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      The fight to whitewash US history: ‘A drop of poison is all you need’

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      On 25 May 2020, a man died after a “medical incident during police interaction” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The man was suspected of forgery and “believed to be in his 40s”. He “physically resisted officers” and, after being handcuffed, “appeared to be suffering medical distress”. He was taken to the hospital “where he died a short time later”.It is not difficult to imagine a version of reality where this, the first police account of George Floyd’s brutal death beneath the knee of an implacable police officer, remained the official narrative of what took place in Minneapolis one year ago. That version of reality unfolds every day. Police lies are accepted and endorsed by the press; press accounts are accepted and believed by the public.That something else happened – that it is now possible for a news organization to say without caveat or qualification that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd – required herculean effort and extraordinary bravery on the part of millions of people.The laborious project of establishing truth in the face of official lies is one that Americans embraced during the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020, whether it was individuals speaking out about their experiences of racism at work, or institutions acknowledging their own complicity in racial injustice. For a time, it seemed that America was finally ready to tell a more honest, nuanced story of itself, one that acknowledged the blood at the root.But alongside this reassessment, another American tradition re-emerged: a reactionary movement bent on reasserting a whitewashed American myth. These reactionary forces have taken aim at efforts to tell an honest version of American history and speak openly about racism by proposing laws in statehouses across the country that would ban the teaching of “critical race theory”, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and, euphemistically, “divisive concepts”.The movement is characterized by a childish insistence that children should be taught a false version of the founding of the United States that better resembles a mythic virgin birth than the bloody, painful reality. It would shred the constitution’s first amendment in order to defend the honor of those who drafted its three-fifths clause.“When you start re-examining the founding myth in light of evidence that’s been discovered in the last 20 years by historians, then that starts to make people doubt the founding myth,” said Christopher S Parker, a professor of political science at the University of Washington who studies reactionary movements. “There’s no room for racism in this myth. Anything that threatens to interrogate the myth is seen as a threat.”Legislation seeking to limit how teachers talk about race has been considered by at least 15 states, according to an analysis by Education Week.In Idaho, Governor Brad Little signed into law a measure banning public schools from teaching critical race theory, which it claimed will “exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the wellbeing of the state of Idaho and its citizens”. The state’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, also established a taskforce to “examine indoctrination in Idaho education and to protect our young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism”.In Tennessee, the legislature has approved a bill that would bar public schools from using instructional materials that promote certain concepts, including the idea that, “This state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.”The Texas house of representatives has passed a flurry of legislation related to teaching history, including a bill that would ban any course that would “require an understanding of the 1619 Project” and a bill that would establish an “1836 Project” (a reference to the date of the founding of the Republic of Texas) to “promote patriotic education”.Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, in April came out in opposition to a small federal grant program (just $5.25m out of the department of education’s $73.5bn budget) supporting American history and civics education projects that, among other criteria, “incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives”.“Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense,” McConnell wrote in a letter to the secretary of education, Miguel Cardona. “Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.”Unsurprisingly, McConnell left out a few pertinent adjectives.“Whose children are we talking about?” asked LaGarrett King, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Education who has developed a new framework for teaching Black history. “Black parents talk to their kids about racism. Asian American parents talk to their kids about racism. Just say that you don’t want white kids to learn about racism.”“If we understand the systemic nature of racism, then that will help us really understand our society, and hopefully improve it,” King added. “Laws like this – it’s simply that people do not want to improve society. History is about power, and these people want to continue in a system that they have enjoyed.”While diversity training and the 1619 Project have been major targets, critical race theory has more recently become the watchword of the moral panic. Developed by Black legal scholars at Harvard in the 1980s, critical race theory is a mode of thinking that examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law.Black parents talk to their kids about racism. Asian American parents talk to their parents about racism. Just say that you don’t want white kids to learn about racism.“Its effectiveness created a backlash,” said Keffrelyn D Brown, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education who argues that critical race theory does have a place in classrooms. Brown said that she believes students should learn about racism in school, but that teachers need tools and frameworks to make those discussions productive.“If we are teaching this, we need to think about racism as just as robust a content area as if we were talking about discrete mathematics or the life cycle,” Brown said. “I find that critical race theory provides a really elegant and clear way for students to understand racism from an informed perspective.”But in the hands of the American right, critical race theory has morphed into an existential threat. In early January, just five days after rightwing rioters had stormed the US Capitol, the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank with close ties to the Trump administration, hosted a panel discussion about the threat of “the new intolerance” and its “grip on America”.“Critical race theory is the complete rejection of the best ideas of the American founding. This is some dangerous, dangerous philosophical poisoning in the blood stream,” said Angela Sailor, a VP of the Heritage Foundation’s Feulner Institute and the moderator of the event.“The rigid persistence with which believers apply this theory has made critical race theory a constant daily presence in the lives of hundreds of millions of people,” she added, in an assessment that will probably come as a surprise to hundreds of millions of people.The Heritage Foundation has been one of the top campaigners against critical race theory, alongside the Manhattan Institute, another conservative thinktank known for promoting the “broken windows” theory of policing.Bridging the two groups is Christopher Rufo, a documentary film-maker who has become the leading spokesperson against critical race theory on television and on Twitter. As a visiting fellow at Heritage, he produced a report arguing that critical race theory makes inequality worse, and in April the Manhattan Institute appointed him the director of a new “Initiative on Critical Race Theory”. (Rufo is also affiliated with another rightwing thinktank, the Discovery Institute, which is best known for its repeated attempts to smuggle Christian theology into US public schools under the guise of the pseudoscientific “intelligent design”.)A host of new organizations has also sprung up to spread the fear of critical race theory far and wide. The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (Fair) launched recently with an advisory board composed of anti-“woke” media figures and academics. The group is so far encouraging opposition to the grant program McConnell opposed and has highlighted a legal challenge to a debt relief program for Black farmers as a “profile in courage”.Those who take the Fair “pledge” can also join a message board where members discuss their activism against critical race theory in schools and access resources such as the guide, How to Talk to a Critical Theorist, which begins, “In many ways, Critical Theorists (or specifically Critical Race Theorists) are just like anyone.”Parents Defending Education, another new organization, encourages parents to “expose” what’s happening in their schools and offers step-by-step instructions for parents to set up “Woke at X” Instagram accounts to document excessive “wokeness” at their children’s schools.A new website, What Are They Learning, was set up by the Daily Caller reporter Luke Rosiak to serve as a “woke-e-leaks” for parents to report incidents of teachers mentioning racism in school. “In deep-red, 78% white Indiana, state department of education tells teachers to Talk about Race in the Classroom, cites Ibram X Kendi,” reads one such report. (The actual document submitted is, in fact, titled Talking about Race in the Classroom and appears to be a copy of a webinar offering teachers advice on discussing last year’s Black Lives Matter protests with their students.)Such initiatives and others – the Educational Liberty Alliance, Critical Race Training in Education, No Left Turn in Education – have received enthusiastic support from the rightwing media, with the New York Post, Daily Caller, Federalist and Fox News serving up a steady stream of outrage fodder about the threat of critical race theory. Since 5 June, Fox News has mentioned “critical race theory” by name in 150 broadcasts, the Atlantic found.For some of these groups, critical race theory is just one of many “liberal” ideas they don’t want their children to learn. No Left Turn in Education also complains about comprehensive sex education and includes a link on its website to an article suggesting that teaching children about the climate crisis is a form of indoctrination.It’s not enough to be balanced; it’s not adequate to say that we balance out criticism of the past with praise of the past. The idea is that a drop of poison is all you need to ruin the wellFor others, it seems possible that attacking critical race theory is just a smokescreen for a bog standard conservative agenda. (Toward the end of the Heritage Foundation’s January panel, the group’s director of its center for education policy told viewers that the “most important” way to fight critical race theory was to support “school choice”, a longstanding policy goal of the right.)Whatever their motives, today’s reactionaries are picking up the mantle of generations of Americans who have fought to ensure that white children are taught a version of America’s past that is more hagiographic than historic. The echoes are so strong that Adam Laats, a Binghamton University professor who studies the history of education in the US, remarked, “It’s confusing which decade we’re in.”In the 1920s and 1930s, reactionaries objected to textbooks that gave credence to the progressive historian Charles Beard’s argument that the founders’ motives were not strictly principled, but instead were influenced by economic self-interest, according to Seth Cotlar, a history professor at Willamette University.In 1923, an Oregon state government controlled by members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan enacted a law that banned the use of any textbook in schools that “speaks slightingly of the founders of the republic, or of the men who preserved the union, or which belittles or undervalues their work”. And in the 1930s, conservatives waged what Laats called a “frenzied campaign” against the textbooks of Harold Rugg, another progressive historian, that actually resulted in a book burning in Bradner, Ohio.For those supporting the resurgent Klan, “To speak ill of a founder was akin to a kind of sacrilege,” said Cotlar.Another battle over textbooks flared in the 1990s when Lynne Cheney launched a high-profile campaign against an effort to introduce new standards for teaching US history, which she found insufficiently “celebratory” and lacking “a tone of affirmation”. Harriet Tubman, the KKK, and McCarthyism all received too much attention, Cheney complained, and George Washington and Robert E Lee not enough.The decades change; the fixation on maintaining a false idea of historic figures as pure founts of virtue remains. Today, the single contention in the 1619 Project that has drawn the most vociferous outrage is author Nikole Hannah-Jones’s assertion that “one of the primary reasons” colonists fought for independence was to preserve the institution of slavery. Hannah-Jones was denied tenure by the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees, which overruled the dean, faculty and university, reportedly due to political pressure from conservative critics of the 1619 Project.“Underlying this is the never-solved dilemma about what history class is supposed to do,” said Laats. “For some people it’s supposed to be a pep talk before the game, a well of pure inspiration for young people, and I think that is why the danger seems so intense to conservatives.“It’s not enough to be balanced; it’s not adequate to say that we balance out criticism of the past with praise of the past. The idea is that a drop of poison is all you need to ruin the well.”Still, the fact that reactionaries are looking to legislate against certain ideas may be a sign of just how weak their own position is.Laats suspects that the right is using “critical race theory” as a euphemism. “You can’t go to a school board and say you want to ban the idea that Black Lives Matter.“They’ve given up on arguing in favor of indoctrination and instead say that critical race theory is the actual indoctrination,” he said of the conservative movement. “They’ve given up on arguing in favor of racism to say that critical race theory is the real racism. This campaign against the teaching of critical race theory is scary, and it’s a sign of great strength, but it’s strength in favor of an idea that’s already lost.”Or at least, so we hope.Last week I called Paweł Machcewicz, a Polish historian who has been at the center of a battle in his own country between those who want to tell the truth about the past, and those who want to weaponize history for political purposes. Machcewicz was one of the historians who uncovered evidence of Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes, and as the founding director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, he attempted to provide an accurate account of Poland’s experience in the war. The far-right ruling party, Law and Justice, deemed the museum insufficiently patriotic and fired him. The next year, the government passed legislation to outlaw accusing Poland of complicity in Nazi war crimes.“Democracy turned out to be very fragile,” Machcewicz said. “I knew history was important for Law and Justice, but it became a sort of obsession. I never thought that as a founding director of a museum of the second world war, I would become a public enemy.”“You never know what price you have to pay for independent history,” he added. “I don’t think it will ever go as far in the US as Poland, but some years ago, I also felt quite secure in my country.” More

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      The first 100 days of Biden were also the first 100 without Trump – that’s telling | Robert Reich

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      By almost any measure, Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.Two-thirds of Americans support Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined on Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6tn price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn’t feel radical.Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare – which Bill Clinton failed to accomplish and which Barack Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering – Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as preschool, public community college, paid family and medical leave, home care and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared with workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few if any social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it’s time we caught up.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s handBesides, it’s hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn’t feel scary. He’s old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He’s humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it’s clear he knows them.Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor – the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it’s unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.In his address to Congress, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first 100 days. They had been accomplished “because of you”, he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden’s proposals. Donald Trump left it with little more than a list of grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans: that Trump would have been re-elected but for fraudulent votes and a “deep state” conspiracy, that Democrats are “socialists” and that the “left” is intent on taking away American freedoms.Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he is to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump’s yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden’s. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.Trump’s giant $1.9tn tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which “trickled down”, make Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.Trump’s fierce economic nationalism has made Biden’s “buy American” initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump’s angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers’ refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes have alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump’s overt racism and overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden’s initiatives to end police brutality and “root out systemic racism”, as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.With any luck, Biden’s plans might prove to be the antidote to Trumpism – creating enough decent-paying working-class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the rightwing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury. More

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      Senate Republicans balk at plan to highlight Black history in US schools

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      Dozens of Senate Republicans have called on the Biden administration to withdraw what they say is a “divisive” proposal that would place greater emphasis on slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in history and civics lessons in US schools.The lawmakers zeroed in on the proposal’s mention of the New York Times’ Pulitzer prize-winning 1619 Project.The project, which traces US history from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in colonial Virginia, was a frequent target for the Republican right in Congress and Donald Trump, who sought instead to promote “patriotic” education.In the latest salvo of a burgeoning culture war over race, 39 Republicans, led by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said proposed education department policy would divert established school curricula toward a “politicized and divisive agenda” fixated on the country’s flaws.“Young Americans deserve a rigorous understanding of civics and American history,” the Republican senators wrote in a letter to the education secretary, Miguel Cardona, released on Friday.“They need to understand both our successes and our failures. Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us.”The proposed policy would support teaching that “reflects the breadth and depth of our nation’s diverse history and the vital role of diversity in our nation’s democracy”, according to a notice posted on a government regulation website.It would encourage schools to adopt projects that incorporate “the systemic marginalization, biases, inequities and discriminatory policy and practice in American history”.A spokesman for the US education department said institutions were acknowledging America’s “legacy of systemic inequities” and noted that the department welcomes comments on the proposal until 19 May.The Republicans’ letter came two days after Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, declared that “America is not a racist country” in his response to Joe Biden’s address to Congress. Scott also defended a Republican voting law in Georgia Democrats have denounced as a return to Jim Crow segregation.The Republican party, which remains fractured after Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, has sought to brand Biden as a divisive leader controlled by leftists. More

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      Biden is already backtracking on his promises to provide student debt relief | Astra Taylor

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      At his recent town hall, Joe Biden made a series of convoluted and condescending comments about American student debt. His remarks cast doubt on his ability, or willingness, to confront this country’s ballooning student loan crisis. Within hours, #cancelstudentdebt was trending on Twitter.Biden’s rambling justification of the status quo was peppered with straw men, invocations of false scarcity and non-solutions. He pitted working-class Americans against each other, implying that people who attend private schools aren’t worthy of relief, as though poor students don’t also attend such schools. He said that money would be better spent on early childhood education instead of debt cancellation, as if educators aren’t themselves drowning in student debt, and as if we can’t address both concerns at once. He suggested relying on parents or selling a home at a profit to settle your debt, a luxury those without intergenerational wealth or property cannot afford. And he touted various programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), that have totally failed borrowers: over 95% of PSLF applicants have been denied.In contrast to Biden’s smug comments, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley recently revealed that she defaulted on her student loans. Similarly, at a recent Debt Collective event, congressional hopeful Nina Turner said that she and her son owe a combined $100,000. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has, of course, proudly confessed to being in debt, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that becoming a congressperson was easier than paying off her debt. Philadelphia councilmember Kendra Brooks (who is planning to introduce a city resolution calling on the Biden administration to cancel all student debt) has also spoken out about her own struggles as a borrower. Their experience and candor – and commitment to real solutions including cancellation – demonstrate why we need debtors, not millionaires, in our public offices.Let’s be clear about another thing. Biden absolutely has the legal authority to use executive power to cancel all federal student debt. Congress granted this authority decades ago as part of the Higher Education Act. It’s even been put to the test: in response to the Covid pandemic, Donald Trump and his former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, used that authority three times to suspend payments and student loan interest.As he rambled on, Biden gave the distinct impression that he preferred not to have the power to do so. That way he could blame Congress should his campaign promises go unkept. (The day after the town hall, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, attempted to clarify her boss’s remarks about whether he will use executive authority to cancel student debt. She stated that the administration was still considering the possibility.)Adding to the confusion, Biden seemed unable to keep his own campaign pledges straight, muddling his student debt cancellation proposals. For the record, he campaigned on two distinct planks. One: “immediate” cancellation of $10,000 for every borrower as a form of Covid relief. Two: the cancellation of all undergraduate student loans for debt-holders who attended public universities and HBCUs and who earn up to $125,000 a year. Keeping these two promises is the absolute minimum the Biden administration needs to do to keep the public’s trust.But the Biden administration should, and can, do much more. Biden should cancel all student debt using executive authority. It is the simplest way the new administration can help tens of millions of people who are being crushed by the double whammy of unpayable loans and an economy-destroying pandemic.Yet, to date, all the Biden administration has done for this country’s 45 million student debtors is extend Trump and DeVos’s federal student loan payment suspension. Continuing a flawed Republican policy is hardly a progressive victory – especially not for the 8 million FFEL borrowers who are unconscionably left out of the moratorium.Biden owes this country debt relief not only because he campaigned on it, but because he helped cause the problem. A former senator from Delaware, the credit card capital of the world, he spent decades carrying water for financial interests and expanding access to student loans while limiting borrower protections.Biden’s brand is empath-in-chief, but on student debt he is alarmingly out of touchBiden’s record shows that he won’t address the problem without being pushed. Indeed, the fact that the president has embraced debt cancellation at all (however inadequate his proposals) is testament to ongoing grassroots efforts. The Debt Collective, a group I organize with, has been pushing for student debt abolition and free public college for nearly a decade. On 21 January, we launched the Biden Jubilee 100 – 100 borrowers on debt strike demanding full cancellation within the administration’s first hundred days. A growing list of senators and congresspeople have signed on to resolutions calling on Biden to cancel $50,000 a borrower using executive authority. (It’s worth noting that the $50,000 figure is based on outdated research. After three years of rapidly rising debt loads, the scholars behind it now recommend $75,000 of cancellation.) A growing chorus of voices from across the country and a range of backgrounds are shouting in unison: cancel student debt.Biden’s brand is empath-in-chief, but on student debt he is alarmingly out of touch. The president has shared that his own children borrowed for college and noted that he was the “poorest man in Congress” – meaning the poorest man in a body of millionaires. He didn’t question the ease with which his well-connected kids got well-compensated jobs enabling them to repay their loans, nor mention that people his age were able to go to college without being burdened by a mountain of debt. All people want today is the same opportunity that Biden and his peers had.Instead of acknowledging this generational disparity, Biden reiterated a common criticism of more generous forms of student debt cancellation – that it would help the privileged, specifically the minuscule subset of debt-holders who attended the Ivy League. But as Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response: “Very wealthy people already have a student loan forgiveness program. It’s called their parents.” As things stand, poor and working people typically pay more for the same degrees than their affluent counterparts due to years or decades of monthly payments and accumulating interest. Our debt-financed higher education system is a tax on poor people who dare pursue a better life.Imagine if, instead of defending the status quo, Biden used his platform to articulate the social benefits of cancelling student debt. He could have said that cancelling student debt will support 45 million Americans and provide an estimated trillion-dollar economic boost over the next decade and create millions of desperately needed jobs. He could have spoken about canceling student debt as a way to help close the racial wealth gap, acknowledging that Black borrowers are the most burdened, or talked about how education should be free and accessible to all if we want to expand opportunity and deepen democracy. He could have acknowledged that cancellation will help struggling seniors, especially those having their social security checks garnished because of student loan defaults. He could have mentioned that debt cancellation is popular, even among many Republicans, and that eliminating it will help his party stay in power.He didn’t say any of that, and so we have to say it. Debtors have to get organized, connecting online and protesting in the streets. We live in a period of intersecting crises. Some of them are very difficult to solve. But cancelling student debt is easy. By refusing to act, the president and his administration are choosing to perpetuate a system that causes profound, pointless, and preventable harm.Astra Taylor is the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and an organizer with the Debt Collective More

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      in Elections

      Jill Biden encourages teachers in opening address as first lady – video

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      In her first solo address as first lady, Jill Biden hosted her first solo event by praising the work of teachers and promising them support during the coronavirus pandemic.
      Biden hailed their ‘heroic commitment’ and explained that she was teaching a class on the morning of the inauguration of her husband, Joe Biden
      Joe Biden to focus on economic recovery – US politics live More

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      'Kids can handle hard truths': teachers and their students reckon with capitol attack

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      Fifteen-year-old Sevan Minassian-Godner’s brain struggled to process the images of violent, pro-Trump insurrectionists defacing the Capitol.The scene reminded the Berkeley high school sophomore of a movie, maybe the Hunger Games. Not the unbreakable idea of American democracy he’s grown up learning about from pop culture, books and Hollywood.“One thing I remember going through my mind was, how could people do this? How is it possible?” he said. “To see on live television this revolt to a fair election really opened my eyes to how just awful right now our world is getting.”From Berkeley to Milwaukee to Maryland, young people are coming to terms with last week’s violence that left five dead and a president impeached for the second time. And right alongside, teachers are having to answer thorny questions about democracy, race, policing and where the country goes from here.Many teachers say kids have been remarkably resilient and curious about the events at the Capitol. They have also noticed that many of their students of color, sadly, did not find the scene shocking.The violence has taught students some tough lessons about the America they are coming of age in – one that has normalized political division and proved time and again that all citizens are not treated equally under the law. It’s important not to shy away from these conversations in the classroom, and to place events in context, educators say.“Reactionary violence is a thread in our nation’s history,” says Oscar Ramos, a ninth-grade history and government teacher in Maryland. “When people say they don’t understand how it could happen, that’s not true. We have to be clear-eyed in the history of our country to make sense of the events for kids. I believe they can handle being entrusted with hard truths.”A lesson in inequalityFew schools may be better positioned to help students unpack the conversation than Berkeley High, located in Berkeley, California, a cradle of progressive activism where discussions about white supremacy, voter suppression and toxic masculinity are woven into the ninth-grade curriculum.As events unfolded at the Capitol, Sevan’s mom, Hasmig Minassian, who teaches the freshmen seminar, said she and co-teachers quickly pivoted from a planned lesson on gender.After starting by defining terms like coup, sedition, insurrection, domestic terrorist and treason, teachers framed the day’s class by reminding students that what they had just seen was unprecedented.Then teachers presented contrasting images: photos of Black Lives Matter protesters doused with pepper-spray by militarized police forces, juxtaposed with images of a Capitol police officer taking a selfie with a rioter, or peacefully escorting an older intruder out of the building.In the images, students took note of the fact that unlike other political movements they have studied, this one seemed mostly devoid of young people, made up of instead of older white males – people who students described as being baited into violence by the very president they trusted, Minassian said.“Kids are really attuned to the fairness of things,” she said. “Forget left or right – they’re all about sniffing out what’s fair or unfair. And I think they saw a group of people being taken advantage of by Trump, and were really curious about the punishment for breaking into the building, or Nancy Pelosi’s office, then posting photos of it.”But to Minassian, what stands out most was how most students found the events troubling, but not unexpected.“It made me a little sad to hear how unsurprised the students were. I had to pick up more adults from the floor than kids that day,” Minassian said.For students of color, she added, the differential treatment by police was a reality they already understood. “Seeing burly white men assaulting the halls of government, with representatives hiding under their desks in fear, it didn’t feel that different from what they feel just walking down the street and passing a cop. It was like: welcome to my world.”‘Don’t shy away from hard conversations’Across the country in Montgomery county, Maryland, not far from the Capitol attack, Oscar Ramos started Thursday’s discussion with historical context, reminding students that democracy wasn’t meant for people of color when the country was first founded by white men, some of them slave owners, and how racialized violence is a recurring theme in US history.That day, in fact, the class had been scheduled to discuss Black Wall Street, a thriving center of Black culture and commerce that in 1921 was looted and destroyed by a white mob in what became known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the deadliest racist attacks in US history.Ramos recalls pausing frequently as he led an open discussion about the Capitol attack, choosing words carefully so as not to alienate students whose narratives conflicted with those he presented. As a Latino teacher, Ramos worries about accusations of bias in the content he teaches. But, he said, choosing not to talk about racial violence is a form of bias, too.Janine Domingues, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute who specializes in helping children and families who have been affected by trauma, said it was important to be truthful when talking with children about the events at the Capitol, even if it means leaving out graphic details and keeping explanations simple.“For children, it’s important to check in on what they’re feeling and offer reassurance. ‘I know what you’re seeing is scary, but we’re safe right now,’” Domingues said. Children of color and those from marginalized communities may feel particularly vulnerable and targeted in the wake of racialized events, she added.Older children and teenagers may be ready for an open dialogue about what the events mean for the country, she said, though adults will still want to filter information and guide the conversation.“I think it’s a tremendous growth opportunity and a chance to give students skills for how to process what’s happening,” Domingues said. “As long as we don’t shy away from these hard conversations.”‘You have control over your actions’Those hard conversations were under way last week in the midwestern city of Milwaukee, as David Castillo, a planning assistant with the school district’s office of Black and Latino male achievement, helped lead a dialogue with the students he mentors.Castillo said students keyed in on how differently police had handled Black Lives Matter protests over the summer.“I could see the wheels turning in their heads, the cognitive dissonance that comes from recognizing the hypocrisy of that the same group that shouted ‘Blue Lives Matter’ are now attacking police,” Castillo said.“As Black and brown kids from inner-city Milwaukee, they know how law enforcement responds. It’s like: I already believed this, and now I have tangible evidence,’ he said.One fifth-grade teacher in Milwaukee, who asked not to be identified, said she was “blown away” by the level of engagement and sophistication with which her students discussed last week’s events.Part of the morning was dedicated to helping students recognize misinformation by comparing sources, a skill that she says educators have a moral obligation to equip students with. But most of the time was devoted to open discussion – one that lasted three hours.One student connected the apparent complicity by some of the Capitol police to the lack of Latino representation in textbooks. Others expressed fear, she said, asking whether the politicians in the Capitol were safe or if they had been kidnapped, or what could happen during Joe Biden’s inauguration.“I had to be honest that I shared those concerns about further conflict,” she said “I thought it would be more powerful if I was real with them.”Across town, on the city’s north side, first-grade teacher Angela Harris focused Thursday’s class on empathy and emotional regulation, using rioters’ actions as an example on how not to react.To make the discussion concrete, she tied it to the mock elections held previously in class – which Joe Biden won – and asked how they would feel if someone was so upset by the results they tore up the classroom. Students were indignant, she said. They immediately wanted to know what consequences such a person would face.Every student in Harris’s class is Black. Even at six years old, students noticed that police seemed to respond differently to the white mob than the ways they have seen cops behave in their community. Milwaukee has one of the highest incarceration rates in the US for Black men. More than half of all Black men living in Milwaukee county have been incarcerated before they reach 40, according to a 2013 study by UW-Milwaukee.“They have a fear of police even at five or six years old. It’s part of their everyday life,” Harris said. “For some of them that was the first time they might have seen white people interact with police,” she said.Harris said she didn’t dive deeply into this thread – they’ve already seen enough disparities just living in Milwaukee, she said, one of the nation’s most segregated cities – choosing instead to focus on the skills they could grow.“I want them to understand that at any moment, you have to be the one the who has control over your actions. And what happened at the Capitol is a perfect example of folks not being able to control their emotions.” More

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      Republican accuses Harvard of 'caving to the woke left' after school cuts ties

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      A Republican member of Congress claimed on Tuesday to have undergone a “rite of passage and badge of honor” and accused Harvard University of “caving to the woke left”, after she lost an advisory role for perpetuating Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York was removed from a senior advisory committee at Harvard’s school of government after she declined to resign voluntarily, according to Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Harvard Kennedy School.Hundreds of students and alumni called on Harvard to cut ties with Stefanik, a 2006 Harvard graduate, after last week’s violent insurrection at the US Capitol, which Trump incited.Stefanik was among 147 Republicans who went ahead with objections to certifying Joe Biden’s election, even after the attack left five people dead.She condemned the rioters but repeated false claims about “unprecedented voting irregularities” in the presidential election.Until Harvard took action, Stefanik was one of roughly a dozen current and former public servants on a senior advisory committee for the Institute of Politics, a program intended to get undergraduates interested in public service careers.In a statement, Stefanik said: “The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse and ultimately the student experience.”Elmendorf said the decision was not based on political ideology.“Rather, in my assessment, Elise has made public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.”Stefanik, who represents an upstate New York district, was re-elected to a fourth term in November. More

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      Columbia students threaten to withhold tuition fees amid Covid protest

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      Almost 1,800 students at Columbia University in New York are threatening to withhold tuition fees next year, in the latest signal to US academia of widespread preparedness to act on demands to reduce costs and address social justice issues relating to labor, investments and surrounding communities.In a letter to trustees and administrators of Columbia, Barnard College and Teachers College, the students said: “The university is acutely failing its students and the local community.”They accused the university of “inaction” since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, when students began demonstrating against what they say are exorbitant tuition rates “which constitute a significant source of financial hardship during this economic depression”.The letter referred to national protests over structural racism, accusing the university of failing to act on demands to address “its own role in upholding racist policing practices, damaging local communities and inadequately supporting Black students”.Emmaline Bennett, chair of the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America and a master’s student at Teachers College, told the Guardian the university and other colleges had made no effort to reduce tuition fees as they moved to remote learning models necessitated by pandemic conditions.“We think it says a lot about the profit motive of higher education, even as the economy is in crisis and millions of people are facing unemployment,” Bennett said. “This is especially true of Columbia, which is one of the most expensive universities in the US.”Demands outlined in the letter include reducing the cost of attendance by at least 10%, increasing financial aid by the same percentage and replacing fees with grants.Such reforms, the letter said, should not come at the expense of instructor or worker pay, but rather at the expense of bloated administrative salaries, expansion projects and other expenses that do not directly benefit students and workers.The university, the letter said, must invest in community safety solutions that prioritise the safety of Black students, and “commit to complete transparency about the University’s investments and respect the democratic votes of the student body regarding investment and divestment decisions – including divestment from companies involved in human rights violations and divesting fully from fossil fuels.“These issues are united by a shared root cause: a flagrant disregard for initiatives democratically supported within the community. Your administration’s unilateral decision-making process has perpetuated the existence of these injustices in our community despite possessing ample resources to confront them with structural solutions.“Should the university continue to remain silent in the face of the pressing demands detailed below, we and a thousand of fellow students are prepared to withhold tuition payments for the Spring semester and not to donate to the university at any point in the future.”A Columbia spokesperson said: “Throughout this difficult year, Columbia has remained focused on preserving the health and safety of our community, fulfilling our commitment to anti-racism, providing the education sought by our students and continuing the scientific and other research needed to overcome society’s serious challenges.”The university has frozen undergraduate tuition fees and allowed greater flexibility in coursework over three terms. It has also, it said, adopted Covid-related provisions including an off-campus living allowance of $4,000 per semester, to help with living and technology expenses related to remote learning.Columbia is not alone in facing elevated student demands. In late August, for example, students at the University of Chicago staged a week-long picket of the provost’s house as part of a campaign to disband the university police department, Chicago’s largest private force.The issue of student debt remains challenging. In a nod to progressives, President-elect Joe Biden last month affirmed his support for a US House measure which would erase up to $10,000 in private, non-federal loan debt for distressed individuals.Biden highlighted “people … having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent” and said such debt relief “should be done immediately”.Some Democrats say relief should go further. In September, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren co-authored a resolution which called for the next president to cancel up to $50,000 of outstanding federal loans per borrower.At Columbia, students say their demands for Covid-related fee reductions are only a starting point.“In the long-term, we need to reform the educational system entirely,” said Bennett. “We need to make all universities and colleges free, and to cancel all student debt to prevent enduring educational and economic inequalities.” More