Book banning and racism

“The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it,” writes professor Ibram X. Kendi. That is the essence of antiracism: the action that must follow both emotional and intellectual awareness of racism", Ibram X. Kendi, ​Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.

Following is an echo essay published in The Washington Post written by Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies education at NYU.

Politicians dictating what teachers can say about racism will prove to be dangerous, as evidenced in the information reported in this essay.

College student essays from 1961, underscore why our current trajectory could be devastating.

The reactionary nostalgia evoked by TFG, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan has taken on a new dimension: a push to censor what gets taught in America’s history classrooms.

New laws in red states — and even some purple states — aim to ban the teaching of critical race theory, and one district in Tennessee has even banned a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust.

As one student wrote 30 years after finishing his segregated education in Georgia, from elementary school through high school, “there was not a single instance — not one — in which any of the teachers initiated, even allowed a discussion about racism.” Instead, teachers and textbooks presented U.S. history as the triumph of democracy. Any serious engagement with slavery, Jim Crow or even the Black experience got excluded from what historian Nathan Huggins has termed America’s “master narrative.”
But without these discussions, White students never bothered to ask themselves why their towns had separate Black and White water fountains, waiting rooms, bus stations and more. Instead, they saw bigotry, in the words of one of those students decades later, as “just the way things were, and would always be.”

Civil rights demonstration in a NAACP Detroit branch PARADE FOR VICTORY, 1944. Six African American men in top haps and tails, carry a coffin with the sign, HERE LIES JIM CROW. During World War II, African Americans fought for their 'Double Victory,' one abroad and one at home.

This lack of knowledge about Jim Crow* policies, racism and the South’s past left children and young adults with skewed perceptions. Nowhere was this clearer than in 35 essays written by White undergraduates at UGA less than a week after a segregationist riot erupted Jan. 11, 1961, outside the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students to desegregate the university and the first to live on campus. These essays came from a surprising place: A calculus professor, who was one of the faculty members who belatedly stood up to the campus’s belligerent segregationists after witnessing their racist violence, asked his students to reflect on the riot and UGA’s desegregation crisis.

These moves are a throwback to the right wing’s idea of an educational golden age — the period before the civil rights movement transformed American education. That period reminds us that such political actions can have a chilling effect on teachers’ willingness to teach about race and racism. And a lack of education on these topics can have devastating consequences, something that was on display at the University of Georgia in 1961.

What did education look like on the White side of the color line in the Jim Crow South?

As one student wrote 30 years after finishing his segregated education in Georgia, from elementary school through high school, “there was not a single instance — not one — in which any of the teachers initiated, even allowed a discussion about racism.” Instead, teachers and textbooks presented U.S. history as the triumph of democracy. Any serious engagement with slavery, Jim Crow or even the Black experience got excluded from what historian Nathan Huggins has termed America’s “master narrative.”

But without these discussions, White students never bothered to ask themselves why their towns had separate Black and White water fountains, waiting rooms, bus stations and more. Instead, they saw bigotry, in the words of one of those students decades later, as “just the way things were, and would always be.”

This lack of knowledge about Jim Crow policies, racism and the South’s past left children and young adults with skewed perceptions. Nowhere was this clearer than in 35 essays written by White undergraduates at UGA, less than a week after a segregationist riot erupted Jan. 11, 1961, outside the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students to desegregate the university and the first to live on campus. These essays came from a surprising place: A calculus professor, who was one of the faculty members who belatedly stood up to the campus’s belligerent segregationists after witnessing their racist violence, asked his students to reflect on the riot and UGA’s desegregation crisis.

The essays confirmed that students lacked a formal education on issues related to race — only two of them mentioned any educational institution influencing their ideas on the topic.

The substance of the essays also made clear that most White UGA students had learned nothing in school to challenge white-supremacist assumptions based in myths and falsehoods. 

Crude stereotypes of Black inferiority pervaded the most strongly segregationist essays: “The Negro has a lack of ambition. He does not have the desire to work and better himself,” read one essay. It also claimed that African Americans did not have “the morals we have,” nor were they “as physically clean as whites.”

Another student noted, “I personally do not desire to associate” with Blacks because they “have a low moral standard.” The student’s “evidence” to support this claim? Stereotypes about how Black Americans had “their brand new Cadillac standing in the yard of their one room tennant [sic] home (neither paid for yet).” The student also cited purported criminality among African Americans to justify their view.

Students also invoked pseudoscience — picked up from racist family members, friends and the rhetoric of white-supremacist organizations and politicians — to support segregation. One student did not want integration because, they claimed, “the Negroid race” was “inferior to the Caucasian race … The Negro has an average one eighth more bone thickness on his skull. This leads one to believe that the Negro has not come as far through evolution as the White Man.”

Finally, the students trafficked in sexual stereotypes that had long been a staple of white-supremacist propaganda. As one student put it: “In college I feel that women will be protected better if they don’t have to dodge colored boys.” Such racist fears of Black men as sexual predators had deep roots in the South, and white supremacists had used them to justify horrific vigilantism, lynchings and the enactment of anti-miscegenation laws.

The students also lacked even a rudimentary knowledge of the civil rights movement, which was barely mentioned in their high school history textbooks. Collectively, the 35 essays cited only one civil rights organization: the NAACP.

Even the students who mentioned the NAACP fretted that the organization was “communist infiltrated” and part of a communist plot to “break up the United States.” These fears had no basis in fact. The NAACP was a legalistic organization that was far more moderate tactically than the direct action-oriented wings of the civil rights movement that were growing in prominence in 1961. Instead, these claims parroted the propaganda of segregationist politicians trying to discredit the civil rights movement. The students proved historically illiterate about the movement’s leadership as well: Not one of the essays mentioned a single civil rights movement leader or named any African American.

All 35 essays displayed a racially bound parochialism. Even students who were not overtly racist displayed a total inability to understand, even to care, about how those on the Black side of the color line experienced life. The essays displayed an unmistakable lack of empathy when the students wrote about UGA’s desegregation crisis.

White student mobs had hung effigies of Black students, marched behind a banner deploying a racial slur to tell Hunter and Hamilton Holmes — the university’s other pioneering Black student — to “go home” and rioted. Yet the student essay writers depicted themselves as the victims of the situation. As one essayist explained, “Many students, parents, and Georgians feel hurt because our federal government has shown that it … can force people to do things which we dislike.” The student thought that UGA students “as citizens should have a right to go to segregated schools.”

“I am mad,” another student wrote, that an integrationist “federal government took away state’s rights.” The student thought the decision “does not make up a democracy [sic].”

Such rhetoric echoed that of segregationist politicians, whose pious phrases about federalism and states’ rights (for White people) obfuscated state wrongs, namely the reality that the Jim Crow system of legally ordained racial discrimination reduced Blacks to second-class citizens. Media interviews with White UGA students about the crisis led Bruce Galphin of the Atlanta Constitution to complain that UGA’s faculty had not challenged the white-supremacist misconceptions that their students had brought with them to college: He wondered what the students “have been studying at the university” because their “only tutors in political science” appeared to have been “extremist politicians.” The students kept “spewing up” clichés and buzzwords like “judicial tyranny” and “socialism.”

Even Galphin, however, did not mention, the reason even liberal professors and teachers avoided challenging such segregationist assumptions in their Georgia classrooms. They lacked the academic freedom to teach about racial integration. It was, as one UGA professor put it, “dangerous” to discuss the issue because doing so put their jobs at risk. That was clear after Georgia’s governor attacked and fired UGA’s education school dean “for just hinting that one day integration would come to the South.”

These efforts parallel some of the most extreme situations in 2022.

In some states, teachers have lost their jobs for even dabbling in anti-racist education, and Virginia’s new Republican governor recently established a hotline for turning in teachers who promote “divisive practices.”

But the UGA student essays underscore the dangers of such practices. Because schools did not address or teach about racism or its history, it freed far-right politicians, parents, families and friends to school even the brightest and most capable young White Georgians in racial bigotry.

While red-state America in 2022, is far different from Georgia in 1961, this history provides a stark warning: When schools cannot encourage candid study, and critical thinking about racism and anti-Blackness, it leads to the propitiation of the bigotry that has long plagued American society.

*Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race.

Senator Marsha Blackburn is an Idiot fan club! Just click "like"!

Taaaa-daaaa! I was delighted to find a social media page titled "Marsha Blackburn is an Idiot". Check it out!

Bennett cartoon published in the Chattanooga Times Free Press 

So, my series about Blackburn's incompetence is not an original idea! I'm glad to be like minded with 300 plus people who support the Marsha Blackburn is an Idiot social media page with "like".

This blog is my own first in a series of echoes titled "Blackburn is an Idiot", or "BIAI".  In my opinion, Blackburn's wrong-minded supporters are zealots who practice snake worshipping, believe the earth was created in seven days, aka, "creationists" and that evolution never happened (reference Scopes Monkey Trial*).  These weird constituents are the right wing Tennessee idiots who elected BIAI. Unfortunately, she has delivered for them.  In other words, "Stupid Is As Stupid Does", or #SIASD is the BIAI slogan.

Following is an opinion echo, published in the Williamson Herald, in Franklin, Tennessee.  A ray of BIAI hope beams from this opinion. At least, some Tennesseans are not among Blackburn's weird BIAI cult. 

Letter to the Editor: Disgusted by Blackburn

It is deeply disturbing to be reminded that our state of Tennessee is represented in the U.S. Senate by someone so willing to fan the political flames that keep our country divided by writing propaganda.

 
Please allow me to fact check BIAI, to correct the falsehoods she spews in her op-ed articles. 

In fact, contrary to her uninformed position, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has not been taught in Tennessee's public schools. Furthermore, what BIAI claims as “the left”, are not making an effort at “brainwashing” kids or “shaming” white children in our state/country’s schools. 

Moreover, CRT does not actively encourage discrimination, nor does it “segregate people into two main categories: oppressors or victims.”

Check out the best selling book "How to be an Anti Racist" by Ibram M. Kendi.

CRT “at its core” (to borrow Mrs. Blackburn’s words) IS about understanding inequality and racism in America and encouraging debate about how it should be addressed. It IS based on the idea that racism is a part of our everyday lives as it is embedded into our legal systems and policies. And, as such, people who do not intend to be racist may, inadvertently, make choices that fuel racism.

It is about outcomes, not only individuals’ own beliefs. And, it calls for these outcomes to be studied and rectified. Clearly, there is much room for debate about how outcomes can be rectified, but we should welcome such debate, not stymie it. We need to broaden our children’s world view, not narrow it.

Mrs. Blackburn points out the voice she hears from only one parent (but, of many other idiots, I’m sure). Yet there are also many parents who believe — as my wife and I do — that our kids are very capable of critically considering many ideas. We believe it is important that they are exposed to these kinds of ideas and that they should be encouraged to consider the implications of our history, both the good and the bad, including how it has informed both our historical and current laws and policies. This is why we are so concerned by the law recently passed, in Tennessee (SB 0623: Tennessee passes bill to withhold funding for schools teaching about systemic racism)
and by propaganda like Mrs. Blackburn (aka #BIAI) is spreading.

Parents need to show up at school board meetings to protest this discriminatory bill. But we need to show up to make sure that our kids are allowed to learn about institutionalized racism. 

We need to make sure our school board members understand that we know this teaching does not imply that white kids are demonized. Rather, we believe it is important that our kids are allowed to consider ideas in a broader context. Our kids are very capable of critically considering these kinds of ideas, and they need to be given the opportunity to do so.

Sincerely,

Tony Caudill,  in Franklin, Tennessee

*A misdemeanor, punishable by fine in Tennessee, to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible....

It's time to formally launch the #BIAI fan club! 

https://www.facebook.com/MarshaBlackburnIsAnIdiot

Exposing Racism - Donald Trump is a big and evil racist problem

Donald Trump enabled racism. In my opinion, racism is the insidious manifestation of evil.

Exposing racism

Dear Editor : 

Thanks extend to columnist Michelle Singletary, for courage and devotion to helping readers understand the devastating effects of racism (“Not all readers yet get ‘racism,’ ” Dec. 20). 

In fact, it takes guts to keep at it, as she has, and I want her to know, there are many readers who are appreciative of her efforts and appreciated The Press Democrat, a newspaper, for printing her columns.

As a middle-aged white woman, I can’t know what it is to experience racism. Yet, reading and listening to Singletary and other people of color can help me and like-minded allies understand how racism affects every part of life and how to be better advocates.

It falls upon all of us to help spread the word, to shine a light on racism and to show support, especially in the face of negative responses and attacks. The fact that these exist as much as they do, indeed at all, shows us we still have much work to do.

From Irene Barnard, in Santa Rosa, California 

Racism and Antiracism - echo excerpt

As a professional nurse, I believe this excerpt from the book "How To Be An Antiracist" matches with my understanding about the sociology of medicine, and how racism is a public heath risk for poor health and early death. 

This blog is an echo excerpt from the book by Author Ibram X. Kendi.  His concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

In his memoir, Kendi weaves together an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science--including the story of his own awakening to antiracism--bringing it all together in a cogent, accessible form. He begins by helping us rethink our most deeply held, if implicit, beliefs and our most intimate personal relationships (including beliefs about race and IQ and interracial social relations) and reexamines the policies and larger social arrangements we support. How to Be an Antiracist promises to become an essential book for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step of contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.

Kendi wrote (p. 21-22) this autobiographical segue to the data he presents that correlates race with poor health and life expectancy:

I am one generation removed from picking cotton for pocket change under the warming climate in Guyton, outside of Savannah, GA.  That's where we buried my grandmother in 1993. Memories of her comforting calmness, her dark green thrum, and her large trash bags filled with Christmas gifts lived on as we drove back to New York from her funeral.  The next day, my father ventured up to Flushng, Queens, to see his single mother, also named Mary Ann. She had the clearest dark-brown skin, a smile that hugged you and a wit that smacked you.

When my father opened the door of her apartment, he smelled the fumes coming from the stove she'd left on, and some other fumes.  His mother was nowhere in sight, he rushed down the hallway and into her back bedroom. That's where he found his mother, as if sleeping, but dead.  Her struggle with Alzheimer's, a disease more prevalent among African Americans, was over.

There may be no more consequential White privilege than life itself. White lives matter to the tune of 3.5 additional years over Black lives in the United States, which is just the most glaring of a host of health disparities starting from infancy, where Black infants die at twice the rate of White infants. But, at least my grandmother and I met, we shared, we loved. I never met my paternal grandfather. I never met my maternal grandfather, Alvin, killed by cancer three years before my birth. In the United States, African Americans are 25 percent more likely to die of cancer than Whites. My father survived prostate cancer, which kills twice as many Black men as it does White men. Breast cancer disproportionately kills Black women.

Three million African Americans and four million Latinx, secured health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), dropping the uninsured rates for both groups to around 11 percent before President Barack Obama left office. But, a staggering 28.5 million Americans remained uninsured, a number primed for growth after the Republican Congress repealed the individual mandate in 2017. And, it is becoming harder for people of color to vote out of office the politicians crafting these policies designed to shorten their lives.  Racist voting policy has evolved from disenfranchising by Jim Crow voting laws to disenfranchising by mass incarceration and voter-ID laws. Sometimes these efforts are so blatant that they are struck down: North Carolina enacted one of these targeted voter-ID laws, but in July 2017, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck it down ruling that its various provision "target African Americans with almost surgical precision." 

Nevertheless, others have remained and been successful. In fact, Wisconsin's strict voter-ID law suppressed approximately two hundred thousand votes- again primarily targeting voters of color, in the 2016 election. Donald Trump won that critical swing state by 22,748 votes.  

In Maine Writer's  summary about the above excerpt: Race and politics and health share a negative correlation for people of color. Data demonstrates how people of color are obstructed from voting for the people who could improve their human condition.