Governor Kristi Noem and our Republican legislators haven’t read The 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 curriculum, or any of the substantive discussion of the complicated history scholars are trying to unwhitewash. (I haven’t read much of all that myself, but the last five hyperlinks suggest I’m doing more research than our dear leaders.) The South Dakota GOPers squawking about “critical race theory” and the need to restore “patriotic” education are just aping national apartheidist noise without any evidence that South Dakota teachers are tearing down America are or seeking federal money to burn flags.
This latest culture-war distraction from GOP failure is also another front in the Kochs and other rich bastards are fighting beat back the challenges that honest historical and journalistic inquiry pose to the free-market fantasies they tell to preserve their wealth and power. So Trinity College political science professor Isaac Kamola explains:
Why are so many members of the 1776 Commission — and the anti-CRT onslaught more generally — so closely tied to Koch network think tanks and political organizations? Answer: because academic, journalistic and movement efforts to critically interrogate the lasting impact of slavery and American racism fundamentally challenge the free market fundamentalist ideology this network has mass-produced for decades. Koch network libertarians have propagated the fantasy that we all do (or should) live in a radically free market, populated by unraced and ungendered free individuals, all pulling ourselves up by our proverbial bootstraps. In this world, individuals are wealthy (or poor) on their own merit (or because governments tried too hard to make everyone equal). The founding myth for plutocratic libertarians—an American dream on steroids—is essential in maintaining this deeply ideological, pro-corporate policy agenda. This mythical narrative, however, requires studiously avoiding the fact that the United States is not a radically free market but rather a country founded on both the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the racialized practice of chattel slavery. Starting from the actual historical record, however, makes it impossible to take the libertarian mythology seriously—a myth created by rich, cis, white males to justify their own economic superiority.
Think tanks and political operations within the plutocratic libertarian network have therefore invested heavily in this culture war position. Because they advocate unpopular policy proposals, corporate libertarians see CRT, “The 1619 Project” and other antiracist intellectual and political movements as posing an existential threat to their governing ideology—one that depends on an imagined, asocial understanding of unfettered individual liberty. As such, we should not assume that the nonsensical and obscene 1776 Commission report will simply fade under withering critical scrutiny. Nor that Hannah-Jones will ultimately receive fair treatment by the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees. Rather, political actors, with political motivations, and a well-funded infrastructure, are behind this onslaught. As such, having an honest conversation about race in America also requires exposing, and pushing back against, those monied interests that are economically, politically and ideologically opposed to that conversation taking place [Isaac Kamola, “Guest Blog: Where Does the Bizarre Hysteria About ‘Critical Race Theory’ Come From? Follow the Money!” Inside Higher Ed, 2021.06.03].
21 states have introduced or passed legislation seeking to censor history education as it relates to America’s systemic racism. Expect the South Dakota Legislature to join that list in the 2022 Session, because where racist capitalist raiders go, South Dakota Republicans are sure to follow.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/03/slavery-us-germany-holocaust-reckoning/
Why is the US incapable of being honest with its past?
Why is the US incapable, unwilling to learn from its past?
Could it simply be exploitative capitalism – to keep labor prices low, via the Jim Crow-ish prison labor, “right-to-work” nonsense, and the pure greed of executive and board salaries wildly outstripping the salary increases of employees?
The US is largely built on an aspiration, then myth, legend, and folklore. It’s time for the truth.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4xw4zHZDCTTfHKRzkfn3gC
https://www.amazon.com/How-Word-Passed-Reckoning-History/dp/0316492930/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=clint+smith&qid=1623329298&sr=8-1
W/O comment….https://www.foxnews.com/politics/iowa-governor-bans-critical-race-theory
I could say it’s a white wash but thats too trendy, they are simply covering their grasses. Its so easy to look anything up these days so it’s rather pointless. I would love to be a student now, it would be fun to look up anything they are trying to cover up and discussion would be enlivened. Getting thrown out of school was always fun, you get to repeat it in front of the school board to be let back in.
well…the best history of how we became a nation (be patient, its a little dense in parts) is the Empire of Necessity, another good one is Philbrick’s Mayflower….the book His Excellency, George Washington provides a good look at the attitude and culture of our founding fathers, especially the Virginia Planters. And I have to add all three Shelby Foote narratives on the civil war. Kearn’s Team of Rivals is a good overview of Lincoln and the politics of emancipation. At the end of this reading, I believe you will conclude that racism, white supremacy, and economic suppression of workers are keystones of our founding throughout the former colonies and were gradually overcome by a steady wave of new immigrants in the 19th century with more democratic social and economic philosophies.
Kamola’s insight that the issue isn’t critical race theory but critical race studies is spot on. The right needs an object it can reify and demonize, and theory is a better–and the more abstract, the better—object compared to emerging scholarship in critical race studies. Blame does not have a single, unique, and nameable target until it finds a straw man to prop itself up. Critical race “theory” is a convenient object, rather than the more diffuse and polyvalent corpus which constitutes critical race “scholarship” (see Wastell’s article in the Feb 2021 issue of New Discourses, viz., “Essentialism: The Logical Fallacy Plaguing Us Since Plato” here:
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/02/essentialism-logical-fallacy-plaguing-us-since-plato/?fbclid=IwAR1CfRnP1WAeeGZPrM1ntYhCVzuBZxP60qrB2Rl8ZT3yOi1xuPhQjDxesTQ).
Granted and not surprisingly, as Kamola indicates, there is money involved in the fight, just as Donald Pay has indicated on more than one occasion. But I would argue that money is more and effect than a cause. I suggest the cause is a massive floating anxiety on the part of the right that nags at them that they have something to lose. I further suggest two possible and impending losses as cause of the underlying anxieties that threaten them: (1) majority white status: it is projected that by 2045 whites will be “minority white;” and (2) potential loss of wealth, or in simple Marxian terms, “private property” be it taxation of the wealthy or other forms resulting in calls for wealth distribution.
The ideas of white privilege, unconscious bias, institutional racism, racially motivated microagressions and especially essentialism are very disturbing to the right from either perspective of loss.
There are two prongs of the dialectic (a redundancy, as dialectic itself refers to ‘two’). Noem would emphasize one prong at the expense of the other: the “essential” qualities of self-determination, grit, agency, bootstraps, etc. critical to success. Althusserians, on the other hand, would emphasize structuring “existential” influences on individual success: the individual is not constitutive of the social, but is rather its product or effect; this is the emphasis of critical race scholarship. This dialectic is, of course, undecidable, and is a false dialectic as are all dialectics. That makes dialectic no less valuable as an intellectual analytical tool, however. Without dialectic we are mired in a complex topology with no possible definition for discussion.
Ironically the 1776 Commission as well as Noem’s civics endeavor represents the second, existential prong of the dialectic: the notion that we need by structured by a project which will putatively promote (structure) our own patriotic education, education of any kind being effectively structuring of the individual and group consciousness. Doubly ironic is that this is a form of structuring a “class consciousness:” (For Georg Lukács development of class consciousness of a historical subject is a prerequisite for revolution.!)
(Ironically, Delgado and Stefanic get themselves into a bind on the matter of essentialism: identity politics in the interest of minority rights can itself a form of essentialism).
It is additionally equally ironic that Noem seems in agreement with Nietzsche who argues in Genealogy of Morals that human rights exist as a means for the weak to constrain the strong. She indeed gives every appearance that she feels under attack by minority identity politics and the tenets of critical race scholarship. Again ironic that she on the other hand asserts her own “rights” as a weak person under attack to try to constrain others, again effectively aligning herself with Nietzsche.
Related — have you seen how this group is characterizing school board elections in Rapid?
https://uspie.blog/2021/06/10/rapid-city-sd-school-board-elections-upset-incumbents/
I’m troubled how they think it’s to be commended that Christians rally around a nation’s flag.
Don’t worry Steve, a student can look up anything now and easily see through the proper ganders of the gop.
Steve, keep reading their tripe, you’r the kind of person they want to influence!
A political grouping wants Washoe County – Reno, Nevada teachers to wear body cameras to ensure parents that no “critical race theory” is being taught in classrooms.
That is how a coup is done, one school board, one legislator at a time.
Kioch bro wants magats to believe ridding the US of Dept. of Education will save parents tax monies when in reality, those savings are already spoken for as more tax breaks for koch bro.
Well Arlo, it was all those liberal Norwegians who did it.