The Fight Against the White Supremacist Whitewash and Fascist Suppression of Historical Truth

Part 1: Mandatory Lies and “Patriotic” Brainwashing

by Rafael Kadaris

August 9, 2021 | revcom.us

 

The fight against the fascist suppression of historical truth, in education and beyond, will be a critical and ongoing struggle over the coming period. This battle raises political, legal, and epistemological questions of extreme importance. We will be covering it here at revcom.us and strongly encourage our readers to write in and share your experiences encountering this, research you’ve done on this, or any ideas you have on how to wage this fight. Email: revolution.reports@yahoo.com

In recent months, Republican fascists have launched a nationwide assault on the right of students to learn the true history of this country. They aim to force teachers to teach a false version of American history—where the foundational role of slavery and genocide is erased, or whitewashed and justified once again, and the big lie of American “greatness” is shoved down everyone’s throat. And this time the erasure and whitewash has the force of law and the power of the state behind it.

They have targeted “critical race theory” (CRT), a framework developed in law schools for explaining the persistence of racial inequality even when the laws appear to be equal. Most of these Republican fascists don’t know anything about CRT, but they are using it as a catch-all buzzword to incite and inflame white resentment, and suppress any discussion about systemic racism against Black people and other people of color. In fact, they flip things completely upside down and claim that simply acknowledging the history and reality of anti-Black racism is divisive and racist against white people!

Their goal is to impose a framework where the facts of racial oppression can only be explained as anomalies and outliers from the overriding “special goodness” of America. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this leads very quickly to banning the facts themselves. Think about it: If racism is just a matter of a few prejudiced people, how do you explain the systematic policy over decades of “redlining” Black neighborhoods, and denying Black people home loans and insurance, which is a major factor in the racial wealth gap we see today?¹ If slavery is an aberration from America’s core identity, how do you explain the fact that slave labor produced the major part of the wealth that fueled the development of this country, not just in the South but in the North as well?²

This fight over historical truth, and what lessons and values students will learn from that, is a high-stakes battle in its own right. And it is a key front in a larger political war these Republicans are waging to restructure society with a new fascist order, where truth is banned, dissent is outlawed, critical thinking is stifled, and white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations are even more aggressively enforced.

This must be opposed, and the true history—and the teachers who are under fire for teaching it, and the students trying to learn it—must be defended. At the same time, as we will show in future installments of this series, while critical race theory unearths and confronts some of the ugly truth about this country, it is not scientific about the fundamental problem or the actual solution, and ultimately won’t be able to stand up to this fascist assault.

The Fascist Attack Is Already Deadly Serious, with Laws Being Passed...

Republican fascists have unleashed a massive, coordinated legislative campaign—at the federal, state, and local levels—targeting education:

• Republican legislatures in more than 20 states have proposed anti-critical race theory laws to control what can and can’t be taught about U.S. history and racism. Six states—Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Tennessee—have already signed bills into law. The Texas law, for example, explicitly bans the teaching of slavery as anything other than a “deviation” from America’s “authentic founding principles” of “liberty and equality.”
• Almost all of these laws contain language banning the teaching of anything that would give rise to “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” While on the surface this may seem unobjectionable, in actual practice these laws will empower white students and parents who have been whipped up with a false sense of victimhood to censor school curriculum. And they require teachers to self-censor on the basis of what students might feel, or say they feel.

Mobs Unleashed...

• White fascist mobs have been swarming school board meetings, filing complaints and lawsuits alleging discrimination against white students, trying to oust school board members and get teachers fired. At least 165 local and national groups have formed to shut down lessons on race and gender.

Educators Being Driven Out...

• A Black superintendent of two mostly white towns in Connecticut who had set up an anti-racist task force in the school district was forced to resign, citing the “emotional and personal toll to be a Black man doing this work and facing very blatant attacks.”
• The only Black woman in a Missouri school district’s administration resigned from her position as diversity coordinator when violent threats became so severe that the district hired private security to patrol her house.
• A white high school social studies teacher in Tennessee is facing termination after assigning an essay about Donald Trump by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and showing a video of poetry about white privilege.
• A white English teacher in Florida, was removed from her teaching position by school officials because she had a Black Lives Matter banner in her classroom at Robert E. Lee High School—a school named after the commander of the Confederate Army!

And Student Speech Being Targeted as Well...

• A Florida school district temporarily suspended the student yearbook because it talked about the Black Lives Matter movement, but didn’t mention “Blue lives matter.”³
• After parents in Texas complained about a student-designed yearbook cover that included the words “science is real, Black lives matter, no human is illegal, love is love,” an art teacher was put on leave.⁴
• A slideshow about the Black Lives Matter movement by a group of 8th graders in Rockland County, New York was attacked at a school board meeting for being “anti-police,” and then censored by the superintendent.⁵

Extending the Attack Throughout Society

These fascist attacks have focused on K-12 education, but have reached way beyond, impacting the whole social and political discourse. Fox Fascist News’ Tucker Carlson recently attacked General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accusing him of helping set the stage for genocide against white people, because Milley said that he wanted to understand “white rage” and that military leaders should study critical race theory.⁶ Fox “News” mentioned “critical race theory” 901 times just in the month of June. A Texas “think tank” released a list of words to be “on the lookout for” in order to identify critical race theory and get it banned, including “equity, diversity, and inclusion,” “colonialism,” “institutional racism,” and “social justice.”

• Last month, Texas senator Ted Cruz introduced a Senate bill to prevent federal agencies from training people in critical race theory or any “divisive concepts” about race or gender, and that bars federal funding for any entity or individual that advances the idea that “the United States is a fundamentally racist country.” This is similar to an executive order that Trump signed last year, which Biden overturned on his first day in office.
• Fascist intellectual hitman Christopher Rufo has helped lead the charge against CRT, openly stating his intentions to make CRT an all-encompassing boogeyman for everything that ignorant racist Americans hate and fear. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” He constantly cites (and also distorts) extreme examples of identity politics “wokeness”⁷—fear-mongering that little white kids will be separated off and made to feel bad just for being white—as a justification for denying very real oppression of Black people and other people of color.

This fascist offensive is already having a chilling effect on some educators. And there is growing fear among progressive teachers and students about what will happen in the fall when these laws go into effect—when reactionary white students get turned into state-sanctioned classroom spies, snitching on their teachers for making them “uncomfortable,” and racist parents and “community members” get even more unleashed. Imagine what it’s like to be a teacher being forced to lie to your students. Imagine how many will self-censor.

As Bob Avakian wrote last August: “We can recognize the looming shadow of a situation where not just school children, but everyone in society, will be required to pledge allegiance to a white Christian fascist America.”

Imagine how many will just leave, rather than stand up to the mob. Imagine where this will lead... IF there is not powerful resistance to and defiance of these laws, increasingly linked up to an evidence-based scientific understanding of history and current day reality, and a revolutionary movement that stretches everywhere into society.

 

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1. American Crime Case #62: How Capitalism + White Supremacy Created Chicago’s Black Ghetto. Part 1: Great Migration and the Brutal Reality of the “Promised Land,” revcoms.us [back]

2. From The Michael Slate Show: Vicious Slavery and the Development of U.S. Capitalism, revcom.us [back]

3. High school paused distribution of yearbook over pages about Black Lives Matter movement, Local10.com, June 7, 2021 [back]

4. Lewisville teacher on leave as parents upset over ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘I can’t breathe’ yearbook back cover, Dallas Morning News, May 28, 2021 [back]

5. How student-led lesson on the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in Clarkstown, Rockland/Westchester Journal News, May 29, 2021 [back]

6. For more on the roots and meaning of the Milley controversy, see “Bitter Fighting at the Top Reveals a System in Crisis: THREE THINGS THIS WEEK THAT TELL YOU THE RULERS OF THIS COUNTRY ARE IN DEEP SHIT,” revcoms.us. For the strategic implications, see Bob Avakian’s THIS IS A RARE TIME WHEN REVOLUTION BECOMES POSSIBLE—WHY THAT IS SO, AND HOW TO SEIZE ON THIS RARE OPPORTUNITY, including his point that “These divisions have already become deeply rooted in the major institutions in this country, including the military, and they will increasingly become sharper and burst out into the open, as things continue to sharpen up in society overall and within the ruling class.” [back]

7. Which does take extreme and insane expression these days, and which actually serves to reinforce and strengthen the fascist forces. Read Bob Avakian On Fascist Lunacy and “Woke Folk” Insanity: A New “Two Outmodeds.” [back]

 

Fort Worth school trustees greeted with chants of “No CRT!” countered by a woman shouting out: “Stop whitewashing history!” Photo: Juan Figueroa/Dallas Morning News

Fascist Republicans have been constantly attacking “critical race theory.” Here, Amy Carney, Republican from Arizona, May 24, 2021. Photo: The Republic