Sam Adler-Bell: Behind the CRT Crackdown

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.aapf.org/theforum-critical-race-theory-crackdown


“Acts of forgetting,” wrote the French philosopher Ernest Renan in 1882, play an indispensable role in “the creation of a nation.” Peoples congregate into nations not only under shared memories of triumph and glory, Renan observed; for a nation to cohere, Renan thought, the “deeds of violence” at the root of every nation’s founding must be forgotten, too. “The essence of a nation,” Renan wrote, “is that all its individual members should have many things in common; and also that all of them should hold many things in oblivion.”

America has long lived by this dictum, that our union depends on collective acts of amnesia—ex obliviis unum. Indigenous genocide, the subjugation of women, the enslavement of Africans, the plantation regime, coerced “free” labor, the mine wars and anti-union terror, the criminalization of sexual minorities, nativist violence, lynching, and Jim Crow apartheid: all of these, at various times, have been consigned to common oblivion—ennobling omissions that undergird a vague but encompassing national pride.

For Renan, “historical error” was preferable to historical accuracy if the latter was unflattering. (“Advances in the field of history are often a threat to the nation,” he wrote.) His spiritual descendants—today’s right-wing crusaders against anti-racist education—are less candid about their intentions, but no less fearful of history’s rebuke. “Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country,” said president Donald Trump in September 2020, as he announced a commission to promote “patriotic” and “pro-American” education in public schools.

Trump’s 1776 Commission amounted to very little: a single, tendentious, report, 41 pages long, written without consultation from any professional historians, and released two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration. But its underlying purpose—protecting the nation’s children from the unsavory aspects of American history, especially its moments of racial tyranny—has remained a pivotal focus for conservatives in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the largest anti-racist mobilization in US history.

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