Burnt books in modern times
Texas State Representative Matt Krause, a Republican, emailed a list of 850 books to superintendents, a mix of half-century-old novels — “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron — and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margaret Atwood, as well as edgy young adult books touching on sexual identity. Are these works, he asked, on your library shelves?
Mr. Krause’s motive was unclear, but the next night, at a school board meeting in San Antonio, parents accused a librarian of poisoning young minds.
Texas is afire with fierce battles over education, race and gender. What began as a debate over social studies curriculum and critical race studies — an academic theory about how systemic racism enters the pores of society — has become something broader and more profound, not least an effort to curtail and even ban books, including classics of American literature.
In June, and again in recent weeks, Texas legislators passed a law shaping how teachers approach instruction touching on race and gender. And Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican with presidential ambitions, took aim at school library shelves, directing education officials to investigate “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography.”
“Parents are rightfully angry,” he wrote in a separate letter. They “have the right to shield their children from obscene content.”“Education is not above the fray; it is the fray,” said Robert Pondiscio, a former teacher and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy group. “It’s naïve to think otherwise.”In Texas, such battles recur. In 2018, an education committee proposed striking a reference to “heroic” defenders of the Alamo, describing it as a “value-laden word.” A roar of resistance arose and the board of education rejected the proposal. The Republican lieutenant governor this year pressured a museum to cancel a panel to discuss a revisionist book — “Forget the Alamo” — examining its slaveholding combatants.“One minute they’re talking critical race theory,” Ms. Damon, the librarian, said. “Suddenly I’m hearing librarians are indoctrinating students.”
Mr. Krause, who compiled the list of 850 books that might “make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” because of race or sex, did not respond to interview requests. Nor did his aides explain why he drew up the list, which includes a book on gay teenagers and book banning, “The Year They Burned the Books” by Nancy Garden; “Quinceañera,” a study of the Latina coming-of-age ritual by the Mexican Jewish academic Ilan Stavans; and a particularly puzzling choice, “Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, which is deeply critical of leftist academic theorizing, including critical race theory.
On the question of slavery, for instance, the Texas law prohibits teachers from portraying slavery and racism as “anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States.” This conflicts with the views of many scholars who note that from America’s founding, slavery was woven into the structure of the nation and the Constitution.
The NYT goes on to point out that Texas law is ambiguous and vague, causing the list of bad books seems to send a chill through school boards. In the absence of clarity in state law, some librarians have been told to pre-emptively pull down books. A San Antonio school district took 400 books off the shelves for review.
It does seem naïve to think that the radical right will not target public education and inconvenient history and truth in Texas and everywhere else it can. Instead of critical race theory, something akin to White superiority theory will be taught. Texas law does not mention critical race theory, so there is ambiguity. The Texas radical right can play with that ambiguity as they socially re-engineer American society, government and law to fit the dominating neocapitalist and Christian nationalist ideologies that now dominate the radical right republican Party. A similarly vague law in Oklahoma has been challenged on grounds of vagueness
The Texas law states that teachers should “explore” contentious subjects such as slavery and treatment of American Indians “in a manner free from political bias.” However, it appears that the radical right has no real interest in anything other than indoctrinating students with their politically biased vision of reality and history. The right will self-righteously condemn any whiff of other points of view that do not accord with their sacred beliefs. That runs deep in Christian nationalist dogma.
Among other things, Christian nationalist ideology is rock solid in its dogmas that (i) heterosexual White men are God's chosen moral and political leaders, and (ii) America was Founded as a White Christian nation that God chose to rule over all other nations and racial groups. That literally is the history they teach in their religious schools. Christian nationalists want to force all public schools to teach the same thing as long as public schools exist.[1]
Question: Is the radical right sincere about being unbiased in teaching, or is that just propaganda and lies?
Footnote:
1. Christian nationalists want all secular public schools replaced with private religious schools, and they want to force American taxpayers pay for all of it by law. That is core dogma among Christian nationalist elites and their legal strategy in the courts, not fringe crackpottery. This is no idle threat.
According to Pew research in 2020, half of Americans say the Bible should influence U.S. laws. 28% favor the Bible over the will of the people. Christian nationalists have made it clear that they do not care about majority public opposition to what they want to do. They are doing God's work and that trumps everything else including man's law, the US Constitution, public opposition, democracy and civil liberties. They are authoritarian.
Burning books about 80 years ago
No comments:
Post a Comment