YOUR
COMMENTSShortly before Virginia’s gubernatorial
election on November 2, the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin,
circulated an ad in which a white woman calls for Virginia public
schools to ban classroom discussions of Toni Morrison’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved.
Pandering to racist
fears and white racial anxiety, Youngkin also stated he would
ban from schools what the right wing is inaccurately describing
as “critical race theory,” a term which actually
refers to a body of legal scholarship, but which right-wingers
like Youngkin are using as a catch-all to describe any discussion
of systemic racism in the U.S. And Youngkin made the boldface
and dangerous assertion that educators are destroying America.
Days later, Youngkin received 50.6 percent of the vote, defeating
Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
Youngkin’s
attack on Virginia teachers’ ability to discuss structural
racism are just one example of the GOP’s ongoing attack
on public and higher education — an attack that is closely
aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds
power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters
liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the
right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure.
The Republican
Party makes clear that educational practices that inform,
liberate, empower and address systemic problems that undermine
democracy are both a threat to its politics and a deserving
object of disdain.
The Republican
Party’s view of “patriotic education” draws
directly from the playbook of previous dictatorships with
their hatred of reason, truth, science, evidence and the willingness
to use language as a source of dehumanization and violence.
This is a language that operates in the interests of manufactured
fear while producing a void filled with despair. This is a
form of apartheid pedagogy that embraces the cult of manufactured
ignorance, freezes the moral imagination, erases unsettling
forms of historical memory and works to discredit dissent
among individuals and institutions that call attention to
social problems.
The attacks on
suppressed histories of racism represent an updated modern
civil war. This is a war against reason and racial injustice
that reproduces itself through the production of, as Toni
Morrison herself notes, “cultivated ignorance, enforced
silence, and metastasizing lies.”
Matters of conscience,
social responsibility and equity have been purged from a Republican
Party that feeds off the ghosts of an authoritarian past.
Its disdain for justice and civic responsibility is also evident
in its defense of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol,
its refusal to accept the election of Joe Biden as president
and its immersion in a culture of lies.
The spirit of
the Confederacy is obvious in the GOP’s voter suppression
laws and its support of white nationalism and white supremacy.
The spirit of U.S. authoritarianism is also alive in the Republican
Party’s efforts to capture the machinery of state power
in order to invalidate state elections along with attempts
to suppress the votes of people of color. Such actions are
frighteningly similar to attacks on Black voters during Reconstruction.
The legacy of
Jim Crow and an updated version of the Southern Strategy are
the driving forces in the Republican Party’s attempts
to remove from public and higher education, if not history
itself, any reference to slavery, racism and the teaching
of other unpleasant truths. In this instance, white racial
fears are activated, functioning like a coma to enlist the
public in increasing acts of censorship, surveillance, and
other practices that deaden the moral imagination and sense
of civic justice.
The current policing
of education in the United States cannot be abstracted from
a larger strategy to identify the institutions and individuals
who “make trouble” by uncovering the truth, resisting
the warmongers, and exposing the violence at work by those
politicians who invite the public “to become vigilantes,
bounty hunters and snitches.” Drawing on the work of
Russell Banks, I believe that the current attacks on educators
who teach about the history and contemporary realities of
racism are part of a broader attempt to silence those “committed
to a life of opposition, of speaking truth to power, of challenging
and overthrowing received wisdom and disregarding the official
version of everything.”
Authoritarianism
and education now inform each other as the Republican Party
in numerous states mobilizes education as a vehicle for white
supremacy, pedagogical repression, excision and support for
curricula defined by an allegiance to unbridled anti-intellectualism
and a brutal policy of racial exclusion. Republican legislators
now use the law to turn public education into white nationalist
factories and spaces of indoctrination and conformity. Republican
state legislators have put policies into place that erase
and whitewash history, and attack any reference to race, diversity
and equity while also deskilling teachers and undermining
their attempts to exercise control over their teaching, knowledge
and the curriculum.
Horrified over
the possibility of young people learning about the history
of colonization, slavery and the struggles of those who have
resisted long-standing forms of oppression, the Republican
Party subscribes to a politics of denial and disappearance.
Science, racism, truth, climate change and dissent are now
relegated to a politics of terminal exclusion and social abandonment.
Attacking discussions of racism in public schools and higher
education, they have made clear that “the ancient lie
of white supremacy remains lethal.” History now repeats
itself with a vengeance given that the Republican Party has
a long legacy of pandering to racial resentment and white
supremacy. This is a legacy that extends from Richard Nixon’s
war on Black people and Ronald Reagan’s racist use of
the myth of the welfare queen to Donald Trump’s birther
arguments and the demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, Black
journalists and athletes, and the reference to Haiti and African
nations as “shithole” countries.
Horrified over
the possibility of young people learning about the history
of colonization, slavery and the struggles of those who have
resisted long-standing forms of oppression, the Republican
Party subscribes to a politics of denial and disappearance.
As part of the ongoing culture wars, various Republican governors
have banned the teaching of what they are inaccurately deeming
“critical race theory” in public schools, and
have also threatened to cut back state funding for public
universities that introduce anti-racist issues to students,
including a great deal of the founding literature of Black
Studies and other sources that provoke discussions that offer
a remedy to racial injustice. At the core of these attacks
is a totalizing attack on critical thinking, informed judgments,
truth and the core values that inform a critical notion of
citizenship.
Henry Louis Gates
Jr. has eloquently argued that what is at stake here is the
freedom to write and bear witness, the freedom to learn that
liberation and civic literacy inform each other, and to recognize
that the freedom to teach and learn is under siege in a culture
that is being policed by the new authoritarians. How else
to explain that Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth), the chair
of the House General Investigating Committee, required that
Texas school districts provide a list of over 800 books used
in classrooms and libraries.
Not surprisingly,
all of these books address important social problems. Krause
also asked schools to report whether his designated list of
books might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish,
or any other form of psychological distress because of their
race or sex.” Karen Attiah notes that, “looking
at Krause’s list, it’s hard not to conjure up
images of totalitarian regimes and violent groups that have
gone after books throughout history, from Nazi attacks on
works considered ‘un-German’ in 1933 to al-Qaeda
destroying precious manuscripts in Timbuktu. A gander at Krause’s
list reveals an almost exclusive focus on race and racism,
sex and sexuality, LGBT issues, abortion and — gasp
— even puberty.”
It gets worse.
In Wisconsin, Republican legislators want to banish certain
words, such as “white supremacy,” “structural
bias,” “structural racism,” “whiteness,”
“multiculturalism” and “systemic racism.”
For the Republican Party, words are dangerous, especially
those that encourage critical interpretations, expand human
agency and produce sentences that open the possibilities for
self-determination and a more democratic social order. Banning
words and books constitutes a pedagogy of unlearning and disappearance,
particularly with respect to care, empathy for the suffering
of others, solidarity and the courage needed to confront injustices.
Banning books and words injects ignorance into the public
sphere, making reason toxic and justice irrelevant. Banning
books and words is tantamount to a totalitarian dictatorship
of illiteracy and politics of elimination. Even more, it both
erases the genocidal brutality that such practices produced
in the past and normalizes the possibility of their appearing
again in the future.
In Wisconsin,
Republican legislators want to banish certain words such as
“white supremacy,” “structural bias,”
“structural racism,” “whiteness,”
“multiculturalism” and “systemic racism.”
Words and books that offer oppressed people the opportunity
to gain self-representation and the ability to narrate themselves
are now viewed by many Republicans as unpatriotic. Words that
unfold in books that speak to a critical engagement with history,
engage the possibilities at work in the unfolding of the human
condition, and “bear witness to the full range of our
humanity” are increasingly subject to an updated form
of repression that prefigures authoritarian models of governance.
Words that encompass
the far reaches of human intelligibility, offering an emancipated
notion of individual and public agency are now examined with
a heightened racial frenzy produced by a Republican Party
and its acolytes who support the toxic principles of white
supremacy and a politics of disposability. In this discourse,
language functions to suppress any sense of racial justice,
moral decency and democratic values. It is indebted to a politics
of erasure and manufactured ignorance, and it wages a major
assault on reason and justice. Moreover, it turns lethal by
paving the way for a rebranded form of fascism. As part of
its attack on and whitewashing of history, memory is trapped
in a present that is wedded to a form of historical amnesia.
Under such circumstances, words, language and thought itself
are being erased or misrepresented so as to operate in an
educational climate marked by what Richard Rodriguez once
called “an astonishing vacancy.”
Fears about banishing
books feature prominently in a number of dystopian novels
that provide alarming examples of future authoritarian societies.
Such lessons appear lost on a sizeable portion of the general
public for whom the current historical moment imitates the
horrifying fictional narratives explored in dystopian novels
such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four, where books are outlawed or
relegated to memory holes connected to incinerators used to
destroy them.
American authoritarianism
is alive and well. The Republican Party and its allies are
waging an aggressive onslaught against any institution, policy
and ideal that upholds democracy. In a startling statement
that resonates with the previous horrors of history and the
war on critical intellectuals, academics and journalists,
Republican J.D. Vance, who is running for the Senate in Ohio,
stated that “The Professors are the Enemy.”
This deadly contempt
for academics is present not only in the ways in which the
neoliberal university has stripped them of ownership over
their working conditions and modes of governance, but also
in its utter disregard for their role as citizen scholars
and public intellectuals. This disregard was unabashedly visible
when the University of Florida prohibited four university
professors from providing expert testimony in lawsuits challenging
state policies endorsed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.In
this blatant act of censorship, possibly a signal of what
is to come, the University of Florida administration decided
that it would look to the Republican governor to decide how
to regulate university speech and the public activities of
its faculty. As Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor, pointed
out,
The university
does not exist to protect the governor. It exists to serve
the public. It is an independent institution to serve the
public good, and nothing could be more to the public good
than a professor telling the truth to the public under oath.
Fortunately, this
blatant assault against freedom of expression and academic
freedom was reversed as a result of mounting public and legal
outrage.
The ominous shadows
of history are once again flooding the United States. Historical
memory serves us well in making clear that the banishing of
words, ideas and books is the precondition for the horrors
that produced the fascist politics of the 1930s in Europe
and later in the 1970s and ‘80s in authoritarian regimes
in Latin America. Republican J.D. Vance’s attack on
academics mirrors a statement made by Gen. Millán Astray,
a firm supporter of Francisco Franco, who on October 12, 1936,
while attending a speech given by the Dean of Salamanca University
in Spain, shouted, “Long live death . . . death to the
intellectuals!! Down with Intelligence.” This grotesque
utterance occurred in the midst of a civil war in which intellectuals
were tortured, murdered and sent into exile. The terror it
both evokes and legitimizes has now become an organizing principle
of the Republican Party.
The banning of
books also has historical precedents that speak powerfully
to the dangerous authoritarian spirit that now animates Republican
Party politics. On the evening of May 10, 1933, over 40,000
people gathered in Berlin in what was then known as the Opernplatz.
At the urging of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels,
more than 25,000 books labeled as “un-German”
were burned. Soon afterward, book burnings took place across
Germany in a variety of university towns. The purpose of the
book burnings was to “cleanse” Germany of the
literature of “racial impurity” and dissent and
“purify” the German spirit. There was more at
work here than what the novelist Andrew Motion called a monumental
“manifestation of intolerance;” there was also
a forecasting of the killings, mass murders, disappearances
and genocide that would follow this symbolic act of racial
hatred and purification.
The banning of
books in the United States, which bears a dangerous resemblance
to the Nazi book burning, represents a startling vision of
the Republican Party’s disdain for democracy and its
willingness to resurrect totalitarian practices linked to
earlier periods of censorship, repression, terror and state
violence. In this case, as the great 19th-century German poet
Heinrich Heine observed rightly, “Where they burn books,
they will, in the end, also burn people.” The banning
of books and the dehumanizing of the writers who produce them
is one step away from habituating the wider public into accepting
the transition from censorship to more overt criminal acts
on the part of the state. Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole
perfectly captures the implications such actions have for
developing into a full-fledged form of authoritarianism. He
writes:
As a society the
American people are being habituated into accepting cruelty
on a wide scale. Americans are being taught not to see other
people as human beings whose lives are as important as their
own. Once that line has been crossed … then we know
where that all leads, what the ultimate destination is. There
is no mystery about it. We know what happens when a government
and its leaders dehumanize large numbers of people.
The Republican
Party is not calling for the burning of books or the imprisonment
of authors they target as “un-American,” (at least
not yet) but the spirit that animates their calls for censorship,
historical cleansing, so-called racial purity, disposability
and politics is alarming and a precondition for something
much worse. The Nazi assertion and threat proclaiming, “The
state has been conquered but not the universities” could
very well be viewed as a central feature of the Republican
Party’s war on critical race theory, the banning of
books and its all-out war on higher education as a democratic
public sphere.
The attacks on
critical modes of thinking in the United States are at the
center of a looming civil war in which the horrifying phantoms
of the past have been re-energized and now threaten to appear
once again. Beneath the spectacle of the MAGA hats, the criminal
assault on the Capitol and an expanding culture of lies, there
is a reactionary cultural politics financed by corporate interests
and legitimized by powerful social media platforms, conservative
foundations and other cultural apparatuses whose endpoint
is the death of democracy.
At the current
moment in the United States, manufactured fear is now coupled
with the mass production of ignorance and the surging political
power of U.S.-bred authoritarianism. These forces work in
tandem in order to destroy higher education, which is one
of the few public spaces left where truth and justice can
be taught, and resistance can be cultivated against the looming
danger of normalizing white supremacy and an updated form
of American fascism.
It would be wise
for educators and others to heed Toni Morrison’s warning,
so prophetically accurate at the present moment: “If
the university does not take seriously and rigorously its
role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator
of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and
preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other
regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of
us, and without us.”
Clearly, faculty,
students, and others who take democracy seriously must work
together to make higher education take on the responsibility
of addressing the authoritarian cracks that have appeared
in U.S. society. Critical education helps us to remember that
justice and what it takes to be human are inextricably connected
and cannot be removed from a politics of solidarity. Justice
is on hold in the United States, and, in part, this suggests
that educators and those who refuse to live in a fascist world
need to rethink the meaning of education and how it works
as an instrument of empowerment, resistance and possibility.
Fascist mythologies, racist social practices, misogynist governing
structures and the prioritization of market values must be
removed from higher education. Moreover, new structures of
power must be enacted, and education must be reclaimed as
a civic practice rather than as a series of commercial exchanges.
Only then will it be possible for higher education to operate
as a democratic public sphere that takes seriously the notion
that democracy requires an informed citizenry and education
is the foundation for that to happen.
Repressive forms
of political education saturate everyday life and produce
both a reactionary shift in mass consciousness and a crisis
of civic imagination. In part, this is due to an attack on
democratic modes of education and public understanding in
a variety of cultural apparatuses, extending from public and
higher education to social media. Heightened racial hysteria
has become normalized and needs to be challenged in all the
cultural sites in which it appears. The pedagogical apparatuses
of culture have turned repressive and dangerous, and need
to be uncovered, resisted and overcome. The threat they expose
to democracy should be foregrounded, and, in part, this is
a role that higher education needs to address.
As Toni Morrison
has observed, colleges and universities need to embrace “powerful
visionary thinking about how the life of the moral mind and
a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context”
of tyranny. In part, this means constructing liberating pedagogies
that address the dangers of white nationalism, white supremacy,
political corruption and fascist politics. It also means educating
students and providing faculty with the tools, time and space
to create widespread forms of resistance in conjunction with
other groups outside the university in order to fight against
the authoritarian attacks that constitute what amounts to
a new civil war.
As Toni Morrison
has observed, colleges and universities need to embrace “powerful
visionary thinking about how the life of the moral mind and
a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context”
of tyranny. The struggle over education is too crucial to
ignore or lose. The stakes involve not just the struggle over
history, knowledge and values, but also over the truth, justice,
power and the social conditions that make democratic modes
of agency, identity and dignity possible. The danger democracy
faces in the U.S. is almost unthinkable given the impending
threat of fascism. Given the seriousness of this impending
danger, historian Robin D. G. Kelley rightly observes, “We
have no choice but to fight.”
One entry into
such a struggle is to recognize that democracy and capitalism
are diametrically opposed to each other. The current racist
attacks on higher education cannot be successful in the long
run if capitalism remains in place. Not only is there a need
for critical educators to do everything possible to develop
forms of popular education and a cultural politics that challenges
the corporatization of the university, but they must also
produce an anti-capitalist consciousness central to any viable
notion of equality, freedom, justice and social change. Predatory
capitalism is incompatible with democracy given the staggering
inequalities it produces in wealth, income and power. David
Harvey is right in asserting that “The fundamental problems
are actually so deep right now that there is no way that we
are going to go anywhere without a very strong anti-capitalist
movement.” What needs to be addressed is that the most
powerful big lie in the United States is not that Trump won
the 2020 election, but the normalized claim that capitalism
and democracy are synonymous.
The struggle for
a radical democracy suggests the need to develop a new language
that enables people to think in terms of broader solidarities,
necessary for overcoming a fractured political landscape.
This should be a language that touches people’s lives,
provides a comprehensive understanding of politics, offers
a concrete program for social change and lays the foundation
for a broad-based movement that will unite around a society
steeped in the principles of democratic socialism.
Democracy and
education have been pathologized under neoliberal capitalism
and have drifted into a space that mimics the ineffable terrors
of the past. Higher education in a time of growing authoritarianism
must address the question of what its role is in a democracy
and whether it is willing to define and defend itself as a
democratic public sphere and protective space of critique
and possibility.
As Hannah Arendt
once put it in her seminal essay, “The Crisis in Education:”
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we
love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and
by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for
renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would
be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether
we love our children enough not to expel them from our world
and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their
hands their chance of undertaking something new, something
unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task
of renewing a common world.”
The struggle over
education must be seen as part of a crucial struggle for democracy
itself. As Primo Levy warned us, “Every age has its
own fascism.” His words are more prophetic than ever
given the current collapse of conscience and the willingness,
if not glee, of the Republican Party to embrace an American-style
fascism.
As Amartya Sen
once argued, it is time “to think big about society”
— to move beyond the despair, isolation, theoretical
abysses and political silos that stand in the way of developing
a strong anti-capitalist movement. The danger facing the United
States is real and must be met with the utmost resistance
by a mass movement of workers, young people, academics, teachers,
feminists and others who believe that making education central
to politics is an urgent political necessity.
Well this is awkward.
Friend, we urgently
need your support. Yes it can be awkward to ask for help,
but we’ll do whatever it takes to ensure Truthout
survives — we believe in this work that much.
Trustworthy, fearless
reporting is desperately needed, but there are far too few
media sources that can deliver. Independent news outlets like
this one are irreplaceable, so if you appreciate what we publish,
please donate what you can, or consider starting a new monthly
donation to sustain and strengthen honest journalism.
