de jure as well as de facto segregation, redlining, differential criminal justice enforcement,, on and on and on…your question becomes…questionable in itself.
What is forgotten is ALL American states (or at least their elites) benefited from slavery. New England merchants were deeply involved in financing the slave trade and the financial/banking side of the Southern economy. Which helped establish the modern New England economic base of education and finance.
The slave economy created a massive amount of wealth, and none of that wealth went to the slaves, ever, at any point. Did that fact shape our history? Gee, I dunno, Marty, what do you think?
British taxes on tea not really a good analogy.
A naive social scientist traveling through the US would observe that Black people tend to be concentrated in poorer parts, that those parts are often more polluted and crime ridden, that the schools in those parts tend to be worse both physically and instructionally, and that there’s a large discrepancy in wealth between Black and white people.
After conducting the requisite statistical tests to rule out the likelihood that these differences are due to chance, our intrepid scientist would begin to hypothesize explanations for these differences, and devise experiments to test those hypotheses. One possible explanation is that there are fundamental differences in the capacities and/or characters of Black and white people, but I think it’s safe to say that any well-designed series of experiments would force our scientist to reject that hypothesis, and look instead for social and historical explanations.
We don’t have to do that. We are not naive; we know the awful history of the kidnapping and enslavement of Black people in the US, and the continued history of racism that denied any semblance of equal opportunity to the majority of Black people, often in forms that amount to slavery in everything but name. We know that, but many of us still choose to lie about it.
Ophelia:
Yes, really, because I try to follow the principle of charity, and the interpretation that seems most obvious to me has issues. Out of respect, I’m trying to leave open the possibility that said interpretation is not the intended one and that the intended one is without fault.
Of course, it did, and I’m not disputing that. If what was said was, “Modern America owes its form to the nation’s centuries-long history of chattel slavery and subsequent brutal, systematic discrimination,” then I wouldn’t have raised an objection. What I’m on about is the present tense phrasing. Suppose I say p continues to affect me today. Whether p be high local humidity, my osteoarthritis, or my poverty, the straightforward meaning is that there is p right now, and its presence affects me. Under this plain interpretation, our goal state is immediately conceivable. Specifically, it is a state sans p, regardless of what p is. If local humidity decreases, then high humidity no longer affects me. If medical science heals my cartilage, then osteoarthritis no longer affects me. If my bank account swells to $TEXAS, then poverty no longer affects me. Naturally, then, if slavery continues to affect American life today, that means that there is slavery, its presence affects American life today, and we need to get rid of that slavery. But this inference doesn’t work, so a different interpretation is necessary. Hence we get “but for y, not-x“: but for the historical practice of slavery, American life would not be what it is. If understood in this way, then I don’t see how it can be false of any future state of affairs, as a direct causal line could be drawn from historical slavery to that state. To wit, what could happen in the next thousand years such that an American in the year 3021 could say, “Slavery does not continue to affect American life today,” and be right? What would that future America look like? Brian M:
What question do you mean, the implicit one (“How is this to be interpreted?”) or the explicit one (“What can happen in the future to make the claim no longer true?”)? In neither case do I see how guest@#5’s comment provides an answer. My issue is not with whether American life has been shaped by the practice of slavery. If I had asked, “Fucking history, how does it work?” then sure, providing historical facts would answer that. I asked that neither explicitly nor implicitly.
I’m still not sure which question you think was asked or answered.
No, that’s okay, don’t bother, go ahead and assume that my intended interpretation is full of faults.
rofl
I’ll try to remember to make an ass of u and me in the future.