You're Doing What The Right Wing Is Doing

Speech is the crowning achievement of humankind. It enables us to communicate ideas with a degree of subtlety that would otherwise be impossible. It allows us to preserve knowledge over centuries through oral traditions. It helps us to cooperate and empathise and

And yet, for all its marvels, speech doesn’t have anything on mind-reading.

Mind-reading would be impervious to lies and misinformation and language barriers, it would be (at least in my imagination) instantaneous and utterly unambiguous. And best of all, it would leave us in no doubt about each other’s motivations. For better or worse.

In my article, Do Critical Race Theorists Know What Racism Is?, I wrote about the “anti-CRT” bills that caused so much controversy a couple of years ago. I pointed out that despite the headlines, the only thing the bills outlawed was the teaching of outright racism. I argued that kids could and should be taught the history of racism in America without being taught to be racist.

George thought he could read my mind.

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George:

You're doing what the right wing is doing....picking a handful of examples of bad teachers and attributing their harmful actions to everyone who believes that our schools haven't done enough to teach history as it, you know, actually went down.

I grew up in NC and never heard, until recently, about the violent coup that resulted in the outright murder of many elected black officials in Wilmington, NC. It's the only successful such coup in the nation's history. I wonder why I wasn't taught about it in my NC history class. Do you suppose it was because it might have made me uncomfortable on account of my race?

You're being suckered by the language of the bills. Do you really imagine that the folks supporting and voting for these bills intend to monitor events and circumstances to make sure that no black child feels discomfort on account of his or her race?

The intent of these bills is to assure that history continues to be taught in a way that ignores the centuries of state-supported terrorism against black families in this country . Period.

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Steve QJ:

“You're doing what the right wing is doing”

Ugh, God, I really wish more people were capable of thinking beyond this binary.

I'm doing what anybody who actually cares about opposing racism should be doing. I swear, if the right explicitly stated that oxygen was good for you, 5% of people on the left would immediatly asphyxiate themselves.

I have no idea why you weren't taught about the Wilmington insurrection. Quite possibly because there have been so many racial atrocities in America's history that it would be impossible to cover them all. The point is, if your teacher can't teach you about a topic like that without making you feel anguish about the colour of your skin then they shouldn't be a teacher.

Believe me when I say I care more about black children being made to feel discomfort on account of their race than you do. Don't let that little rush of righteous indignation to your brain tell you any different.

The difference is, if we want our children to inhabit a society that is less racist than this one, we don't do that by making young white children who are guilty of absolutely nothing feel resentful and anxious about the colour of their skin. Not to mention the increasing number of bi-racial children who are being caught up in this nonsense.

I didn't grow up in NC and I knew about the Wilmington insurrection. I want it to be taught accurately. I say so very explicitly in the article. I just don't want racial collectivism to be taught along with it. It used to be that anybody who was against racism would agree with me. Sadly, an increasing number of people think racism is only a problem if "the wrong side" does it.

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George:

“I have no idea why you weren't taught about the Wilmington insurrection. Quite possibly because there have been so many racial atrocities in America's history that it would be impossible to cover them all”

You know full well why no one in NC has ever been taught about the Wilmington massacre. As to your "so many racial atrocities" comment, that's disingenuous....how about we start with the very worst atrocities? Like the Wilmington massacre and the Tulsa massacre? Think we might be able to do that?

And that "shouldn't be a teacher" line? Nobody is naive enough to think that no white parent would go to the school and claim their precious offspring was made to feel uncomfortable when he or she heard that elected black officials were murdered in the streets by white terrorists however it was taught.

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Steve QJ:

“You know full well why no one in NC has ever been taught about the Wilmington massacre.”

No, actually I don't. And nor do you. In fact, neither do you know that nobody "has ever been taught" about it. You know that you and presumably your classmates weren't taught it. Or maybe even that you were taught it and you forgot, like you’ve no doubt forgotten all kinds of things you learned in school. Jesus, the absolute certainty with which people talk nowadays. It makes you impervious to reason.

And yes, parents do go into school and complain about how their children are being made to feel. They do this on a wide range of topics, and they do it already. These bills don't change that. I read recently about a black mother who sued her school because her biracial son, whose deceased father is white, didn't want to label himself as an oppressor (not for nothing, requiring children to do this is already illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964).

Children in schools all over the world learn that white Nazis murdered millions of Jews. They learn that black Hutu massacred black Tutsi. They learn that Mao killed millions upon millions of Chinese people. I AM NOT ARGUING THAT THIS SHOULDN'T BE TAUGHT. I'm saying that this can and should be taught without also teaching the racist idea that people from any of these racial groups bear collective responsibilty or should feel personal guilt for the actions of other people who happened to look superficially similar to them. Why is this difficult for you to understand?

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George:

“No, actually I don't.”

You’re simply not being honest here. The story of the only successful violent overthrow of a duly elected government in the nation’s history was taught to none of us for the same reason we were all taught that the Civil War was actually about “states’ rights”, for the same reason that Lee and Jackson are taught to be “military geniuses” rather than traitors, for the same reason that memorials to terrorists like Nathaniel Bedford Forrest still stand in this country, and for the same reason Andrew Jackson is held up as populist hero. To disingenuously suggest that you’re altogether unaware of our school’s 150 years of systematic efforts to outright lie about our nation’s history hurts the rest of your arguments.

“I AM NOT ARGUING THAT THIS SHOULDN'T BE TAUGHT.”

In fact, you are. You are siding with right-wingers who are arguing that it shouldn’t be taught. They are saying so in school board meetings. They are saying so at their rallies. The fact that the legislators who support their views are clever enough to use language that their white constituents understand as code for “we’ll continue to teach history dishonestly so that neither you nor your children are ever made to feed uncomfortable” doesn’t mean they aren’t motivated to do just that.

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Steve QJ:

“In fact, you are.”

Ugh, God, okay man. Life must be so simple when you simply decide what complete strangers are thinking instead of listening to them. I mean, you'll end up being wrong all the time, but who cares about that eh? As long as you get to tell yourself that you're some paragon of moral virtue.

I haven't suggested I'm unaware of the failures of schools to teach American history accurtely. In fact, if you bothered to read the article instead of trying to read my mind, you'd see that I've even linked to some examples of failures to honestly teach American history! The two issues aren't the same.

It's possible to believe that:

a) the history of racial prejudice in America can and should be taught accurately and comprehensively, without demonising children because of their race.

and

b) that the ways in which race is taught inaccurately should be fixed.

These positions do not contradict each other.

Your argument seems to be that if American history is taught accurately we have to make children feel badly about themselves. Therefore anybody who is against making children feel bad about themselves is against an accurate telling of history. If that's how you think then I'm hoping you're not a teacher.

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As I alluded to recently, modern social justice activism is tied up with the constant drip-feeding of a persecution complex.

Spend five minutes on trans-Twitter, and you’ll find a steady stream of hyperbole about genocide and the denial of their right to exist. Read some of the more extreme “antiracist” activists, and you’ll be inundated with tales about “harm” and white supremacy and black people’s “inherent vulnerability.”

And while I think most of the people who write this nonsense understand the game they’re playing, a depressing number of readers end up falling for the grift.

If you're convinced, as George seems to be, that these bills ban CRT, and that CRT is the only possible way to teach racial history accurately, there’s no way to make progress from there. 

Any damage done, even if it’s done to children, is acceptable collateral damage. Every act that could be explained by stupidity ends up being attributed to malice. And anybody who offers any pushback about the way the history of racism is taught is trying to stop it from being taught at all. 

The sad thing is, this confusion could be resolved with just a brief conversation. If only people would stop trying to read each other’s minds.