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      Defeating the Dictators review: prescriptions for democratic health

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      Charles Dunst’s “aspirational” book about how democracies can do a better job of competing with autocracies is bursting with statistics and lots of common sense.The statistics are there to convince us that many autocracies spend much more sensibly than the world’s richest democracies do. A few examples:
      China has increased spending on education as a percentage of its gross domestic product by 75% since 1975.
      In 2018, 15-year-old Chinese students had the highest average scores in the world on tests for math, science and reading, followed by Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong – “none of which is a democracy”.
      Citizens of Singapore have an average life expectancy of around 84 and an infant mortality rate of two per 1,000 – “better than almost every democracy”.
      Singapore achieves that good health by spending just 4% of its GDP on healthcare – versus 17% of GDP spent in the US, which gets much less impressive results.
      Dunst’s commonsense observations include ideas like these: weak safety nets damage citizens’ confidence in their governments (and therefore should be strengthened); bad healthcare systems cost more money in the long run than good ones; and investments in infrastructure repay themselves many times over.Dunst is deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Looking at his own country, he is heartened that Joe Biden managed to push through a $1tn infrastructure bill, but then points out that’s only 1.25% of GDP, compared with the 8.5% of GDP China spent on infrastructure every year from 1992 to 2011.“China today spends more on infrastructure than the United States and Europe do combined,” Dunst writes.By spending more on things that actually matter, countries that oppress their citizens in other ways can engender remarkable levels of confidence in government.“In 2019,” Dunst writes, “nearly 90% of Chinese reported trust in their government … as did almost 70% of Singaporeans.”Practically the only good news for democracies in this story is the fact that almost every major economy faces similar declining birth rates. Most dramatically, China has gone from 2.25 children per woman in 1990 to just 1.3 today. No major economy is producing enough children to maintain its current population.At the same time, since 2017, China’s net migration rate – the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants – “has worsened every year”.China lost about 335,000 people in 2022 alone.Democracies like the US, Germany and the UK all posted positive net migration rates of at least 2.7%. These numbers support one of Dunst’s more optimistic notions. While “China and others may promise economic stability”, democracies remain attractive because they offer “more freedom, equality and opportunities to pursue happiness”.Dunst argues that one of the biggest challenges for democracies is to convince their populations of the benefits of immigration, instead of listening to politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France, who have been so successful in reviving ancient xenophobia.Dunst also thinks education systems in places like the US and Britain need to become much more democratic. At Harvard, the acceptance rate for the children of alumni is 30%, versus 6% for the general population. In 2021, “nearly a third of legacy freshmen hailed from households making more than half a million dollars”.When non-connected parents “see the underperforming children of top financiers and politicians vaunted into top schools and jobs because of connections, these parents will rebel against the system that allowed this to happen … They will vote for the would-be dictator.”Dunst thinks we must offer more scholarships “for people studying science and technology … more funding for vocational schools” and “constant skill training” for the workforce.He wisely suggests that a “key reform would be to make non-regular [American] workers eligible for high-quality health insurance that travels with them from job to job”. But he is also bizarrely opposed to universal healthcare – the kind that is the norm all over Europe. Suddenly, he sounds like a flack for a greedy pharmaceutical company, writing that such a system “could undermine the competitive attitude that makes the United States one of the world’s leaders in medical innovation”.America’s continuing failure to provide decent health insurance to its most needy citizens is hardly a spur to innovation. And the fact we are the only major democracy with a healthcare system dominated by the profit motive isn’t mentioned here at all.Dunst is almost entirely silent about the explosion of fake facts on the internet, which makes it so much more difficult to sell the commonsense ideas he pushes for. Another problem is his failure to acknowledge that America now has only one major political party that is genuinely interested in solving any of these fundamental problems, while the other prefers to cater to its base with attacks on wokeness or any prosecutor who thinks it makes sense to prosecute a former president for any of his dozens of alleged crimes.This is the fundamental problem facing American democracy now. As long as the Republicans control the House of Representatives or any other part of the government, the chances of enacting any of the proposals Dunst thinks necessary to help defeat the dictators – serious educational reform, immigration reform and additional infrastructure projects – are exactly zero. More

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      ‘Parents’ rights’: Republicans wage education culture war as 2024 looms

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      Speaking recently at a theater in Davenport, Iowa, Donald Trump marveled at the crowd’s reaction when he vowed to “bring back parental rights into our schools”. The line elicited thunderous applause – one of the loudest ovations of his nearly two-hour address.“Can you imagine what I’m doing? I’m saying, ‘Parents, you have rights’ … and the place goes crazy,” remarked the former president, who is again seeking the Republican nomination.With the 2024 election cycle looming, Republicans are leaning into the education culture wars, championing policies that they say will give parents more of a say in their children’s education, from the subjects they are taught to the books they read, with hopes of appealing to suburban voters who recoiled from the party during the Trump years. In their telling, Republicans are the defenders of America’s schoolchildren whose education is threatened by a leftwing ideology that promotes activism, racial history and gender fluidity over academic outcomes.But critics and many educators say conservatives are using the term “parents’ rights” as a guise to advance a rightwing education agenda that undermines public schools, whitewashes American history and marginalizes LGBTQ+ students.The debate took center stage in the House this week, where Republicans broke into cheers after narrowly advancing their “Parents Bill of Rights”. Friday’s vote followed a contentious 16-hour committee hearing and a bitter floor debate over the legislation, whose sponsor argued would “bring more transparency and accountability to education” and whose opponents derisively rebranded the “politics over parents act”.Democrats argued that the bill would only serve to embolden a far-right movement that has pushed book bans, restrictions on the instruction of American history and turned classrooms into “ground zero” for conservative culture wars.“This legislation has nothing to do with parental involvement,” said Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader. “It has everything to do with jamming the extreme Maga Republican ideology down the throats of the children and the parents of the United States of America.”Though the legislation has little chance of advancing in the Democratic-controlled Senate, it will serve as a rallying cry for Republicans on the campaign trail.‘A line in the sand’The origins of the “parents’ rights” movement, experts say, can be traced back to the 1925 “trial of the century” in which a Tennessee biology teacher was fined for teaching evolution in violation of state law. The term has been invoked repeatedly in the decades since, notably in clashes related to desegregation, the red scare, sex education and homeschooling.“The idea of parents’ rights is really nothing new in American politics,” said Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute who has written extensively about culture war battles in education.The present-day movement emerged in response to the upheaval sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, when extended school lockdowns led to a burst of political activism by parents who felt overwhelmed and abandoned, and by the racial justice protests that erupted in the summer of 2020, with the murder of George Floyd. Conservative politicians were quick to seize on any backlash, channeling voter frustration into a sophisticated national campaign aimed at restricting instruction on race and gender.As the presidential primary begins to take shape, the notional field of Republican hopefuls are using the education battles to distinguish themselves on an issue they believe has the potential to motivate their base.By far the most aggressive education culture warrior has been Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is widely seen as Trump’s strongest rival for the Republican nomination, though he has not formally entered the contest.“I think we have really done a great job of drawing a line in the sand to say the purpose of our schools is to educate kids not to indoctrinate kids,” DeSantis said at a recent event in Des Moines, Iowa.He has pointed to his successes in Florida, where he notably signed into law the Parental Rights in Education Act, branded by critics as “don’t say gay”, which forbids the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary grades. He also approved the “Stop Woke Act” that restricts conversations around race in schools, colleges and even private workplaces; banned transgender athletes from competing on women’s sports teams at public schools and colleges; and blocked high schools in the state from offering an Advanced Placement course on African American studies.Emboldened by his re-election victory, DeSantis is now pushing a raft of education-related proposals that would go even further ahead of an anticipated White House run.Not to be outflanked, Trump and the budding field of GOP candidates and potential contenders have also sharpened their attacks on the education system.In Iowa this month, Trump vowed to prohibit the teaching of “critical race theory”, “transgender insanity” and “any other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content” in public classrooms while calling for universal school choice, the direct election of school principals by parents and breaking up the Department of Education.Former vice-president Mike Pence, who built a reputation as a staunch social conservative and is weighing a run for president, has also staked out territory in the education wars, pushing what he calls a “parents’ rights” agenda. In Iowa last month, he stood with conservative parents as a federal appeals court considered a case involving a local school district’s policy to support transgender students.Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador who is now challenging him for the nomination, has denounced critical race theory as “un-American” and blamed leftwing ideology for fueling a culture of “woke self-loathing” she has called a “virus more dangerous than any pandemic”. And in a likely preview of the education fights to come, Haley suggested Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” law “didn’t go far enough”.‘A front-row seat’In 2021, Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the race for Virginia’s governor under the banner of “Parents matter” in a state that had been steadily trending blue offered a model for Republicans candidates across the country.“During Covid, parents for the first time weren’t just going to PTA conferences; they were literally turning their living rooms into classrooms and so they got a front-row seat to curriculum, standards, grading, teaching practices,” said Kristin Davison, a top strategist for Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign. “That awoke a number of parents across the political spectrum to demand more out of their schools.”As governor, Youngkin issued a day one executive order prohibiting the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory” from Virginia classrooms and overhauled policies related to transgender students in public schools. He also set up a tip line for parents to report teachers who raise “divisive” topics in the classroom, thought it has since been shut down.With parents and teachers continuing to grapple with the repercussions of the pandemic on students – the learning loss and mental health challenges – Davison believes the education agenda championed by Republican politicians like Youngkin, who has also been raised as a potential presidential candidate in 2024, will only become more resonant with voters.Since Youngkin’s election, the conservative campaign to expand parental control over public education has moved from contentious school board meetings to state capitols and now Congress. Over the last two years, Republican-controlled legislatures have enacted or are considering a dizzying array of new proposals limiting the instruction of what proponents deem “divisive concepts” in public schools.And this week House Republicans pressed ahead with their “Parents Bill of Rights”, a centerpiece of their midterm election campaign and a top priority for the speaker, Kevin McCarthy.The measure outlines five pillars that Republicans say will guarantee a parent’s right to scrutinize library books and classroom curricula and review school budgets, among other aspects. It would also require parents’ consent before a student is allowed to change their gender designation, pronouns or name, a provision that Democrats warned would force schools to out LGBTQ+ students to their families that may not be accepting of their identity.“Parents across this country have overwhelmingly spoken out that they have had enough,” said Julia Letlow, the Republican congresswoman of Louisiana who sponsored the bill. “They want a seat at the table because at the end of the day, these are our children, not the government’s.”‘It’s just terrible what they’re doing’Democrats say the focus on divisive cultural issues distracts from the real challenges facing American students and public education – and suspect voters will punish Republicans for it.They point to the midterms results and polling as evidence that voters are more concerned about school funding, teacher shortages, student mental health and campus safety than they are about the instruction of critical race theory, an academic framework for examining systemic racism in American institutions.A pre-election memo by the Republican National Committee last year seemed to recognize that risk and last year advised candidates to center their general election pitch on “parental rights and quality education”, as opposed to cultural attacks.And though DeSantis soared to re-election last year in Florida, several other GOP candidates for governor who pushed a socially conservative agenda lost, including in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. House Republicans failed to secure the dominating majority they predicted, while many of the “parents’ rights” activists who ran for seats on their local school board came up short, even though conservative groups poured millions of dollars into winning the once-sleepy contests.“Unless we say stupid things,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said, a reference to the debate-stage blunder by the party’s nominee for Virginia governor that many believe contributed to Youngkin’s victory, “our proactive agenda of quality education, well-paid teachers, mental health and job skills beats their agenda of transgender, CRT every single time.”Democrats believe they can offer a strong contrast. They are promoting an education agenda focused on boosting federal funding for public schools and raising teachers’ pay while expanding pre-K programs and increasing college affordability, plans that face strong Republican resistance.In the president’s State of the Union address, Joe Biden, who is expected to run for re-election, proposed two years of tuition-free community college as a way to expand access to “the best career training in America”. He also used his executive authority to forgive more than $400bn in student-loan debt, an action that enraged Republicans and some Democrats and which the supreme court appears poised to invalidate.In a recent interview, Biden criticized the flurry of legislation targeting transgender students and athletes and singled out new laws in Florida as particularly problematic.“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful,” he said. “It’s just terrible what they’re doing.”‘Peddling hysteria’For many of the teachers, parents and students caught up in the political battle of so-called parents’ rights, the impact has been disorienting and demoralizing.Public school teachers, already grappling with the impacts of the pandemic on their students’ mental health and academic achievement, are now trying to navigate a thicket of new restrictions that critics say are having a chilling effect on what they can discuss in the classroom.Educators and librarians have come under attack, inundated with conspiracy-fueled accusations that they are “grooming” students by offering books that address LGBTQ+ issues. Some have quit or retired early, exacerbating, some say, the nation’s teacher shortage.A survey by the Pew Research Center found that parents divided sharply along partisan lines when asked how their school-age children should be taught about gender identity, the legacy of slavery and whether they had enough influence over school curriculum. But some polls have found broader support for laws restricting certain instruction on gender and sexuality in elementary grades.There are areas of consensus. In general, Americans strongly oppose book bans and believe students should be taught both “the good and bad” aspects of American history. And though public attitudes on transgender rights are complex and still being shaped, especially on issues involving trans youth, Americans remain widely supportive of laws that protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.But as the debate over parental rights in education rages, LGBTQ+ students, and especially trans youth, say the efforts to place aggressive controls on their identities is harming their mental health, while LGBTQ+ parents in states like Florida reporting that they have considered moving away to protect their families.“The politicians and rightwing zealots behind this anti-LGBTQ+ movement are peddling hysteria,” said Brandon Wolf of the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, adding: “While it’s a marketing ploy for those folks, it has had real impacts on people across the state.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, denounced Republicans’ attacks on public education as a “divisive” political strategy. While it may serve Republicans on the campaign trail, she said, it was doing a “disservice” in the classroom, where teachers must prepare students for a world that is socially, culturally and technologically different than the one into which their parents graduated.“I don’t think it has anything to do with parental rights or education,” she said. “I think it’s a fear of the future.” More

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      Half a million kids out of class as LA school workers strike for better pay

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      Tens of thousands of workers in the Los Angeles unified school district, accompanied by teachers, walked off the job on Tuesday over stalled contract talks for higher pay and better working conditions, shutting down the nation’s second-largest school system.The strike, which is expected to last three days, upended the lives of more than 500,000 students and their families from schools in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, as bus drivers, cafeteria workers and teachers demanded more support at a time when educators in the city and elsewhere are struggling to afford to live where they work.The latest strike comes years after a swirl of educator activism swept across the country, from Oklahoma to Chicago to Los Angeles itself, as teachers take more aggressive labor action to compel districts to improve working conditions during contract negotiations. In 2019, tens of thousands of teachers walked out of Los Angeles schools for six days and demanded higher wages, smaller class sizes, and more support staff.This time, the Service Employees International Union, which represents about 30,000 teachers’ aides, special education assistants, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and other support staff, led districtwide demonstrations. Support workers, who earn, on average, $25,000 a year, with many living in poverty and working limited hours, have demanded a 30% pay raise and more staffing.In what Los Angeles schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho called a “historic” offer, the district has proposed a pay increase of more than 20% over multiple years, with a 3% bonus and “massive expansion of healthcare benefits”, he said on Fox 11.Despite last-minute efforts to avert the strike, talks failed. The district’s support workers, who bring students to and from school, clean schools and feed students every day, have been working without a contract since June 2020.The strike started on Tuesday morning from a bus yard, with workers chanting for better wages and increased staffing in a steady rain before dawn. Some held signs that read: “We keep schools safe, Respect Us!”The district has more than 500,000 students from Los Angeles and all or part of 25 other cities and unincorporated county areas. Nearly three-quarters are Latino.Parent Danielle Peters rallied with union members outside Hancock Park elementary school, along with her children, Jack, 10, and Ella, seven. She said it was wrong that school workers earn as little as $15 an hour, a wage Peters remembers earning for babysitting.“They are underappreciated, they are underpaid, and they have the most important job in the world,” she said of support staff. “We care about them, and this is the least we can do.”Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing 35,000 educators, counselors and other staff, pledged solidarity with the strikers.The union’s 2019 strike resulted in a contract settlement, but teachers continue to negotiate with the district after that contract expired in June 2022. Teachers are asking for a 20% pay increase over two years, more targeted support for Black students, and more housing aid for low-income families, as they frame their demands around meeting the rising cost of living in Los Angeles county and the need for increased support in the years of the Covid-19 pandemic.On Friday, the teachers union informed the district that it was terminating its contract, allowing teachers to strike alongside SEIU workers and adding pressure on ongoing negotiations.“These are the co-workers that are the lowest-paid workers in our schools and we cannot stand idly by as we consistently see them disrespected and mistreated by this district,” the UTLA president, Cecily Myart-Cruz, told a news conference.Myart-Cruz was joined by Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat and Senate candidate, who said the strikers were earning “poverty wages”.“People with some of the most important responsibilities in our schools should not have to live in poverty,” Schiff said.On the picket lines, Danielle Murray, a special education assistant, told KABC-TV working conditions had been declining every year.“We’re very understaffed,” Murray said. “The custodial staff is a ghost crew, so the schools are dirty. They’re doing the best they can.”She added: “Some people are saying, ‘If you want more money, get a better job.’ Well, some of us have bachelor’s degrees, but we choose to work with a special population that some people don’t want to work with. We want to make a difference to these students.”Superintendent Alberto M Carvalho accused the union of refusing to negotiate and said that he was prepared to meet at any time day or night. He said on Monday a “golden opportunity” to make progress was lost.“I believe this strike could have been avoided. But it cannot be avoided without individuals actually speaking to one another,” he said.Local 99 said on Monday evening that it was in discussions with state labor regulators over allegations that the district engaged in misconduct that has impeded the rights of workers to engage in legally protected union-related activities.“We want to be clear that we are not in negotiations with LAUSD,” the union said in a statement. “We continue to be engaged in the impasse process with the state.”Those talks would not avoid a walkout, the statement said.During the strike, about 150 of the district’s more than 1,000 schools are expected to remain open with adult supervision but no instruction, to give students somewhere to go. Dozens of libraries and parks, plus some “grab and go” spots for students to get lunches also planned to be open to kids to lessen the strain on parents now scrambling to find care.“Schools are so much more than centers of education – they are a safety net for hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles families,” the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, said in a statement on Monday. “We will make sure to do all we can to provide resources needed by the families of our city.”Workers, meanwhile, said striking was the only option they had left.Instructional aide Marlee Ostrow, who supports the strike, said she was long overdue for a raise. The 67-year-old was hired nearly two decades ago at $11.75 an hour, and today she makes about $16. That isn’t enough to keep pace with inflation and rising housing prices, she said, and meanwhile her duties have expanded from two classrooms to five.Ostrow blames the district’s low wages for job vacancies that have piled up in recent years.“There’s not even anybody applying because you can make more money starting at Burger King,” she said. “A lot of people really want to help kids, and they shouldn’t be penalized for wanting that to be their life’s work.” More

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      Wellesley College students vote to admit trans men and non-binary people

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      Students at the famed Wellesley College for women voted this week to extend admission to trans men and non-binary students, though campus administrators have said there is “no plan” to immediately change school policy.In a non-binding election on Tuesday, students at the liberal arts college in Massachusetts voted to open admission to all non-binary and transgender students, including trans men, reported Wellesley News, the college’s student newspaper.Wellesley’s alumni include former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, ex-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and other public figures.The proposed resolution, which will be presented to Wellesley’s board of trustees, would allow trans men to be admitted to the university. Non-binary applicants, regardless of their sex at birth, would also be considered for admission, according to the resolution approved by students.The ballot measure would also call for the university to replace gender-specific language with gender neutral language in reference to its student body, including using they/them pronouns in place of she/her pronouns, according to CNN.The admissions policy which students have voted in favor of modifying notes that anyone who identifies as a woman is eligible for admission, the college’s website says.Non-binary students “who were assigned female at birth” are currently considered eligible for admission. But trans men are not considered for admission.Students have argued that the resolution came in part because of students who transitioned in college and felt excluded by the university’s use of descriptors including “women” and “alumnae”, the Boston Globe reported.Despite the student support, Wellesley administrators have said they will not consider the ballot measure ratified by students.“Although there is no plan to revisit its mission as a women’s college or its admissions policy, the college will continue to engage all students, including transgender male and non-binary students, in the important work of building an inclusive academic community where everyone feels they belong,” Wellesley’s media relations director, Stacey Schmeidel, said.Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, spoke about the proposed question last week in an open message entitled: “Affirming our mission and embracing our community.”Johnson’s message said: “Wellesley is a women’s college that admits cis, trans, and non-binary students – all who consistently identify as women.” Johnson added that Wellesley’s being both a “women’s college and a diverse community” was not a mutually exclusive proposition.Several students were critical of Johnson’s open message, with the Wellesley News’s editorial board calling out Johnson for intervening in student discourse and neglecting to mention legislative attacks on transgender people in her broader statement.“The Wellesley News editorial board is once again stating that transgender and non-binary students have always belonged and will continue to belong at Wellesley, a historically women’s college,” the editorial board wrote in a letter.Students have previously criticized the university’s lack of inclusive language for transgender and non-binary students.Students also have urged Wellesley’s board of trustees to keep a mural featuring the transgender flag which was powerwashed in 2021.School administrators have said that they support students who transition after being admitted, noting on their website that “[once] accepted to Wellesley, every student receives the full support and mentorship of college faculty, staff, and administrators through graduation”.Wellesley currently has no data on how many transgender and non-binary students attend the college, according to the New York Times. More

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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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      Ron DeSantis’ academic restrictions show he hopes to change history by censoring it | Francine Prose

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      Ron DeSantis’ academic restrictions show he hopes to change history by censoring itFrancine ProseFlorida’s Stop Woke Act and ban on African American studies will only deprive students of the right to think and learn For some time now, conservative groups have pressured libraries and classrooms to remove certain “controversial” books from their shelves and their syllabi. These are texts that tell uncomfortable or unpopular truths about our nation’s origins, including inequality, race, history, gender, sexuality, power and class – a range of subjects that a small but vocal group of Americans would prefer to ignore or deny.Ron DeSantis bans African American studies class from Florida high schoolsRead moreThese efforts achieved one of their most notable successes last April when the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Stop Woke Act, which prohibits in-school discussions about racism, oppression, LBGTQ+ issues and economic inequity. Books that have not been officially vetted and approved must be hidden or covered, lest teachers unknowingly break an ill-defined law against distributing pornography – a felony.On 1 February, these pernicious restrictions on academic freedom spread beyond Florida, when the College Board announced its decision to severely restrict what can and cannot be taught in the newly created advanced placement class in African American studies. Cut from the curriculum (or in some cases made optional) was any discussion of Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, police brutality, queer Black life and the Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. Writers who have been removed from the reading list include bell hooks, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates.These decisions are alarming and disturbing on so many levels that it’s hard to decide which aspect is the most damaging and insidious. At risk are our foundational principles of free speech, our conviction that educators – and not politicians – should be writing up our lesson plans and deciding what transpires in our classrooms, our belief that students can (and need to) consider complicated issues.As someone who has taught for decades, I can hardly imagine abruptly cutting off class discussions that have veered (as they inevitably will) into these now forbidden areas. Must we fear that our students will report us as insurrectionists and felons for having mentioned the grotesque racial disparities in our prison populations? I believe that education not only involves the transmission of hard information but also helps students to think for themselves, to weigh opposing arguments and to make informed decisions. How can these goals be accomplished when we are being told to (quite literally) whitewash our nation’s history, to deny that we are walking on appropriated land in a country built by kidnapped and enslaved people, when we are being encouraged to lie about the very ground beneath our feet?Students aren’t as stupid as the Florida legislature seems to think, and by adopting these new regulations, we are only encouraging them to distrust their teachers and the system that so blatantly misrepresents the realities they so clearly observe around them.In the past, authoritarianism – and the indoctrination that sustains it – has used educational systems to further its agenda. We can recall images of first-graders wearing little red kerchiefs and saluting the eastern bloc dictators, of students let out of class to welcome the Führer to town. We know that democracy depends on the free and open exchange of ideas, on conversations that begin early in the life of its citizens – and that fascism thrives when only one point of view is permitted. DeSantis’s rulings, and the campaigns that have engendered them, are inherently anti-democratic.We cannot change history by censoring it. We cannot pretend that we were never a slave-holding society, that racism ceased to exist when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. We cannot erase the past, or influence a young person’s gender and sexuality by removing a book from the library. Students are not political pawns or ideologues-in-training. They are our future and it’s frightening to imagine a future populated by citizens who were forbidden to argue and debate, to hear about a historical event from multiple perspectives and to learn to make the critical judgments and necessary distinctions that will help them navigate our increasingly complex and challenging world.It’s been noted that Ron DeSantis graduated with a degree in history from Yale, where he was presumably encouraged to engage in – and to learn from – the open debates that he is now attempting to stifle. Presumably, too, he learned what a good education is, what it means to be taught to think – and that is precisely what he is denying students who are less privileged than he and his Yale classmates.It’s a political decision designed to win over the Trump supporters that the governor will need in his bid for the presidency – that is, white working-class Americans who don’t understand that their own children are also being denied the education that will help them overcome the class divisions that perpetuate our economic inequality. Private school students will still be able to study history in depth, to learn to reason, to process and assess the accuracy of what they are being told. It’s the public school kids who will be funneled into the low-paying jobs, the dim futures for which their schooling has (not accidentally) prepared them.‘We’ve moved backwards’: US librarians face unprecedented attacks amid rightwing book bansRead moreUltimately, what’s most troubling about the new restrictions and proscriptions is that historical facts are being recast as snowflake propaganda. The truth is being distorted or omitted at a moment when we, as a nation, have never so desperately needed to maintain our grip on reality.Without being taught to distinguish truth from fiction, without being asked to think, without learning how this country evolved – a history not just of heroism and noble principles but of theft, brutality and crime – our students will be easy prey to every conspiracy theory that comes along. They will find it far more difficult to imagine and implement the important ways in which we hope to become a more equitable, less racist – and better educated – society.
      Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
      TopicsLibrariesUS educationUS politicsRace in educationRaceBlack Lives Matter movementcommentReuse this content More

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      Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation

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      ReviewMyth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse marshal a fine array of historians for a bestselling assault on rightwing nonsenseThis collection of essays by 21 exceptional historians has an ambitious mission: the re-education of Americans assaulted by lies more systematically than any previous generation.‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964Read moreThe editors are two Princeton history professors, Kevin M Kruse and Julian E Zelizer. They begin with a concise history of how we reached this zenith of misinformation.The assault on truth by a right-wing “media ecosystem” began with Rupert Murdoch’s invention of Fox News, augmented in recent years by even more fantasy-based cable networks like Newsmax and One America News.The shamelessness of these sham journalists was best summarized by lawyers defending the most successful one, Tucker Carlson, in a suit accusing him of slander. The preppy anchor’s statements “cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts”, they said, because he so obviously engages in “non-literal commentary”.Another foundation of the disinformation crisis was the deregulation of broadcast by the Reagan administration, which eliminated the fairness doctrine in 1987. That simple change insured the pollution of the radio airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, creating the first echo chamber.Of course, the internet allowed these waves of lies to reach warp speed, more destructive than anything humanity has experienced. In the understated description of this volume, “the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by … Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths.”These venues have given “far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans” and allowed “ordinary Americans to spread lies to one another”, instantly. “As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political problem.”The vastness of the problem is underscored by the fact that Fox News Digital ended 2022 as “the top-performing news brand” with more than 18bn multi-platform views and an average of 82.7m monthly multi-platform unique visitors. Not to mention 3.4bn Fox News views on YouTube. It was the first time Fox had surpassed CNN in these categories since 2019.The essays in Myth America attack right-wing myths about everything from immigration to Reagan. The authors were chosen in part because they are already “actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media”.In one of the very best chapters, Ari Kelman, a professor at the University of California Davis, tackles the foundational American myth: “Vanishing Indians.” He begins with the former Republican senator Rick Santorum’s assertion in 2021 that colonists arrived with a “blank slate” because there was “nothing here”. (Santorum said he had been misunderstood but was booted off CNN nonetheless.)Kelman documents how such remarks can be traced back to myths started by the New England colonists, who “systematically erased evidence of long-standing Indigenous cultures … as a way of legitimating Euro-American land claims”. Portraying native Americans as hopelessly primitive, they “turned imperial violence into innocent virtue”.The alliance of some native tribes with the British during the War of 1812 made it even easier to marginalize them. “That Indigenous peoples might disappear” began to “look like just desserts.”A counter-narrative began in the 1880s, when Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which described “robbery” and “cruelty … done under the cloak” of 100 years “of treaty-making and treaty breaking”. Hunt described the culpability of white settlers in what we now realize was genocide: “This history of the United States government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians … convicts us, as a nation” of “having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law.”Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the 1970 book by Dee Brown which sold millions, did more than any other modern work to explain how the conquering of the west was only possible because Americans assumed “treaties could be shredded” and the slaughter of Native Americans was just part of the natural order of things.The book described a vanished Native American culture, at a moment when Native Americans had experienced enough of a resurgence to become “the nation’s fastest growing minority”. As a result, “a book written to debunk one pernicious myth unwittingly reifies another, hammering home the message that by the start of the 20th century, Indians had vanished”.Another compelling chapter, The Southern Strategy, dismantles the assertion of the conservative political scientist Carol Swain “that this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth … fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists”.Written by Kruse, the chapter traces the Republican party’s decision to embrace racism to a cross-country tour in 1951 by a South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt, who was the first to propose a merger of Republicans and southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats committed to segregation. In 1952, the Republican platform endorsed every state’s right “to order and control its own domestic institutions”.The election of the Republican John Tower to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961 made him the first Republican to enter the Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction – and showed “the segregationist vote was up for grabs”.Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend “had his suit set on fire”. The Black baseball star Jackie Robinson, a longtime Republican, declared that he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany”.Goldwater was crushed by Johnson but as well as his native Arizona, he carried South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.There is a great deal more surprising, fact-based history in these 390 pages. In an era notorious for an attention span demolished by the internet, it is buoying indeed that a volume of this seriousness has spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
      Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past is published in the US by Basic Books
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      Ex-Trump aide Sanders defends critical race theory ban as Arkansas governor

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      Ex-Trump aide Sanders defends critical race theory ban as Arkansas governor Sarah Sanders, a former Trump press secretary, says move is preventative and ‘to make sure we’re not indoctrinating our kids’ The new Republican governor of Arkansas, Sarah Sanders, said the move to ban critical race theory in public schools in her state was a preventative measure.“It’s incredibly important that we do things to protect the students in our state,” she told Fox News Sunday. “We have to make sure that we are not indoctrinating our kids and that these policies and these ideas never see the light of day.”The daughter of a former governor Mike Huckabee, Sanders is the first woman to govern Arkansas.She is also a graduate of the Trump White House, where she was the second of four press secretaries.Sanders made headlines this week when she kicked off her first term with a series of executive orders.One targeted critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans across the US have successfully used CRT used as an electoral issue despite it not being taught in most public schools.Another Sanders order banned the use in state documents of “Latinx”, defined by one expert proponent as “a gender-neutral term to describe US residents of Latin American descent”.Such opening gambits – “hyped executive orders that looked like something important but weren’t really”, according to a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette – attracted national attention.On Sunday, echoing Republican language in other anti-CRT campaigns often fueled by anger over the 1619 Project, a New York Times series that cast US history in light of the history of slavery, Sanders insisted: “We should never teach our kids to hate America or that America is a racist and evil country [when] in fact, it should be the exact opposite.”Though Axios and other outlets responded to Sanders’ CRT order by reporting that CRT was not taught in Arkansas schools, Huckabee said: “Our job is to protect the students and we’re going to take steps every single day to make sure we do exactly that.“And that’s the reason I signed the executive order. I’m proud of the fact that we’re taking those steps and we’re going to continue to do it every single day that I’m in office.”Sanders’ host, Shannon Bream, asked if teachers in Arkansas could “still have the uncomfortable conversations about the sins of our past, about the things this country has gotten wrong”.Sanders said: “Our teachers absolutely need to teach our history but they shouldn’t teach our kids and our students ideas to hate this country and to give a false premise about who we are and what we’re about. And that is something that we have to make sure we protect our students from.”Speaking to Axios this week, Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said: “Much of the debate around critical race theory is as much a distraction as it is a strategy.”Johnson said the NAACP believes “accurate history is the history that should be taught”.TopicsArkansasDonald TrumpUS politicsUS educationRepublicansRacenewsReuse this content More