With an onslaught of state-level efforts to restrict voting rights, a revitalized congressional debate over citizenship qualifications, and a violent, attempted insurrection, the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. election cycle is startlingly reminiscent of the American historical Reconstruction period. Yet, in the wake of sponsoring these anachronistic efforts to target and disenfranchise racial minorities, many conservatives have simultaneously waged a vocal battle against the teaching of history that would inform students why such efforts can be so dangerous. Education shapes our national historical memory and has a powerful influence on how we perceive the rights and responsibilities of our country today; therefore, this new wave of conservative-led efforts to censor and control historical education is not only misguided, but can produce harmful real-world consequences.
Political attempts to warp historical and scientific narratives are a recurring phenomenon in American life. The persistence of the Lost Cause is perhaps the most prominent example of the tremendous influence that state-level education programs can have on enduring historical memory. The Lost Cause ideology emerged following the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Its central tenets included the deification of Confederate leaders, the glorification of a noble southern intent, and most notably, the idea that the Civil War was fundamentally a dispute not over slavery, but over state sovereignty in the face of oppressive industrial, federal power. Other examples of political curriculum battles include the infamous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which the Tennessee government indicted a high school biology teacher for violating the state’s ban on teaching evolution, and former President Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to institute a constitutional school prayer amendment, which exposed a stark national divide between religious traditionalists and civil liberties groups in the 1980s. The recent Florida state decision to ban the teaching of critical race theory and the New York Times’ 1619 Project have revived discussions of conflicting approaches to historical education on the heels of an international movement for racial justice.
The common denominator between these varied culture-war curriculum battles is that each was spearheaded by conservative governments and school boards desperate to shift the focus of classroom discussions surrounding salient issues away from marginalized perspectives. In doing so, conservatives have transformed topics like race, evolution, and the causes of the Civil War into cultural battlefields inundating mainstream media and litmus tests for candidates seeking higher office. Now, a new Lost Cause narrative is emerging at the hands of the Republican Party — one that threatens to undermine our national historical memory by cementing an alternate narrative of the American story designed to favor patriotism instead of truth. For example, 2021 has witnessed a wave of public and private efforts to silence the discussion of slavery and race in American history. When Retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter delivered an address at an Ohio Memorial Day event held at a cemetery, his microphone was cut once he began to speak about the participation of formerly enslaved Black people in a past ceremony honoring the lives of Civil War veterans.
Futhermore, in response to the free 1619 Project curriculum examining the impacts of slavery on contemporary American life, former President Trump launched the 1776 Commission, a report authored by national historians and scholars that aims to establish a “dispositive rebuttal of reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.” The White House released this 1776 Report merely fourteen days after the insurrection at the Capitol. While the U.S. Capitol building was being invaded with billowing Confederate flags from the first Lost Cause, a conservative effort was brewing behind the scenes to provide a pseudo-intellectual basis for a new Lost Cause designed to promote patriotic history instead of the teaching of more complete, honest, and sometimes painful truths about our national past.
Critical race theory first emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement, as described in a pioneering 1993 novel on the discipline, entitled “Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment” by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Charles R. Lawrence III, and Mari Matsuda. Critical race theory served as a framework through which legal scholars could evaluate the role of racism in shaping legislation and policies that contributed to racial inequality, such as income, incarceration, housing, education, and health disparities along racial lines. The central thesis of critical race theory is that truly addressing America’s institutionalized racism requires a complete examination of the history of existing hierarchies rather than small reforms within establishments. As Crenshaw noted, “Critical race theory just says let’s pay attention to what has happened in this country and how what has happened in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes, so we can become that country that we say we are.”
Today, however, conservatives have seized critical race theory as a euphemism to decry and even outlaw nearly any effort to teach the national history of race and racism in public education. Because critical race theory has been appropriated as a flash point in the ongoing culture wars surrounding racial justice, deliberate misrepresentations of this academic discipline contribute to pervasive misunderstandings about the American experience. History is perhaps the most enduring form of politics; therefore, in order to combat the ongoing war on historical education, it is essential to teach the history of race and racism in America with a more targeted approach less convenient for right-wing conspiracists to use as fodder for fear-mongering. By using language that conservatives cannot appropriate, distort, and sell to the public as attacks on White America, historians can promote honest historical education that seriously reckons with the history of American racism without encountering constant bad-faith hostility from Republican-controlled governments.
Acknowledging fault and complexity in American history is perhaps the most patriotic way to express the United States’ relationship with its past and present. It is easy to glorify and admire a perfect national narrative, but it is far more powerful to still express hope in and allegiance to America’s paragons of freedom and equality, even while recognizing that the country has not always lived up to these ideals. The goal of history is not to engender jingoistic patriotism. The goal of history is not to make a country’s citizens feel good about every aspect of the past behavior of their country. Telling the truth about America’s painful history with regard to racism and oppression is not unpatriotic indoctrination. History should be not taught as an exercise in patriotic self-congratulation, but instead, as a critical analysis of how the past produced the society we live in today. Therefore, recent conservative efforts to suppress racial perspectives in historical education are fallacious and may engender dangerous real-life ramifications including reviving historical methods of oppression. State governments censoring the past to suppress evidence of systemic racism as they enact modern-day laws to advance systemic racism is perhaps the greatest evidence of systemic racism. How we remember the past is intrinsically linked to how we understand the present.
The teaching of honest, comprehensive history that centers narratives from a variety of perspectives should not be deemed unpatriotic or anti-American simply because it might paint parts of America’s history in a negative light. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins — and he her worst enemy who, under the specious … garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.” Although the battle for historical memory may appear futile and hopeless at times, a true participatory democracy rests on its ability to revise interpretations of the past as a means to promote national accountability and enrich contemporary understanding. In an era of reinvigorated conservative efforts to suppress complex accounts of American history, we cannot allow laws that obstruct in-school public education to prevent intellectual growth. We must continue to ask ourselves how the history we are taught could have produced the present we were living in, and most importantly, actively seek out voices that the state attempts to silence.
Image by Dean Hinnant is licensed under the Unsplash License.
