The White backlash targeting schools is only growing

The White backlash targeting schools is only growing

A child wears a shirt reading, “My school is not your social training camp” outside of the Loudoun County School Board Building in Virginia in September. (Eric Lee for The Washington Post)

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By Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 12:39 p.m. EST

Among the most fundamental truths of contemporary American politics is this: Whenever a Democrat is elected president there will be a right-wing backlash, always angry, often violent. The current one is focused on the schools, where Republicans see political gold in race panic — with a healthy topping of sex panic.

The particular way this backlash is organized allows national Republicans to feed and promote it, then watch while it reaches its full flower of lunacy at the local level. Which is what’s happening now, in gradually more extreme ways.

And there’s a particular way in which President Biden’s public image — or more precisely, what he doesn’t represent to the right — has influenced the shape of the backlash his presidency triggered.

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This backlash began with a wave of laws around the country meant to keep teachers in schools and universities from discussing critical race theory, or at least what your average GOP state legislator thinks critical race theory might be. According to a recent report from PEN America, legislators filed 54 bills in 24 states banning so-called “divisive concepts” around race; at least 11 have been signed into law, and more are certain to come in 2022.

Now that the right has found its mojo in attacks on teachers, it may have been inevitable that we would find ourselves with a new kind of Lost Cause, in which teachers in red states could be required by law to teach a sanitized version of American history, one with a very particular story of White innocence at its heart.

And as long as they’re feeling so empowered to reach down into schools, Republicans will root out anything that might make LGBTQ youths feel less bad about themselves, or any insufficiently puritanical discussion of sex. The president of the Iowa Senate is drafting legislation to make it a felony for a teacher to give an “obscene” book to a student, and around the country, conservative activists are targeting books with LGBTQ themes for removal from classrooms and libraries.

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In New Hampshire — which already passed a bill banning discussion of “divisive concepts” on race — Republicans have now proposed “An Act Relative to Teachers’ Loyalty,” which says this:

No teacher shall advocate any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America in New Hampshire public schools which does not include the worldwide context of now outdated and discouraged practices. Such prohibition includes but is not limited to teaching that the United States was founded on racism.

So what constitutes a “negative account” of the founding and history of the United States? One of the co-sponsors of the legislation was asked how a teacher would address something like the Three-Fifths Compromise if this bill passed. She helpfully explained that the Three-Fifths Compromise was actually a noble attempt to limit the power of slaveholding states so “a viewpoint that was on its way out” wouldn’t be “overrepresented.”

Another of the co-sponsors said, “Slavery was a terrible thing, but a lot of people don’t know slavery happened all over the world.”

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The idea here is that young people will be taught a pair of ideas about America’s past and future. First, whatever bad things happened in the past, they either weren’t really that bad, or were understandable and therefore forgivable. Everybody was buying and selling human beings back then!

Second, whatever sins were committed in the past, they are behind us. Racism today, if it exists at all, is nothing more than the actions of a few disreputable people with hate in their hearts.

That’s why so many of these bills make specific reference to “systemic racism” as an idea teachers should be banned from discussing. If racism is not merely something that resides within individuals but is woven into systems, then it can continue to exist no matter how many people protest that they don’t have “a racist bone in my body.” Which means we might have to do something about it.

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What does all this have to do with President Biden? Well, the idea that Biden as an individual ought to inspire intense fear and loathing has never really taken hold in the way it did with Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Without that focus on the person of the president, conservatives broadened their target list. Now the threat comes from everywhere, encompassing ideas, ideologies, and institutions that are both far away (like Hollywood) and close by (like your neighborhood school).

What’s more, schools are run and controlled by local people who may not have wanted to be a part of some national civil war, and are therefore much more susceptible to harassment and intimidation than your governor or senator. Once states pass these laws, then start firing teachers and driving school board members from their jobs, the right will see victory even if the president is still a Democrat.

Meanwhile, Republicans in D.C. sit back and smile, giving gentle (or not-so-gentle) nudges to all this backlash through the conservative media, whipping people into a frenzy with national conservative organizations providing money and expertise to local groups to keep on the pressure.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told colleagues last week that Republicans would not be releasing a policy agenda before the 2022 midterm elections. Why bother? At the moment, it looks like White backlash will be more than enough to return them to power.