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    ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Kimberlé Crenshaw warns against rightwing battle over critical race theory

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    ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Kimberlé Crenshaw warns against rightwing battle over critical race theory Exclusive: Author and academic cautions pushback against racial justice education feeds revival of segregationist policiesThe professor who is a leading voice on critical race theory has warned that the rightwing battle against racial justice education not only threatens US democracy, but encourages a revival of segregationist values and policies.‘Cowering to politics’: how AP African American studies became the most controversial course in the USRead moreKimberlé Crenshaw is among top American academics and authors recently stripped from the latest draft of the advanced placement (AP) African American studies course being piloted in US high schools, after Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, led an aggressive backlash against it.The Columbia University and UCLA law professor and co-founder of the African American Policy Forum thinktank, believes that the escalations against racial history teaching, in Florida and elsewhere represent “the tip of the iceberg” of rightwing efforts to retract the progress since the civil rights era and push America towards authoritarianism.“Are [schools] on the side of the neo-segregationist faction? Or are [they] going to stick with the commitments that we’ve all celebrated for the last 50, 60 years?” Crenshaw asked, referring to headway made on equal opportunities since the 1960s.“The College Board fiasco, I think, is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of interests that have to make this decision,” she said.The College Board, the organization that administers college readiness exams and AP courses for high schoolers to earn college credits, denied bending to political pressure amid accusations that the curriculum has been watered down.But in what many viewed as a response to DeSantis’s ban, the work of Crenshaw and other high-profile progressive Black figures, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, were relegated from required reading to “optional” within the course.Several topics, including intersectionality, queer studies and the Black Lives Matters movement, were downgraded. The new version of the course now suggests Black conservatism as a research project idea.DeSantis, who will probably run for president in 2024, claimed the course violated state law and “lacks educational value”.Even apart from outrage at states moving to ban the course outright, if the edited version ends up being the course’s final form when it is set to launch fully in 2024, Crenshaw cautions that states teaching the significantly pared-down version will see its students earning the same credits as those studying the fuller version that includes the kind of contemporary and intersectional material she views as vital.Making such core topics optional “is exactly the same structure of segregation”, she said. “It’s like ‘we’re going to create this so that the anti-woke [camp] will permit states to decide whether they want the segregated version, or whether they want a more fully representative and inclusive version,’” said Crenshaw.Crenshaw is widely known for her activism and scholarship on two essential schools of thought on anti-Black racism. She is a trailblazer in critical race theory, which explores the persistence of systemic racism in US legal institutions, pioneered by law professor Derrick Bell. And she coined the term intersectionality, in 1989, describing how different identities such as race, gender and sexuality cut across each other and overlap.And from the previous draft last fall to the current version of the AP course, the key word “systemic” disappeared entirely and the word “intersectionality” went from several to a lone mention.Crenshaw said that the “frightening” choice in the new AP course to make contemporary lessons optional follows a similar logic to how corporations navigated Jim Crow segregation.Crenshaw noted that Donald Trump and the right’s Make America Great Again (Maga) extremism is directly linked to the College Board’s decision – and further back to strategies used during decades of racial segregation laws that prevailed from post-Reconstruction to the 1960s.“One of the truly, bone-chillingly frightening things about the aspiration to ‘make America great again’ that’s amplified by what’s happening with the College Board is that one of the most sustained features of segregation in the past was the fact that businesses were not only enablers, they facilitated segregation,” she said, driven by the profit motive and the white supremacy movement.“So when businesses and segregation were aligned, it was a chokehold on Black freedom aspirations,” she said.Crenshaw spoke to the Guardian from the sunlit living room of her New York home. A nearby desk that Crenshaw calls the “graveyard” is stacked with commonly banned books – books that Crenshaw herself hands out as part of her Books Unbanned tour, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.She urges a stronger, concerted pushback to this latest manifestation of racist history. “What was brilliant about the civil rights movement is that they really pressured national interests, corporate interests, to break with their policies of simply facilitating segregation in the south,” she said.Crenshaw believes that the College Board development reflects just one part of a continuous strategy from the right to target and disenfranchise minority groups.“It’s called ‘make America great again’. So what is it about this America now that this faction finds wanting?” she asked.“The energy and power structure of the Maga [movement] is really this desire for a time where there isn’t a sense of ‘I have to share this country with people who don’t look like me, [and] what we are born into was never an even playing field,’” she said.So when the “idea of greatness” harks back to the time of racial tyranny, she noted, far-right forces attempt to forgo the teaching of said history, so that “future generations have no tools, no exposure, no ability to critique the present as a reflection of the past”.Today’s most influential Republicans have made inclusive education a target and taken the supreme court further to the right, undermining other democratic institutions, as well as playing down the 6 January 2021 insurrection where extremist Trump supporters tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump and some carried Confederate flags inside the US Capitol after breaking in.In Crenshaw’s view, this is all with the goal of transforming the “decades-long journey towards greater social justice” into what the right admonishes as “wokeness” – which is in fact the encouraging of racial justice and equity.“Wokeness has become the oppression, not the centuries of enslavement and genocide, and imperialism that has shaped the lives of people of color, in ways that continue into the present,” said Crenshaw.Crenshaw traces the aggressive disinformation campaigns about critical race theory to a September 2020 executive order passed by then president Donald Trump that restricted federal agencies and contractors from providing diversity and equity training.“When that happened it was a five star alarm for me. Because if this can happen with the stroke of a pen, it means that our entire infrastructure that we’ve built since Brown [v Board] is weakened,” said Crenshaw, noting the landmark supreme court case that prohibited segregation in US public schools, adding that several elite universities rushed to comply with Trump’s mandate.Soon after, she became acutely aware that Trump and activist Republicans were twisting the term critical race theory and critiquing Black history taught in schools, or slamming research such as the New York Times’ 1619 project in order to spread moral panic.“The ban on anti-racism is so profound, that even the story of a kindergarten or first grade integrating an all-white school runs counter to [the new laws],” said Crenshaw, referring to the memoir of activist Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate an elementary school in the American south in 1960.“So, white kids’ feelings are more important than black kids’ reality.”She continued: “They got their marching orders and into the school boards they went, and into the legislatures they went.”She warned: “If parents can be convinced that there is a wrong happening in public schools, they might be convinced to agree to the dismantling of public education across the board.”Colleges and universities have faced similar assault, Crenshaw noted, as professors are targeted under state laws.Crenshaw further laments the risks of conservatives’ steady takeover of the supreme court and the dismantling of federal voting rights protection and threat to affirmative action in higher education.“This court stands poised to really gut the entire civil rights infrastructure that was built by blood, sweat and tears,” said Crenshaw.Overall, Crenshaw exhorts Democrats and the media to employ much more vigor and urgency in addressing escalating attacks on US institutions, noting that many news outlets frame “the push towards authoritarianism as a [mere] rebrand”.“It was wishful thinking to believe that once the campaign was over, this was going to go away,” said Crenshaw, referring to the Biden-Harris victory in the 2020 election.But Crenshaw remains buoyed by hope that the next generation can overcome attempts at retrenchment from the far right: “This is the next generation’s lap to run. And we’ve got to hand them a baton that they can carry.”In the meantime, Crenshaw says there must be more acknowledgment of what’s at stake.“At some point, there has to be a recognition that we’re fighting for the soul of the country,” she said.TopicsUS politicsUS educationToni MorrisonRon DeSantisDonald TrumpThe far rightFloridafeaturesReuse this content More

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      Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye off banned list in St Louis schools

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      Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye off banned list in St Louis schoolsNobel laureate’s classic debut was removed from libraries but backlash and lawsuits prompted vote to restore

      Books bans and ‘gag orders’: the crackdown no one asked for
      A banned book by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison will be available again to high school students in a district in St Louis, Missouri, after the Wentzville school board reversed its decision to ban The Bluest Eye, in the face of criticism and a class-action lawsuit.‘Adults are banning books, but they’re not asking our opinions’: meet the teens of the Banned Book ClubRead moreThe board made national news last month when it voted 4-3 to removed the book from school libraries, citing themes of racism, incest and child molestation.Morrison’s 1970 debut novel is one of several titles, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and L8R, G8R by Lauren Myracle, to have gained the attention of school boards in conservative US areas.The Wentzville ban was imposed after a challenge by a parent exercising the right to request titles not be available to their children. Backlash was swift, critics saying the board had violated first amendment rights.In a letter of protest, the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Missouri Library Association said: “We encourage you to reexamine the depth of your commitment to education in the truest sense, and to find your courage in the face of baseless political grandstanding at the expense of educators and students in your district.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri sued the district on behalf of two students. According to the St Louis Post-Dispatch, the board accepted a review committee’s recommendation to retain Morrison’s book, voting 5-2 on Friday to rescind the ban. An ACLU official, Anthony Rothert, welcomed the news but warned that books remain suppressed including All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. Challenges against two other books had been withdrawn, the Post-Dispatch reported.The board also approved the retention of Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero, which faced challenges regarding language and depiction of rape.“Wentzville’s policies still make it easy for any community member to force any book from the shelves even when they shamelessly target books by and about communities of color, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups,” said Rothert. “Access to The Bluest Eye was taken from students for three months just because a community member did not think they should have access to Toni Morrison’s story.”Many library associations argue that parents of minors should be able to control their children’s reading but should not make books unavailable to others.Opponents of Morrison’s book, including conservative lawmakers, urged the school board to maintain its ban. After the decision, board member Sandy Garber maintained that The Bluest Eye “doesn’t offer anything to our children”.According to the American Library Association, which monitors challenges to books, calls for bans are increasing.“It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA – the last 20 years,” the director of the ALA office of intellectual freedom, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, told the Guardian in November. “We’ve never had a time when we’ve gotten four or five reports a day for days on end, sometimes as many as eight in a day.Reuse this content More

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      The Republicans' racial culture war is reaching new heights in Virginia | Sidney Blumenthal

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      OpinionUS politicsThe Republicans’ racial culture war is reaching new heights in VirginiaSidney BlumenthalWhy is the Republican running for governor of Virginia going after Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel Beloved? Sat 30 Oct 2021 06.22 EDTLast modified on Sat 30 Oct 2021 13.29 EDTRunning for governor of Virginia as the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin appears to have a split personality – sometimes the generic former corporate executive in a fleece vest, the suburban dad surrounded by his sun-lit children and tail-wagging dogs, and sometimes the fierce kulturkampf warrior and racial dog-whistler. His seemingly dual personality has been filtered through a cascade of Republican consultants’ campaign images. His latest TV commercial attempts to resolve the tension by showing him as a concerned father who shares the worries of the ordinary Trumpster. In the closing hours of the campaign, he has exposed that his political identity can’t be separated from Republican identity politics in the decadent stage of Trumpism.The Republican party has long specialized in fabricating esoteric threats, from the basements of Pizzagate to the stratosphere of “Jewish space lasers”. Youngkin’s campaign, though, has contrived a brand-new enemy within, a specter of doom to stir voters’ anxieties that only he can dispel: the Black Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved.His turn to a literary reference might seem an obscure if not a bizarre non sequitur, at odds with his pacifying image, but the ploy to suppress the greatest work by the most acclaimed Black writer has an organic past in rightwing local politics and an even deeper resonance in Virginia history.In his first TV ad, introducing himself as a newcomer who had never before run for political office, Youngkin warned voters not to misperceive him as yet another nasty Republican and to dismiss not-yet-stated “lies about me”. They should ignore whatever negative material they might hear about how he “left dirty dishes in the sink”. “What’s next, that I hate dogs?” Big smile. Cue: cute kids and puppies. Soundtrack: bark, bark.For a while the nice guy Youngkin tried to walk his thin line, lest he lose the party’s angry base voters. He attempted to use the soft image to cover the hard line. He is vaccinated, but against vaccine mandates. He is inspired by Donald Trump, has proclaimed his belief in the need for audits and “election integrity”; opposed to abortion, but was careful not to appear with Trump at his “Take Back Virginia” rally. He appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News in a ritual cleansing to profess that his motive is pure.“You know, Tucker, this is why I quit my job last summer,” Youngkin said. “I actually could not recognize my home state of Virginia.” He had, he explained, left the corporate world to take up the sword for the Republican culture war.Actually, according to Bloomberg News, he “flamed out” as co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, with a “checkered record”, losing billions on “bad bets”, and “retired after a power struggle”. In May, just before leaving the firm and speaking to Carlson, after the murder of George Floyd, Youngkin signed a statement affirming that contributions to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund would receive matching grants from Carlyle. When asked about this later, however, a campaign spokesperson fired back, “Glenn has never donated to the SPLC and does not agree with them. He is a Christian and a conservative who is pro-life and served in his church for years.”Youngkin’s seeming confusion around controversial racial issues highlighted his conflicting roles. In Washington, while at Carlyle, he was the responsible corporate citizen practicing worthy philanthropy. In the Republican party, where that sort of non-partisan moderation is not only suspect but mocked as a source of evil, he has had to demonstrate that he is not tainted.Soon enough, Youngkin waded into the murky waters of racial politics. He offered himself as the defender of schoolchildren from the menace of critical race theory, even though the abstruse legal doctrine is not taught in any Virginia public school. Yet he suggested that his opponent, former governor Terry McAuliffe, would impose its creed on innocent minds, depriving parents of control. “On day one, I will ban critical race theory in our schools,” Youngkin has pledged.But his brandishing of critical race theory, nonexistent in the schools’ curriculum, has been apparently insufficiently frightening to finish the job. Perhaps not enough people know what the theory is at all. He needed one more push, searched for one more issue and produced one more ad.So, Youngkin seized upon a novel racial symbol, in fact a novel. The danger, he claimed, comes from Beloved by Toni Morrison – the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by the Nobel prize-winning author, about the psychological toll and loss of slavery, especially its sexual abuse, and considered one of the most important American literary works.While no other Republican has ever before run against Beloved as a big closing statement, there is a history to the issue in Virginia.“When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk,” Laura Murphy, identified as “Fairfax County Mother”, said in the Youngkin ad. “It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine.” She claimed that her son had nightmares from reading the assignment in his advanced placement literature class. “It was disgusting and gross,” her son, Blake, said. “It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.” As it happens, in 2016 Murphy had lobbied a Republican-majority general assembly to pass a bill enabling students to exempt themselves from class if they felt the material was sexually explicit. Governor McAuliffe vetoed what became known as “the Beloved bill”.“This Mom knows – she lived through it. It’s a powerful story,” tweeted Youngkin. Ms Murphy, the “Mom”, is in fact a longtime rightwing Republican activist. Her husband, Daniel Murphy, is a lawyer-lobbyist in Washington and a large contributor to Republican candidates and organizations. Their delicate son, Blake Murphy, who complained of “night terrors”, was a Trump White House aide and is now associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which sends out fundraising emails reading: “Alert. You’re a traitor. You abandoned Trump …”The offending novel is a fictional treatment of a true story with a Virginia background, a history that ought to be taught in Virginia schools along with the reading of Beloved. In 1850, Senator James M Mason, of Virginia, sponsored the Fugitive Slave Act. “The safety and integrity of the Southern States (to say nothing of their dignity and honor) are indissolubly bound up with domestic slavery,” he wrote. In 1856, Margaret Garner escaped from her Kentucky plantation into the free state of Ohio. She was the daughter of her owner and had been repeatedly raped by his brother, her uncle, and gave birth to four children. When she was cornered by slave hunters operating under the Fugitive Slave Act, she killed her two-year-old and attempted to kill her other children to spare them their fate. Garner was returned to slavery, where she died from typhus.In the aftermath of her capture, Senator Charles Sumner, the abolitionist from Massachusetts, denounced Mason on the floor of the Senate for his authorship of the bill, “a special act of inhumanity and tyranny”. He also cited the case of a “pious matron who teaches little children to relieve their bondage”, sentenced to “a dungeon”. He was referring to Margaret Douglass, a southern white woman who established a school for Black children in Norfolk, Virginia. She was arrested and sent to prison for a month “as an example”, according to the judge. When she was released, she wrote a book on the cause of Black education and the culture of southern rape. “How important, then,” she wrote, “for these Southern sultans, that the objects of their criminal passions should be kept in utter ignorance and degradation.”Virginia’s racial caste system existed for a century after the civil war. In 1956, after the supreme court’s decision in Brown v Brown of Education ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, Virginia’s general assembly, with Confederate flags flying in the gallery, declared a policy of massive resistance that shut down all public schools for two years. The growth of all-white Christian academies and new patterns of segregation date from that period. Only in 1971 did Virginia revise its state constitution to include a strong provision for public education.Youngkin’s demonizing of Toni Morrison’s Beloved may seem unusual and even abstract, but it is the oldest tactic in the playbook. It was old when Lee Atwater, a political operative for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, explained, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”Youngkin well understands the inflammatory atmosphere in Virginia in which he is dousing gasoline and lighting matches. The violence and murder at Charlottesville are still a burning issue. The trials of racist neo-Nazis have just begun there. Prominent Lost Cause statues of Robert E Lee have been removed within the past few months. Branding Beloved as sexually obscene was always an abstracted effort to avoid coming to terms with slavery, especially its sexual coercion. Parental control is Youngkin’s abstract slogan for his racial divisiveness. Beloved is his signifier to the Trump base that he is a safe member of the cult, no longer an untrustworthy corporate type.Youngkin’s reflexive dependence on the strategy reveals more than the harsh imperatives of being a candidate in the current Republican party. It places him, whether he knows or not, cares or not, objects or not, in a long tradition in the history of Virginia that the Commonwealth has spent decades seeking to overcome.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansVirginiaToni MorrisoncommentReuse this content More