[Republicans are rallying behind racist pedagogy as an organizing
principle. ]
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US FASCISM IS SPREADING UNDER THE GUISE OF “PATRIOTIC EDUCATION”
 
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Henry A. Giroux ,
April 10, 2023
Truthout
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_ Republicans are rallying behind racist pedagogy as an organizing
principle. _

Great Oak High School students leave campus in protest of the
district's ban on "critical race theory" curriculum at Patricia H.
Birdsall Sports Park in Temecula, California, on December 16, 2022.,
WATCHARA PHOMICINDA / THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE VIA GETTY IMAGES

 

The relentless state-based attacks on Black people in the U.S.
and the war being waged against public and higher education
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not unrelated.

In the present political and ideological climate, far right political
leaders, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick
and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) have declared a war on institutions of
public and higher education, which they’ve identified as centers of
“unpatriotic education.” Most far right Republicans fear higher
education as a xxxxxx against their authoritarianism and hence see
students as a threat to their propaganda machines and fascist
politics. As a result, the right wing has kicked into overdrive in an
attempt to target educational institutions as a site for policing
dissent, eliminating unions
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indoctrinating faculty and students, and for normalizing white
Christian nationalism, white supremacy and pedagogies of repression.

We have seen this in Ron DeSantis’s efforts to take over
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progressive New College of Florida and turn it into a haven for white
Christian education. DeSantis wants to remodel New College after the
reactionary Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts
college that Kathryn Joyce states
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played a “far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas
and strategies that power the right.”

It’s clear that the far right GOP has deemed education to be the
most powerful tool for creating a public that is neither informed nor
willing to struggle to keep a democracy alive. This is particularly
evident in the right-wing war on education, which aims at replacing
public education with charter schools, fashioning public and higher
education into centers of far right indoctrination, and destroying
higher education as a democratic public good. Central to such an
attack is a war on critical thinking, troubling knowledge, historical
memory and any form of education that address social problems.
Extremists in the GOP fully embrace both white nationalism and white
supremacy while simultaneously supporting a culture and society in
which the distinction between lies and the truth disappear. What they
would also like to see disappear in their reign of domestic terrorism
are the educators, institutions, and other public spaces that resist
this ongoing tsunami of authoritarian ideas, acts of repression, and
war on critical intellectuals, dissidents and educators.

What the far right GOP politicians fear about education is that it is
the one site where young people learn the responsibilities of being
critical and engaged citizens. As Moira Donegan argues, education at
all levels “are foundational to democracy and this is the reason why
DeSantis and the far right are attacking education.” She writes
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Schools and universities are laboratories of aspiration, places where
young people cultivate their own capacities, expose themselves to the
experiences and worldviews of others, and learn what will be required
of them to live responsible, tolerant lives in a pluralist society. It
is in school where they learn that social hierarchies do not
necessarily correspond to personal merit; it is in school where they
discover the mistakes of the past, and where they gain the tools not
to repeat them. No wonder the DeSantis right, with its fear of
critique and devotion to regressive modes of domination, seems to
hostile to letting kids learn: education is how kids grow up to be the
kinds of adults they can’t control.

Authoritarian societies firmly embrace the notion that history is
written by the victors. In doing so, they wage a war on historical
memory as part of an effort to not only control historical knowledge
particularly in relation to Black and Indigenous people, but also to
disguise dominant power relations in acts and policies that produce a
“diligent and continual silencing
[[link removed]] …
required to maintain its claims on the present and future.” As
whiteness is increasingly secured through voter suppression, border
enforcement, gerrymandering and state violence, far right politicians
and their allies have expanded their repressive pedagogical mechanisms
of discipline and economic measures of control to include cultural
apparatuses such as social media platforms, as well as public and
higher education.

It is the attempt on the part of the GOP to control historical
knowledge and extinguish democratic freedoms in the service of rampant
white nationalism and white supremacy that fuels the attack on public
and higher education and its dirty war against racialized populations.
There is more at stake here than putting up barriers to the
development of critical thinking and the fostering of a radical
imagination among students. The fascist politics at work is more
expansive and destructive, and has become the bedrock strategy to
transforming public and higher education into citadels of repression
and white supremacist disimagination machines.

It is an ongoing project designed to define whiteness as a totalizing
tool of domination, which is used to enact pedagogical practices that
prevent Black and Brown students from learning from the trajectory of
history. As Angela Davis observes
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it is an attempt to prevent all students from understanding the
“nature of U.S. history and the role that racism and capitalism and
heteropatriarchy have played in forging that history.” Teaching
critically about race denotates a history that exposes dangerous
memories, reveals acts of resistance that have been consigned to
oblivion, and reveals the manifold wrongs of a society that allows for
the domestication of the unimaginable.

THE MASS PRODUCTION OF MANUFACTURED IGNORANCE

The far right endeavors to mass produce historical and social amnesia
and manufactured ignorance. A passive and depoliticized citizenry is
now coupled with an accelerating struggle to destroy any public
institution that would challenge such efforts. In addition to
right-wing policies that disparage anti-racist pedagogy, silence
cultures of questioning, and smother independent thinking by
associating the latter with socialist ideals, there is also an attempt
to remove the intellectual and institutional conditions in which
historical memory, critical education, and civic literacy inform each
other as part of the broader goal of creating informed and engaged
citizens. Central to this repressive pedagogical project is an attempt
to squelch memory and freeze history to domesticate thought and turn
historical amnesia into a weapon of miseducation.

In this attack by the assassins of history, memory and truth, there is
an erasure of the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism
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the Black Power movement, Black Panthers, and the political and racist
conditions that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. There is
more at work here than a right-wing push to rethink the legacies of
slavery and anti-racist struggles; there is also a concerted effort to
ban any attempts to teach Black children the truth about their
history. As Marian Wright Edelman notes in her comments on Carter G.
Woodson, the son of a formerly enslaved person, Woodson was clear
about white people refusing to teach Black students about their
rightful place in history, and about how the stakes in these debates
involved “more than an academic discussion.”

She writes
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“He saw the connection between erasing Black history and assaulting
Black bodies and said the crusade to teach the truth about Black
history was even ‘much more important than the anti-lynching
movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in
the schoolroom. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that
everybody is taught to regard as inferior?’”

What also disappears in this right-wing indoctrination project are
elements of the long war on Black people waged by both Republicans and
Democrats. These would include the rise of the Southern Strategy,
Richard Nixon’s racially motivated war on drugs, Ronald Reagan’s
disparaging of so-called welfare queens, Bill Clinton’s racist and
punishing welfare and incarceration policies, and Donald Trump’s
relentless demonization of migrants and Black people. Moreover, the
myriad achievements, struggles, resistance and culture produced by
Black people over 400 years is either erased or trivialized
[[link removed]].
How else to explain the current right-wing attempt to censor,
disparage and ban the 1619 Project from being used in public schools?
How else to explain right-wing attempts to ban books by and about Rosa
Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Bridges, Angela Davis, Audre
Lorde, June Jordan, Robin D.G. Kelley, and other prominent African
Americans?

How else to explain the campaign by Governor DeSantis and attempts by
Florida’s Department of Education to ban a new Advanced Placement
African American Studies course because it included “woke education
masquerading as education” and “lacks educational value”?
DeSantis makes his case for disparaging the A.P. course by citing as
propaganda the work of a range of notable African American writers,
including bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others. Moreover, it is
hard to take seriously DeSantis’s charge that the A.P. course lacks
educational value when it includes work by the famed literary scholar
Henry Louis Gates Jr., historian Nell Irvin Painter, and Black icons
such as Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. As Janai
Nelson notes
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York Times_, “This disturbing pattern of silencing Black voices and
aggressive attempts to erase Black history is one of the most visible
examples of performative white supremacy since the presidency of
Donald Trump.” Jelani Cobb adds insightfully to this critique
by insisting
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DeSantis and the Florida education department want the public to
believe “that the evils of the past are not nearly as dangerous now
as the willingness to talk about them in the present.”

THE RIGHT IS WAGING A STATE-BASED WHITE SUPREMACIST ASSAULT

The right wing in the U.S. is now waging a battle against the
histories, memories and social institutions that make democracy
possible. It is a war against the development of an educated public
for the present and future, especially from the ranks of people of
color. At the heart of this war is a project of indoctrination that
views “dangerous” memories and critical thought as anti-American.
Central to this dirty war is an attack on historical consciousness as
the foundation of critical thinking, the civic imagination and
empowered forms of political agency. Its core organizing idea is the
suppression of Black history and the teaching of anti-racist
practices. What is called anti-woke by right-wing politicians and
pundits is nothing less than an attempt by white supremacists and
nationalists, in the words of James Baldwin, to barricade themselves
“inside their history
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historical racism and attack on memory is a part of a larger political
strategy the right-wing self-proclaimed “culture warriors”
enthusiastically promote as their “culture wars.” The historian
Jason Stanley, writing in _The Guardian_
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argues that right-wing “cultural warriors” who conduct a
“culture war” that whitewashes history, bans ideas and censors
books is nothing less than naked fascism.

This initial “anti-woke” ideology was unapologetically articulated
by former President Trump, who made his ongoing support for white
supremacy clear when he claimed
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March 2022 that keeping critical race studies “out of our schools
… was a matter of national survival.” Trump is worth quoting given
his merging of racism and McCarthyite, anti-communist rhetoric: “We
have no choice. The fate of any nation ultimately depends on the
willingness of its citizens to lay down and they must do this — lay
down their very lives to defend their country. … If we allow the
Marxists and commies and socialists to teach our children to hate
America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect
our great country or its freedom.”

Since 2020, the white supremacist assault on Black history,
anti-racist pedagogy and social justice issues have moved from the
White House to a state-based strategy — most visible in the
educational policies put into play in a number of GOP-controlled
states. One striking (if not scandalous) example is evident in
DeSantis’s aim to mold human agency by turning schools into dead
zones of the imagination. DeSantis’s regressive policies extend far
beyond preventing the A.P. course on African American history from
being used in his state. As is well known, DeSantis’s war on
critical education, anti-racist pedagogy, African American history,
and curricula that include knowledge about trans people has been as
aggressive as it is extensive — and always with a whiff of
high-drama political theater, which makes clear that the discourses of
racial hatred and white nationalism contain valuable political
currency. DeSantis has brought selective elements of Jim Crow back
without apology and in doing so, has focused on policies that erase
history through the imposition of censorship and a form of apartheid
pedagogy that constitutes a form of anti-memory that refuses to hold
racial injustice to account. Under DeSantis, the politics of
disappearance emerges as a set of take-no-prisoners policies that
combine censorship, the demonization of educators and full-fledged
attacks on public and higher education. It also entails the
criminalization of teachers who engage matters of racial injustice,
forcing professors to take loyalty oaths, and the enactment of
politics of silencing aimed at erasing trans people from the
historical record, books and curricular materials. DeSantis’s
“Don’t Say Gay Bill” forces teachers to be silent about sexual
orientation and gender identity issues while using his office to
baselessly target and label people who oppose this bill as pedophiles.
Meanwhile, in Texas, there are GOP calls to criminalize anyone who
provides care for trans people.

There is more at work here than enforced ignorance; there is also a
culture of cruelty that makes societal pariahs out of LGBTQ youth
while doing irreparable harm to their parents, teachers and
caregivers. This is unadulterated hatred
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behind the fake respectability of the law. Will Bunch, the talented
writer for _The Philadelphia Inquirer_, is right in stating
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the “violent, expanding war on LBGTQ kids” by DeSantis and other
Republican lawmakers “should make you think about 1930s Germany.”

DeSantis’s war on academic freedom, critical pedagogy, troubling
knowledge and dangerous memories is also evident in his ludicrous
“Stop Woke Act,” which restricts teachers from talking about
racial inequality, systemic racism, civil rights struggles, slavery,
and any other issue regarding racial justice that might make students
uncomfortable, as if how they feel is the ultimate measure of teaching
them to be informed and critical citizens. Paul Krugman, writing
in _The_ _New York Times_
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right in stating that in reality, it appears that DeSantis and his
Republican allies want to ban anything “that makes right wingers
uncomfortable.” DeSantis has banned math books he claims are
politically offensive, passed a bill requiring that teachers remove or
cover up books from classrooms that have not been approved by a state
compliance censor, used public school funds to expand charter schools,
attacked public schools as crucial civic institutions, and waged a
full-scale war on democratic values and social relations.

Barbara Ransby is laser-sharp in arguing that DeSantis’s attack on
critical education and his support for white nationalism and
authoritarianism “stands in the tradition of practices we have seen
in the fascist past that have remerged in the present.” She is
worth quoting at length
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In this way, DeSantis and his allies uphold the kind of indoctrination
he claims to oppose. He stands in the tradition of the Nazis who
burned books for fear that their antisemitic lies would be challenged
in print. He stands in the tradition of the 1976-1983 Argentinian
dictatorship that jailed and exiled dissident professors and killed
their students. He stands in the tradition of Turkey’s dictator
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has purged, jailed or exiled over 100,000
educators and intellectuals because they wrote and taught ideas he saw
as a political threat. DeSantis’s dangerous actions are textbook
proto-fascist measures. His militant opposition to any teaching of the
Black freedom struggle is also reminiscent of the South African
apartheid regime’s book banning and curricular and speaker
censorship, which limited the circulation of ideas that could
undermine the legitimacy of an unjust system.

At the heart of the “Dirty War” being waged against marginalized
groups in the U.S. is an attack on historical consciousness that not
only connects the past to the present, but also provides in the memory
work essential for understanding the repressive nature and structural
forces at work in the war against Black people, women, LGBTQ people,
and others relegated to the category of disposable. The right wing’s
declared war on democracy is rooted in a politics of disappearance in
which history is shredded and matters of truth, evidence and moral
witnessing are erased. Subjectivity is the material of politics, and
uncovering alternative histories is not simply a pedagogical task, but
a crucial tool in creating political agents capable of remembering the
horrors of a past that cannot be repeated.

When the racist history of the past disappears, and when educators who
teach critical ideas are criminalized, structural racism becomes
invisible and racist acts become individualized as a matter of
attitude and faulty character. When racism is reduced to alleged
self-inflicted behaviors, people blame themselves for their feelings
of inadequacy, impoverishment and alleged deficits, making it all the
more difficult to translate and understand individually experienced
acts of racism as part of a larger system of racial capitalism
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The fascist plague that is now shaping public and higher education
needs to be addressed with a new language that makes education central
to politics and historical consciousness. Such a language needs to
make the politics of remembering a crucial pedagogical tool in
changing the way people connect events, rethink the present political
conjuncture, and understand the history of the present
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_Henry A. Giroux [[link removed]] currently holds the
McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in
the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire
Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy._

_Copyright © __Truthout_ [[link removed]]_._ Reprinted
with permission. May not be reprinted without permission.

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* Education
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* teaching history
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* censorship
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* Republican distortion
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* Racism
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