Ban the truth from schools
About that “Moms for Liberty” complaint:
A Tennessee chapter of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty has tried to use the state’s new law aimed at banning “critical race theory” in school to ban a book about Martin Luther King Jr.
I have a feeling the “Moms” for liberty are for liberty for themselves but not so much for other people – people who teach history that isn’t all We Have Always Been Awesome, for instance.
Tennessee Republicans earlier this year passed a law in response to the conservative panic about “critical race theory,” barring the teaching of certain concepts in classrooms including “teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another; ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes to a specific race or sex; that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist or that a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist,” according to The Tennessean. Critics argue that Republicans in Tennessee and around the country are trying to ban the teaching of history they don’t like.
I’d be more specific about it: history they don’t like because it doesn’t claim we have always been flawless.
The first complaint filed to the state came from Robin Steenman, chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Williamson County, just south of Nashville. The 11-page complaint claims that the state’s widely used Wit and Wisdom literacy curriculum has a “heavily biased agenda” that makes kids “hate their country, each other and/or themselves.”
There’s a book about Martin Luther King, there’s a book about Ruby Bridges (which naturally includes the fact that enraged white people tried to prevent her from going to a “white” public school), there are photos of civil rights campaigners being blasted with fire hoses. News flash for the “Moms”: all that is part of US history, and not a minor part at that.
“The classroom books and teacher manuals reveal both explicit and implicit Anti-American, Anti-White, and Anti-Mexican teaching,” the complaint said. “Additionally, it implies to second grade children that people of color continue to be oppressed by an oppressive ‘angry, vicious, scary, mean, loud, violent, [rude], and [hateful]’ white population and teaches that the racial injustice of the 1960s exists today.”
Instead they should be taught that all that was stamped out no later than 1966 and everything has been completely fabulous ever since?
The state said no for this time because the paperwork was late, but urged another try.
I grew up in Williamson county; there were zero issues covering all of our mixed legacy as a nation. All this shit is new…
Proponents of a sanitized, propagandistic version of American history think they are holding some sort of neutral position. They are not. Those who see America is a Shining City on a Hill refuse to admit that their view is at least as ideological as those who cast doubts upon American Purity and Exceptionalism. They are unwilling to accept the fact that the Hill was stolen from people who were already here, (many of whom were murdered trying to defend it), and that the City now upon it was built in large part by the enforced toil of people who were stolen from elsewhere. Facts are unpatriotic.
Then it should be equally out of bounds to teach that one race (or sex, yes, we see how you slipped that in there) is inferior to another. People of the past who founded the United States believed those very things. It is how they justified the dispossession and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of kidnapped Africans, the denial of rights to women. These were all part of the “natural order” of things, backed up by Biblical authority as well as secular belief. How do you teach that America just unfolded as it did, with Good and Justice triumphing, without invoking some inherent inferiority residing in those who did not end up on the winning end of the “natural” development of its territorial expansion, increasing wealth, and apportioning of political power? If these were not the results of “natural” inferiority and inequality, how did things turn out as they did? How is it that those who won just happened to end up on top, without expending a lot of effort to keep the losers down?
It is simply assumed that America was and is a “meritocracy”, that the Just World Fallacy is actually true. Inequality of wealth and power just happen, without anyone doing anything to make it so.
It’s interesting how anti-CRT Republicans and trans activists both want to use the law to enforce their own narrow view of facts about the past and present, to paper over inconvenient truths that contradict their particular view of the world and interfere with their political agendas.
“Anti-Mexican”? Any idea what they’re going for, here?
No, I was stumped by that too.
Mums for “Liberty” yet they want to restrict learning. Republicans and their exactly wrong names…
YNNB:
To be precise, the obviously false extremes are “Shining City on a Hill” and “Abyssal Pit whence springeth naught but Evil”. Doubting either of those positions is bare rationality.
Freemage/Ophelia:
One of the books they’re objecting to, Separate is Never Equal has racist characters be racist. Shock! Horror! It’s prima facie such a ridiculous objection that I don’t even …
On the other hand, assuming neither mother is dissembling, the two attachments to the complaint letter shouldn’t be ignored. It’s entirely possible to present actual facts without any falsehood and nonetheless convey a distorted view of reality. With children, that kind of thing can happen despite our best intentions and efforts. When the message that seven- and eight-year-old children absorb is that to be white or American is something of which one should be ashamed, that looks like a problem. When a second grader’s first reaction to any obstacle becomes attribution of racial discrimination, that looks like a problem.
Maybe the kids aren’t ready to deal with the subject matter. If so, move the curriculum back. Maybe it’s being presented in a way that’s psychologically unhealthy. If so, adjust the presentation so that it isn’t damaging. Maybe it’s totally fine, and this is just the normal learning process. If so, provide guidance to parents in how to help their children incorporate factual knowledge in a healthy way. Whatever the case, however, something probably ought to change.