It's Only Indoctrination When They Don't Like It
The outrage over critical race theory isn't about substance, it's about identity
Critical Race Theory is not being taught in very many schools across the country, but that doesn’t really matter at this point. The CRT label has been intentionally expanded to encompass every attempt to teach a more honest version of history, every lesson on systemic racism, and essentially anything that questions the infallibility of the American empire.
As this Tweet from the Texas Public Policy Center illustrates, CRT is now anything that uses the following words: “equity,” “colonialism,” “identity,” “prejudice,” “Black Lives Matter,” “social constructs,” “Afrocentric,” and a host of others generally used when discussing race in America.
CRT has rapidly become the moral outrage of the year. Republican lawmakers in 25 states have introduced legislation that would limit or ban the teaching of it.
Opponents frame these lessons as brazen attempts to manufacture racism where there would otherwise be nothing but innocent, color-blind children embracing the vibrant, sunshine-soaked fields of united prosperity and freedom. If we’ve learned anything up to this point it should be to never underestimate the ability of much of the American populace to over-idealize our republic.
While there can—and should—be discussions over certain lessons and curricula, and their overall merit, that’s not what this is. There is some genuine debate occurring beneath the surface level vitriol, but at its core this really isn’t about substance at all. It is just another branch of the culture war.
Last week a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia was shut down and devolved into violence and disorder leading to an arrest. Over 300 people attended the meeting, many of whom were protesting against racial equity lessons and a proposed policy designed to ensure LGBTQ+ student were “treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, transgender status, or gender identity/expression.”
It’s all part of the same tornado of aggrievement that’s pulled in things like transgender people in bathrooms, wedding cakes for gay weddings, Starbucks holiday cups, and Sharia law. It’s about holding on and maintaining the status quo at all costs. Recently, it appears as though more people are questioning the current state of things—as well as their own comfort and complicity in the maintenance of the inequitable systems that undergird much of American society.
And let’s be clear, it’s not as if the idea of a culture war is some hidden theoretical framing. It’s all out in the open. Here’s a tweet from Newsmax host Emerald Robinson about Loudoun County.
Loudoun County has been in the spotlight since one of its physical education teachers Tanner Cross stated that it was against his religion to honor the aforementioned policy regarding LGBTQ+ students. Cross said, “I’m a teacher, but I serve God first and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl, and vice versa, because it is against my religion, it’s lying to a child, it’s abuse to a child, and it is sinning against our God.” Cross was put on leave but was later reinstated by a circuit court judge.
In Commack, Long Island the graphic novel Persepolis has been removed from required reading lists after complaints from parents. As Newsday reported, many students of color spoke out against the ban, with one stating that she had been “starved for representation” throughout her education. The book was removed, apparently, because it was deemed to not be age-appropriate. But as the Newsday piece also points out, if you review the other books on the reading list which did not receive complaints, that justification falls apart.
“They include "The Things They Carried," which describes in minute detail the mutilated body of a Viet Cong killed in combat; "The Handmaid’s Tale," which includes scenes of ritualized rape; and "The Catcher in the Rye," which includes profane language.”
Curious that the authors of these other works: Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, and J.D. Salinger are all white while Marjane Satrapi, the author of “Persepolis,” is an Iranian woman of color.
It’s less about the content and more about what that content represents: something else, something different. Like so much of this culture war nonsense, it’s about white fear. Famed televangelist Pat Robertson called CRT a “monstrous evil” centered around the goal of white enslavement.
At the Loudoun County meeting and many others across the country there were signs and chants of: “Education not indoctrination.” Funny, it’s only labeled indoctrination when it’s something they don’t like, when it’s something that doesn’t align with what they have determined are American values.
This push to teach history in a more honest manner, to reckon with the genocidal colonialism and chattel slavery upon which our nation was founded—as well as the reverberating oppression that followed—is in many ways an antidote to nationalistic indoctrination. In school I was taught to uncritically adore America and disregard its faults, that is indoctrination.
How does the side who attempts to mandate all students pledge their allegiance to the flag every morning out loud think they have a leg to stand on when it comes to indoctrination?
One side is clawing desperately to the system itself, entrenched for decades, malignant, normalized and narrow, and the other is trying to alter that system by feeding it some truth, understanding, and honesty—by widening its scope.
This enterprise will not always be perfect, and conversations around the effectiveness of certain educational approaches should absolutely occur, but a change is needed. It’s important that we all recognize that this push back is simply fear masquerading as moral outrage. It’s the backlash to discomfort, and its all so painfully predictable.
————
Apologies for the infrequent posts as of late. I have been working on some longer projects and have neglected the newsletter a bit.
In case you missed it, I did an IG Live interview with Mother Jones Senior Editor, and author of Jackpot, Michael Mechanic (no relation.) We discussed income inequality and the lives of the ultra-rich. Jackpot is good. You should get it.
————
This newsletter is free and not nearly frequent enough to make you mad, so why not subscribe?