By Rich Lowry
Thursday, July 01, 2021
History itself, nay, our very democracy, is under
attack.
The assailant? State legislatures that have passed laws
intended to keep critical race theory and associated “anti-racist” ideologies
out of the public schools.
The Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a scholar of
totalitarianism and 20th-century atrocities, has written a piece for The
New York Times Magazine titled “The War on History Is a War on Democracy.”
At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum published a
piece with the headline “Democracies Don’t Try to Make Everyone Agree.”
Applebaum summarizes what she thinks is the crux of
the anti-CRT push in schools: “Schoolchildren should not be taught
the history of racism in America; they should not learn about slavery; they
should not be allowed to think about the long-term consequences. That, apparently,
is now the consensus in a segment of the Republican Party.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this line of
attack on anti-CRT bills is either woefully misinformed or willfully dishonest.
It doesn’t interact at all with the intention or the text of the anti-CRT
provisions. In sum, it is a hysterical smear.
Applebaum doesn’t even try to provide an example of the
alleged campaign to erase slavery and racism from the nation’s curricula, even
though there’s already been a lot of anti-CRT movement in the states.
But, hey, evidently, being a fierce proponent of open
debate and historical accuracy frees one from the obligation of trying to
understand the people you are criticizing or of providing actual evidence for
your charges against them.
Snyder goes even further. He explains at length Russian
efforts to minimize the Stalin-era famine in Ukraine and to squelch discussion
of it — a gross offense against historical memory. This campaign is formalized
in “memory laws” that forbid speaking the truth and protect “the feelings of
the powerful” rather than “the facts about the vulnerable.”
“This spring,” Snyder intones, “memory laws arrived in
America.”
Then he recites the supposed parade of horribles. He says
the new anti-CRT rule adopted by Florida’s state school board seeks, like
Russia’s 2014 memory law, “to silence a history of suffering” and “to forbid
education about racism.”
Either Snyder doesn’t know what he’s talking about
because he hasn’t taken the time to understand the state of play in Florida or
he’s being deliberately deceptive.
The rule adopted by the Florida board says, in a passage
that Snyder conveniently doesn’t quote, “Instruction on the required topics
must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant
historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and
Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women,
African American and Hispanic people to our country.”
This is like Vladimir Putin’s handiwork?
The rule, as Snyder does note, bans the use of materials
from the 1619 Project and forbids the teaching of “the theory that racism is
not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American
society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white
persons.”
In this, Florida is prohibiting the teaching of
controversial and divisive perspectives that, at the very least, aren’t
necessary to give a student a full, rounded, and accurate picture of U.S.
history.
Snyder says this means that “since Jim Crow is systemic
racism, having to do with American society and law, the subject would seem to
be banned in Florida schools.”
This is utter nonsense. First, the sentence prior to the
one about systematic racism, quoted above, says that slavery, the Civil War and
Reconstruction, and the civil-rights movement can’t be suppressed or distorted.
How is that consistent with a ban on the teaching of Jim
Crow?
Indeed, it is written
in Florida statute that students are to be taught “the history of
African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the
political conflicts that led to the development of slavery, the passage to
America, the enslavement experience, abolition, and the contributions of
African Americans to society. Instructional materials shall include the
contributions of African Americans to American society.”
The rule adopted by the Florida board of education in no
way supplants the statute but adds further guidance for teachers in how to
implement it.
You wouldn’t know that from Snyder’s article, which is
huffy about truth and accuracy without displaying any commitment to them.
He also heaps scorn on a Texas anti-CRT law but doesn’t bother to quote from or
paraphrase the extensive, extremely wide-ranging list of people, events, and
ideas that it says students should understand.
The list includes:
(7) the history of white supremacy,
including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement,
and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong;
(8) the history and importance of
the civil rights movement, including the following documents:
(A) Martin Luther King Jr.’s
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech;
(B) the federal Civil Rights Act of
1964 (42 U.S.C. Section 2000a et seq.);
(C) the United States Supreme
Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education;
(D) the Emancipation Proclamation;
(E) the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights;
(F) the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution
Again, this is the equivalent of a Putin memory law?
In addition, the Texas act says that if a teacher delves
into a contemporary topic, he should “explore the topic from diverse and
contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”
It forbids requiring school employees to participate in
training that “presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the
basis of race or sex.”
And it forbids courses including, among others, these
concepts:
(i) one race or sex is inherently
superior to another race or sex;
(ii) an individual, by virtue of
the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,
whether consciously or unconsciously;
(iii) an individual should be
discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of
the individual’s race
What exactly is Snyder’s objection here? Does he really
want race and sex stereotyping in the schools? Courses that teach that one race
is superior to another?
He jabs Texas for forbidding courses that require
understanding the 1619 Project. “Teachers succeed,” he snarks, “if students do
not understand something.” But the act refers to understanding Fredrick
Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores
Huerta, among many others. Presumably, if teachers were to impart anything
close to all this knowledge, the kids will be alright if they aren’t taught
Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Other states that have acted against CRT have adopted
similar language against discriminatory content. Idaho, for instance, says that schools shouldn’t force
students to affirm
(i) That any sex, race, ethnicity,
religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior;
(ii) That individuals should be
adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color,
or national origin; or
(iii) That individuals, by virtue
of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently
responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex,
race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin.
It is reasonable to object to the drafting of some of
these laws as vague and overly broad, but it’s hard to see how any fair-minded
person could object to the goal of preventing children from being taught — in
the public schools! — that one race is superior to another or that people
should be discriminated against on the basis of their race.
Here we are, though, with prominent writers lodging their
deep objections, without any grounding in the reality of what’s happening in
the states. Indeed, one has to guess that you are as likely to get an accurate
picture of Stalin’s crimes in today’s Russia as you are a factual portrayal of
the anti-CRT provisions and their consequences in Snyder’s tendentious, highly
misleading essay.
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