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The far rightNeo-Confederates worked with other far-right groups in failed efforts to preserve monumentsEmails, documents and videos reveal the Sons of Confederate Veterans collaborated to keep statues and memorials intact Jason Wilson@ More
There is a specter haunting America – the specter of critical race theory. That, at least, is the impression you would get from rightwing media. Fox News has mentioned the term close to 1,300 times since March – including almost 250 times last week alone.If you don’t know, critical race theory (CRT) is a school of legal thought that argues that racism is not only a problem of prejudices held by individual human beings, but a structural problem that can be embedded in ostensibly neutral laws and government institutions. Thanks in part to efforts by conservative activists to turn this previously esoteric academic idea into a catch-all phrase for the excesses of anti-racist politics, critical race theory has become an overnight bogeyman of the right. Conservative politicians in at least 20 states are pushing legislation to ban its teaching in schools.Rather than critically engaging with critical race theory, rightwing politicians and media outlets prefer to attack a carefully constructed straw man version – transforming “the academic study of structural racism into a vague grab-bag of villainy”, in the words of the New Republic’s Alex Shepard. Just as conservatives attacked anything to the left of the far right as “communist” during the red scare of the 1960s, reactionaries today denounce anything with a whiff of anti-racism as “critical race theory” or “wokeness” run amok.It makes sense that a conservative movement that has connected its fate to Donald Trump and a white supremacist agenda would see anything that criticizes the racist structures of the country as a major threat. What is more puzzling, at least at first glance, is the ire that critical race theory has also drawn from some leftwing and liberal camps. Some liberal media outlets seem almost as obsessed as conservatives are with critical race theory, “cancel culture”, “identity politics” and the like – phenomena which they treat as interchangeable symptoms of the same political malaise. Just look at the onslaught of critical pieces about identity politics and “wokeness” in the opinion pages of the New York Times over the past several years.In the eyes of some liberals and leftists, perhaps most famously personified by the academic Mark Lilla, emphasizing race and racism distracts from the real progressive struggle between labor and capital. Across the western world, mostly old white men are lining up to warn us that the “working class” (read: nativist white workers) feels betrayed by center-left parties that cater to “cosmopolitans” or “urbanites” with “symbolic” politics about issues such as gender-neutral bathrooms, rather than offer real material remedies on traditional bread-and-butter issues.Unfortunately, some younger liberals share the older left’s reflexive hostility to racial and sexual politicsWhat they do not see – or do not want to see – is that economic issues and cultural issues are not neatly separated; if anything, they are intimately intertwined, and always have been. Nostalgia for the golden age of progressivism (the early 20th century in the US, and the 1960s and 1970s in western Europe) ignores that the social democratic welfare state was built on heteronormativity, patriarchy and white supremacy. Many state provisions were provided on the basis of a “traditional” family model, in which the man was the main or sole breadwinner and the woman took care of the kids. And white workers were able to achieve upward mobility in part because immigrants replaced them in less desirable, lower-paid jobs.Unfortunately, some younger liberals, often self-described centrists or classical liberals, share the older left’s reflexive hostility to racial and sexual politics and what they view as excessive radicalism. Take Persuasion, a relatively new online publication created by Yascha Mounk, who made his name as a fervent critic of rightwing populism and Donald Trump. In many ways, the publication is a typical product of the Trump era, set up to “defend the values of a free society” against Trump. But from the beginning the bulk of Persuasion’s articles have focused on criticizing the left, whether in the forms of unduly “woke” Americans or the nominally socialist authoritarian regime of Venezuela. The far right, including the Trumpist Republican party, increasingly seems like an afterthought.Anti-identity-politics leftists and liberals must stop acting as the useful idiots of the far right by advancing its pet issues and terminology. These campaigns against anti-racism might look ridiculous on Fox News, but they have real consequences in legislatures and statehouses across the country, where Republican politicians are using the bogeyman of critical race theory and identity politics to ram reactionary rhetoric into law. Coast to coast, Republican lawmakers have unleashed the most profound attack on democracy that this country has seen in decades. Leftists and liberals must recognize that the true enemy of both the working class and free society is on the right, and that its threat is still at least as serious as it was in 2016.
Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is a Guardian US columnist More
On 17 June, Joe Biden signed a bill turning Juneteenth, 19 June, into a federal holiday. Juneteenth, a celebration of the emancipation of enslaved Black people after the formal end of the US civil war, began in Texas in 1866 and has long been observed by many Black Americans.The US government’s belated decision to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday is a testament to the impact of the current iteration of the perpetual movement for Black American liberation. Unfortunately, it may also be another step in the process to water down symbols of liberation: treating the brutalities of racism as a crime of the past instead of an ongoing project which both major political parties have helped helm. We should celebrate Juneteenth, while resisting attempts to co-opt its meaning and render it empty ceremony.Juneteenth, also known as Jubilee Day and Emancipation Day, is already a highly misunderstood holiday. It is often, understandably, confused with Abraham Lincoln’s issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of any enslaved Black people within the rebellious Confederate states. The proclamation was made official in 1863, at the height of the civil war, and explicitly established the war as one to end slavery. Enslaved Black people had long begun their own uprisings and escapes in the midst of the war, but the proclamation gave legal protections to the new freedmen. After Lincoln’s announcement, over 200,000 formerly enslaved people joined the Union army, playing crucial roles in the defeat of the main Confederate army on 9 April 1865. Despite the north’s burgeoning victory and the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery in the United States was far from over, and slave states that remained part of the Union did not have to acknowledge the humanity of their enslaved population.The remaining armies of the Confederacy and small rebel guerrilla groups continued to fight well after the loss of the Confederate capital and Gen Robert E Lee’s surrender in April. Slave-owning whites in fallen Confederate states fled west to Texas, bringing with them over 100,000 enslaved Black people in the process. It took the arrival of the Union army to begin the end of slavery in Texas. On 19 June 1865, Maj Gen Gordon Granger declared, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” While there have been many other dates for the holiday originally called Emancipation Day, 19 June became the dominant day of celebration.Despite Granger’s announcement, white slave owners fought to keep people in bondage, even killing Black people who fled for their freedom. Freedom had been declared in words, but it would take the military might of the Union army to enforce. This speaks volumes to how deeply the culture and economics of slavery were embedded in the United States, and to the kind of force necessary to uproot it. Of course this uprooting was in many ways incomplete; while the post-slavery Reconstruction era brought many political and economic freedoms to Black Americans in the south, much of that progress would be corrupted by the slavery-like programs of sharecropping and the establishment of the prison-industrial complex that persists today.This complicated history is what makes this holiday particularly susceptible to revisionism, in the way that highly politicized holidays in the US often are. In his proclamation to recognize Juneteenth, Biden wrote that the holiday is:
A day in which we remember the moral stain and terrible toll of slavery on our country – what I’ve long called America’s original sin. A long legacy of systemic racism, inequality, and inhumanity.
Yet the system of racial capitalism that allowed American slavery to exist still thrives today – with every Black person locked behind bars, every bullet fired by police officers into the bodies of Black children, and every Black soldier sent to murder and die to expand and maintain the country’s global system of economic domination. It is more than a little ironic that such a bill would be passed by a Congress rife with more or less open white supremacists, and signed by a president who only recently took pride in working with former segregationist politicians. For powerful American politicians to discuss Juneteenth while dismissing the idea of reparations for the descendants of enslaved people is profoundly hypocritical.Another holiday provides an instructive example: Mother’s Day can be traced to the work of Julia Ward Howe and Ann Reeves Jarvis, two peace activists who wanted to establish an anti-war holiday. Their work was carried on by Jarvis’s daughter, Anna Maria Jarvis, who lived to regret the holiday, which was rapidly commercialized and converted into another mechanism of corporate greed. Then there’s Martin Luther King Jr Day: a holiday that should be a call to action – a day in which people engage in civil disobedience or learn about the strategy and tactics of one of the most important radical organizers of the 20th century – has been sold as a day in which people must perform acts of service. While mostly well intended, that narrative muddles and dilutes King’s politics and feeds the American mythology that sporadic days of service, rather than the hard work of breaking down this system and building it anew, will somehow bring us closer to justice.We should be happy to popularize and celebrate Juneteenth. But we should celebrate it with the same fervor in which it was celebrated the summer of 2020, with protests, political education, and an understanding that the house of the slavemaster still stands, despite a fresh coat of paint. We must celebrate Juneteenth knowing the kind of force it took for enslaved Black people to attain emancipation – and the equivalent political force it may take to finally and absolutely uproot the American capitalist machine that seeks profit at the expense of Black freedom. More
The US government will investigate the troubled legacy of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of the institutions, which over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.The US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, has directed the department to prepare a report detailing available historical records relating to the federal boarding school programs, with an emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites.“The interior department will address the inter-generational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said in a secretarial memo. “I know that this process will be long and difficult. I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss we feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”Haaland announced the review on Tuesday in remarks to the National Congress of American Indians during the group’s midyear conference.Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the US enacted laws and policies to establish and support Indian boarding schools across the country. For more than 150 years, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools that focused on assimilation.Haaland talked about the federal government’s attempt to wipe out tribal identity, language and culture and how that past has continued to manifest itself through long-standing trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, premature deaths, mental disorders and substance abuse.The recent discovery of children’s remains buried at the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school has magnified interest in that legacy in Canada and the US.In Canada, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into society. They were forced to convert to Christianity and were not allowed to speak their languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.After reading about the unmarked graves in Canada, Haaland recounted her own family’s story in a recent opinion piece published by the Washington Post.“Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people,” she wrote. “It is a history that we must learn from if our country is to heal from this tragic era.”She continued: “I am a product of these horrific assimilation policies. My maternal grandparents were stolen from their families when they were only eight years old and were forced to live away from their parents, culture and communities until they were 13. Many children like them never made it back home.”Haaland cited statistics from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which reported that by 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations. Besides providing resources and raising awareness, the coalition has been working to compile additional research on US boarding schools and deaths that many say is sorely lacking.Officials with the interior department said aside from trying to shed more light on the loss of life at the boarding schools, they would be working to protect burial sites associated with the schools and would consult with tribes on how best to do that while respecting families and communities.The report from agency staff is due by 1 April.During her address on Tuesday, Haaland told the story of her grandmother being loaded on a train with other children from her village and being shipped off to boarding school. She said many families had been haunted for too long by the “dark history” of these institutions and that the agency has a responsibility to recover that history.“We must uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of these schools,” she said. More
The US will officially recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday on 19 June after Joe Biden signed a bill into law which commemorates the end of slavery in the country. The president described a day to remember the moral stain of slavery but also to celebrate the capacity to heal. Before signing the bill, Biden said: ‘I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president’
Juneteenth becomes federal holiday celebrating end of slavery in US More
The US will officially recognize Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in America, as a federal holiday after Joe Biden signed a bill into law on Thursday.At a jubilant White House ceremony, the president emphasized the need for the US to reckon with its history, even when that history is shameful.“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” Biden said, before he established what will be known as Juneteenth National Independence Day. “Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with the mistakes we made. And remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.”Just before signing the bill, Biden added: “I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president.”Kamala Harris, also in attendance, reflected on the historic nature of the day and the presence of Black lawmakers who worked diligently to advance the bill.Harris, who is the first Black woman to serve as vice-president, told those at the White House for the bill signing: “We are gathered here in a house built by enslaved people. We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.“And we are here to witness President Joe Biden establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. We have come far, and we have far to go, but today is a day of celebration.”[embedded content]Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the people of Galveston, Texas, freeing slaves in the last rebel state. Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but the proclamation wasn’t enforced in Galveston until federal soldiers read it out on 19 June 1865.Black Americans are rejoicing at the move, but many say more is needed to address systemic racism.Republican-led states have enacted or are considering legislation that activists argue would curtail the right to vote, particularly for people of color. Legislation to address voting rights issues, and institute policing reforms demanded after the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans, remains stalled in the Congress that acted swiftly on the Juneteenth bill.“It’s great, but it’s not enough,” said Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Kansas City. “We need Congress to protect voting rights, and that needs to happen right now so we don’t regress any further,” she added. “That is the most important thing Congress can be addressing at this time.”Federal recognition of Juneteenth also comes as Republican officials across the country move to ban schools from teaching students “critical race theory”, the history of slavery and the continuing impacts of systemic racism.The Senate unanimously passed the bill earlier this week, but in the House, 14 Republicans voted against it.Most federal workers will observe the holiday on Friday. The Washington DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, and Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, announced that state and city government offices would be closed on Friday in honor of Juneteenth. District of Columbia public schools will also be closed on Friday.Before 19 June became a federal holiday, it was observed in the vast majority of states and the District of Columbia. Texas was first to make Juneteenth a holiday, in 1980.In Texas, residents celebrated the role their state played in the historic moment.“I’m happy as pink,” said Doug Matthew, 70, a former city manager of Galveston who has helped coordinate the community’s Juneteenth celebrations since Texas made it a holiday.He credited the work of state and local leaders with paving the way for this week’s step by Congress.“I’m also proud that everything started in Galveston,” Matthew said.Pete Henley, 71, was setting up tables on Thursday for a Juneteenth celebration at the Old Central Cultural Center, a Galveston building that once was a segregated Black school. He said the Juneteenth holiday would help promote understanding and unity.He said his family traced its roots back to enslaved men and women in the Texas city who were among the last to receive word of the Emancipation Proclamation.“As a country, we really need to be striving toward togetherness more than anything,” Henley said. “If we just learn to love each other, it would be so great.” More
Whatever Republican politicians and rightwing media are referring to when they talk about “critical race theory”, it has little to do with critical race theory as an actual discipline. Developed in the 1970s and 80s by law professors – notably Derrick Bell and his acolyte, Kimberlé Crenshaw, at Harvard – the real CRT is analytic framework through which academics can discern the ways that racial disparities are reproduced by the law, and how the legacies of historical racism can persist even after discriminatory policies are revised.But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was. The phrase itself sounds distant, lofty, and abstract – “critical”, “theory” – the kind of thing that comes out of the mouths of people in tweed blazers who think they’re better than you. The very opacity of the words made them the perfect vehicle for what the right wing wanted: a new vessel for white racial anxiety and grievance.And so it is that something Republicans are calling “critical race theory” became the center of a series of statehouse bills – some proposed, others already signed into law – that aim to ban honest conversations about race and sex oppression in America from classrooms. Casting themselves in opposition to a supposed ideology of white sinfulness and inferiority that they claim is sweeping through the nation and indoctrinating children, Republicans are using “critical race theory” as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.Laws claiming to ban critical race theory from public school curriculums have been passed in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, and have been advanced in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia. The bills themselves are patently unconstitutional and will not hold up in court, and they are so non-specific regarding what exactly they oppose that it’s also hard to imagine how they could ever be meaningfully enforced, even if they were not destined to be thrown out.But the bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to revoke speech protections and crush academic freedom, a tendency that has recently been modeled in other nations with rising authoritarian sentiment. Some instructors have already been affected by the bans.The wording of the bans is vast enough to prohibit vast swaths of discursive territory. In the North Carolina law, among those “concepts” that public schools “shall not promote” are “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” and “that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex for the purpose of oppressing members of another race or sex”. A proposed bill in Connecticut, meanwhile, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” or content that causes “any individual to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex”.This last item – with its concern for the emotions of white, male students – may be the most telling. The move to ban discussions of racism and oppression as systemic and socially foundational comes on the heels of the University of North Carolina’s decision to deny tenure to the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, following the interventions of a major donor. It comes, too, a year after the nationwide uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Both of these events garnered a passionate backlash in rightwing media, which have depicted them as assaults on police, “order” and white people. Packaged together as “critical race theory”, these conversations have been demonized on the right in an attempt to reassert understandings of race, racism, and American history that center white people as the primary moral players.The bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to crush academic freedomFor Republicans, the preferred narrative of race and American history is one that minimizes the harm done to Black people, overstates white virtue and insists that racism is a personal prejudice in the minds of misguided or amoral people, rather than a system that structures cultures and institutions. Racism was a problem, this story tells us (with an emphasis on the past tense) because some white people made an error; it’s not a problem any more, because those white people have been edified. This version of American history has placed racist injustice squarely in the past, but also, it quarantines racism in individual minds, rather than recognizing it as an infection that has contaminated our culture. Racism, in this telling, is primarily a matter of personality, of individual white people’s souls.But much modern anti-racist thinking rejects this. The 1619 Project positions Black people, and their enslavement, as central to America’s history, positioning the enslaved not merely footnotes or minor characters, but protagonists. And the real critical race theory that is practiced in law schools does not seem to be concerned with white people’s souls so much as with Black people’s material conditions. Maybe this is part of what Republicans don’t like about these versions of anti-racist thought: they remove white people, and white people’s feelings, from the center of the story.After all, when racism is merely a personal idiosyncrasy, and not a systemic condition, nothing is required of white people, or of the institutions they control, except to deny that they feel hate in their hearts. But if racism is a foundational reality, and not just a personal prejudice, then much bigger changes have to be made – and more is required of white people than personal innocence. More
The United States will soon have a new federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the nation.Congress has approved a bill that would make Juneteenth, or 19 June, a holiday – a bill Joe Biden is expected to sign into law. Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the people of Galveston, Texas, freeing slaves in the last rebel state. Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, freeing enslaved people in the southern states, and Confederate soldiers surrendered in April 1865. But the proclamation wasn’t enforced in Galveston until federal soldiers read out the proclamation on 19 June 1865. “Our federal holidays are purposely few in number and recognize the most important milestones,” said the Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. “I cannot think of a more important milestone to commemorate than the end of slavery in the United States.”Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, speaking next to a large poster of a Black man whose back bore massive scarring from being whipped, said she would be in Galveston this Saturday to celebrate along with Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas.“Can you imagine?” said Jackson Lee, who made a joke about her height. “I will be standing maybe taller than Senator Cornyn, forgive me for that, because it will be such an elevation of joy.”The Senate unanimously passed the measure yesterday, and the House voted to pass the bill on Wednesday afternoon.About 60% of Americans knew “nothing at all” or just “a little bit” about Juneteenth, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. And federal recognition of Juneteenth comes as Republican officials across the country move to ban schools from teaching students “critical race theory”, the history of slavery and the ongoing impacts of systemic racism.“Congress overwhelmingly voted to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday. But let us not forget that in Florida and Texas, educators are banned from teaching critical race theory,” wrote human rights advocate Martin Luther King III, the son of Martin Luther King Jr. “Let Juneteenth be both a day of celebration and a day of education of our nation’s true history.”For some critics, the move felt like a hollow gesture. “No more performative gestures for Juneteenth,” said Janeese Lewis George, a District of Columbia councilmember. “Stop giving us things we didn’t ask for and ignoring the things that matter.”Cori Bush, a Democratic representative of Missouri, called for broader reforms to address systemic racism.It’s Juneteenth AND reparations.It’s Juneteenth AND end police violence + the War on Drugs.It’s Juneteenth AND end housing + education apartheid.It’s Juneteenth AND teach the truth about white supremacy in our country.Black liberation in its totality must be prioritized.— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) June 17, 2021
Fourteen House Republicans opposed the effort. Congressman Matt Rosendale said creating the federal holiday was an effort to celebrate “identity politics”.“Since I believe in treating everyone equally, regardless of race, and that we should be focused on what unites us rather than our differences, I will vote no,” he said in a press release.The vast majority of states recognize Juneteenth as a holiday or have an official observance of the day, and most states hold celebrations. Juneteenth is a paid holiday for state employees in Texas, New York, Virginia and Washington.Under the legislation, the federal holiday would be known as Juneteenth National Independence Day.The Republican congressman Clay Higgins said he would vote for the bill and he supported the establishment of a federal holiday, but he was upset that the name of the holiday included the word independence rather than emancipation.“Why would the Democrats want to politicize this by co-opting the name of our sacred holiday of Independence Day?” Higgins said.“I want to say to my white colleagues on the other side, getting your independence from being enslaved in a country is different from a country getting independence to rule themselves,” the Democratic congresswoman Brenda Lawrence replied, adding: “We have a responsibility to teach every generation of Black and white Americans the pride of a people who have survived, endured and succeeded in these United States of America despite slavery.” More
