February 23, 2022
Whose words are allowed and whose words are not allowed matter.
Back in 1968, Black History Month was not a thing in schools and at that time I had never heard of “Black history.” That year, when I was 17, the assigned reading in my high school English class included Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin’s account of his experiences in the 1950s deep South as a white man who darkened his skin to appear to be Black, and Sammy Davis Jr.’s autobiography Yes I Can. We also read James Baldwin and Richard Wright.
Besides the extraordinary opportunities of exposure to these books and a forum to discuss them, it is also notable that my high school was a private, all-girls, Catholic school, it was located in Texas, and only two Black students were a part of my senior class. Even then, I realized that I was lucky to attend such a progressive institution.
I suppose that was when I developed the notion that the more human beings learned, the more we would improve our understanding of each other and the world, and by doing so, evolve into a more intelligent, compassionate, successful species. It never occurred to me that it was also possible that humanity would devolve, would blissfully embrace ignorance, would regress to barbarism, would run gleefully toward its own destruction.
In 2022, we are in the midst of a wave of book bannings to stop the spread of knowledge and examination of systemic racism. In Texas, SB 3, the redefinition of how social studies should be taught in K-12 schools, became law a few months ago. In the process of becoming law, the bill was amended with certain historical figures and subjects summarily excised with all the finesse of a butcher’s cleaver. Crossed out in the amended text are:
The history of Native Americans; the Fugitive Slave Act; the Indian Removal Act; Underground Railroad records;
Historical documents to the accomplishments of marginalized populations, including the Chinese movement, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement; the history of white supremacy, including the institution of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and the way in which it is morally wrong; Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and his “I Have a Dream” speech; the federal civil rights act of 1964; the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education; the Emancipation Proclamation; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave; the life and work of Cesar Chavez; the life and work of Dolores Huerta; the works of Susan B. Anthony.
Numerous other writings and teachings are also discarded onto the curriculum standards trash heap, including the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 26th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The Texas law also states that a “teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” The law doesn’t specify what a controversial issue is. The state will spend an estimated $14.6 million annually for the next several years to satisfy the law’s requirement that at least one teacher and one administrator from each school district in the state must attend a civics training program that will teach them how race and racism should (and should not) be taught in Texas schools.
Post WWII Germany took the opposite path from America’s post slavery era in healing its deep wounds of racism after the Nazi murders of 6 million Jews and 3 million other “undesirables.” Germany did not install post-war monuments to Hitler and name schools after him and pretend that the genocide did not occur. Germany chose the moral path of hard truth, atonement, and reconciliation.
Susan Neiman’s 2019 book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil excellently presents the German lesson for America. In Texas’s war on learning, this book is just the type destined to be banned.
What’s next? Will defiant teachers be put on trial like John Scopes in 1925 when he defied Tennessee’s law prohibiting the teaching of human evolution? We were once the country that lynched Black people and burned women at the stake for reading. How far back will this pro-ignorance movement drag us? And what record, in whose words, will be left to tell our story?