Road Trip: Memphis to Tallahassee

I came to the keyboard thinking about the horrifying events in Memphis, young Tyre Nichols murdered at the hands of five Black cops.  This was a few weeks ago.  I thought I’d make some cogent comments relating it to the controversy over Florida’s rejection of the draft AP African American Studies course.  But the more I read, the more articles, the more polemics, the comment threads and social media flares, the more disheartened I was by the hyperbolic outrage pummeling me from all sides.  Wild-eyed partisans throwing big boulders of anger, screaming insults at the enemy and cheering their heroes.  How can you see anything clearly through all that rubble and dust and debris?  How can you hear what anyone is saying above all that hysterical braying?  Am I supposed to be more terrified of the wokeist revolutionaries coming to groom my kids and destroy the American Way of Life or more horrified by the Fascist politicians erasing Black history from schools and libraries?  It's hard to keep up.

Years ago, when white America started to take notice of the fact that Black people were disproportionately likely to suffer at the hands (and guns and batons) of the police, the natural impulse was to claim racism on the part of white cops.  Make the forces more diverse, do a better job of not hiring racists to begin with, and the situation will improve.  Except it didn’t.  Then, as white America began to notice with supreme bafflement that many of the cops involved were also Black, the assignment of villainy shifted to a police culture that encouraged brutality.  “Defund the police” was the cut-me-own-throat slogan that deep-sixed any possibility of actually examining our expectations of the role of the police in maintaining a stable civil society.  There were some thoughtful and necessary ideas behind that unfortunate phrase, but they were lost in the noise.  Now we’re still left with the problem of trying to understand, if it’s not the vile racism of individual white good ol’ boys, then why is it still Black people who are bearing the brunt of the disproportion?  Those are the kinds of questions Critical Race Theory was developed to investigate.  But “CRT” has been turned into such a terrifying monster of ideologies that very many people are now sticking their fingers in their ears and hollering, "No, no, no!  We are NOT going to talk about this.”  Certainly not in the schools.

People on the left ranting about DeSantis erasing Black history aren’t helping matters.  DeSantis and his allies clap back that African American history is required under Florida law.  True statement.  There’s even a state-funded commission that’s developed a 129 page curriculum for use in all Florida schools, K-12.  They say this proves that the critics are acting in bad faith.  They say it proves they’re lying, they’re evil.  But the depressing reality is that the commission remains underfunded, the curriculum under-resourced, it is actually in use in only a handful of districts, and with the passage of the 2022 education rules, many of the key concepts can no longer even be mentioned.  What’s left is a few school systems offering a bland recital of inspiring stories of the contributions made by Black men and women, along with a history that declares that slavery and racism were bad, but we’ve pretty much fixed that now.  The playing field has been leveled, everybody succeeds (or not) on their own merits.  Don’t be complaining about "systemic racism" if you haven't got the smarts and self-discipline to hack it in God's America.

This is not the lived experience of millions.  But in Florida classrooms, all the way through high school, it is illegal to inquire into how and why this is the case.  No discussion of anything that might make students uncomfortable is allowed.  If the politicians have their way, it will be illegal in colleges and universities as well.  Because, you know – Freedom!

They complain that those who think raising questions of systemic racism is a necessary part of educating Americans are guilty of “indoctrination”, while those who want to insure that students are only presented with a particular patriotic story of America are educating to the facts.  In Orwell’s great novels, the authoritarians know that they’re corrupting language, twisting words to mean their opposites.  I’m afraid that many of the people supporting these attempts to rigidify the thinking of their kids don’t see it that way at all.

There was a Pew study a few years ago pointing out that most people are not good at distinguishing fact statements from opinion statements.  So often we think we’re arguing about facts when we’re really arguing about opinions and values.  When the truths that our opinions and values reveal to us seem so obvious and clear, it’s hard to avoid concluding that those who disagree aren’t merely mistaken, they must have nefarious motives and are acting in bad faith. 

The CRT that conservatives rail against is a twisted, cracked-mirror caricature of the academic inquiry that goes by that name.  It  was developed in 2020 by Christopher Rufo, and outlined in his CRT Briefing Book.  Call it CRT^R.  Trace the pearl-clutching hysterical rants against CRT and they all go back to Rufo.  It’s in Rufo’s version that we find that the country is unredeemable and that the goals of CRT are to impose feelings of guilt and shame on white children.  He did a bang-up job of turning “Critical Race Theory” into the label for everything that conservatives fear from the “woke mob”.  It happened fast.  He compiled a database of incendiary quotes from CRT theorists, shorn of context; examples pulled from the most egregious and clumsy attempts to promote diversity in schools and government, presenting them as typical rather than the outliers they are.  Then a couple of well-placed articles to get the attention of Tucker Carlson, a guest appearance on his show with a plea to Trump that resulted in an Executive Order banning diversity training in the Federal government.   He’s quite transparent about his aims: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. 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.”  And as Trump speechwriter Jason Miller points out, “The Democrats are taking the bait and keeping wokeness alive.”

Thomas D. Klingenstein and John Fonte (respectively, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, two of the oldest and most influential conservative think tanks) have recently published a manifesto describing what they believe to be the war between the “Woke Revolutionaries” and the “Americanists”.  By the time Rufo’s theory’s been run through several ringers it comes out like this:

• “America is in the middle of a Cold Civil War between woke revolutionaries—who believe America is and has always been systemically racist (evil), so that it must be deconstructed, de-legitimized (i.e., destroyed)—and those who believe that America is good, that its principles are the greatest antidote to racism ever created, and that preserving America and its principles is the highest and most urgent political calling.

• “The woke revolutionaries wish not to reform America along the lines of, say, the New Deal or Great Society but ultimately want to destroy the American way of life.

• “The false charge of ‘systemic racism’ is not presented by woke revolutionaries in good faith but used as a weapon to de-legitimize America’s principles, history, culture, and way of life.

• “Open borders are intended, at least in part, to destroy the American way of life.”

Millions of people believe them.

Their article makes clear their strategy for winning this war – not to engage in argument over the concepts, not to rebut them, but to vilify the ideas and their proponents, while doing everything possible to keep the next generation from encountering those ideas at all.

Apologists for the Florida decision argue that the draft framework lacked “balance”.  But that’s not what Florida objected to.  Here’s what the Secretary of Education said: “Florida rejected an AP course filled with Critical Race Theory and other obvious violations of Florida law.” Let that sink in.  It is illegal to bring these concepts into Florida classrooms.

There’s a strong Christianist element to all of this.  That strain has always been a part of the American psyche, but it’s increasingly blatant.  Remember the DeSantis campaign ad – “So God made a fighter”?  He believes he is on a literal mission from God.  Kristina Karamo, the newly elected chair of the Republican party in Michigan is also explicit – “My goal number one as a Christian is to bring people to Christ, and secondarily to save our country.”   The Christianist does not want to think about uncomfortable things.  She certainly does not want her darling children to be forced to think about these things.  Those in charge of education in Florida have a world view to protect.  It’s consistent, it’s comforting, it’s orderly.  Tolerating for even a moment the idea that it might be built on illusion and wishful thinking simply cannot be allowed.

The fear of losing a way of life that is safe and orderly and clear drives the impulse to keep uncomfortable ideas out of the schools.  But in our tightly wired and interconnected world it’s impossible.  I've written before about the foolishness of trying to keep children from learning that there is complexity to human sexuality.  Trying to prevent bright high school students from hearing the words "intersectionality" and "reparations" is equally absurd and damaging.

I find that sometimes I pity the Moms For Liberty, their husbands and their children, as much as I'm angry at them.  I can empathize with the fear without coming close to sharing it.  That longing for security and order, for everything and everybody in its right place.  The Mom wants her kids to be safe and secure.  She wants them to have the same feeling of pride she feels when she looks at the flag, says the Pledge of Allegiance.  She knows that slavery was terrible and her heart goes out to those who suffered from it in the past, but that the liberal socialist educators want her sons to feel guilty for things they had nothing to do with makes her blood boil.  What mother wouldn’t want to protect her children from that?  And yet she knows that there are women who give their children books about becoming homosexual, who take them to perverted drag queen shows, who want them to believe that they’re evil just because they’re white.  Those kids need to be protected, too.  She thanks God – really thanks him from the bottom of her heart – for sending leaders who know the truth and are courageous enough to fight for it.

I know people don't like empathizing with those they disagree with.  I'm not even suggesting that they should.  This is just me and I can't bring myself to see others as one-dimensional caricatures.  Are some of them racists and conscious white supremacists?  Of course.  Are some of them driven by the same metaphysics as the Christian Nationalists, whether or not they identify with the term?  Certainly!  Are some of them hard-working parents who want their children to be safe and honest and successful?  'Fraid so.  We are none of us all only one thing.  Complicated mix of contradictory dreams and desires.

That many of the founders were slaveholders is an incontestable fact.  That many of them were white supremacists can't be denied.  That in order to come to agreement on the Constitution protections for those beliefs and the economics that depended on them were put into place is part of the historical record.  Without the three-fifths compromise, the United States would not exist.

Does this mean the US is a racist nation?  How can a nation as complex and diverse as this be any one thing?  What I love about my country is its promise:  That the ideas enshrined in the language the founders used turned out to be so much more powerful than they themselves were, that they spoke to an inner truth about people and how we can rise above our tribalism and fear of "the other", that we can show compassion for those we don't understand, and build institutions that help us be better than we started out to be.  That there was corruption of those ideals in the very founding of the country doesn’t invalidate those ideals and neither does recognizing their actuality and their impacts.

It’s a war between incompatible theories of knowledge and language and it’s been going on for a long time.  It’s the Enlightenment vs the Inquisition.  On the one hand, those who believe that the pursuit of truth requires asking questions, gathering evidence, thinking critically, acknowledging doubt.  Those people want their children to be educated to confront uncomfortable facts, to accept a shared responsibility for improving the lives of others.  On the other hand are those who believe they already have the truth.  Their goal is order, security, the elimination of doubt.  They believe that education should be a process of instructing people in the right beliefs. 

So what about those few cogent remarks I thought I was going to make when I came to the keyboard weeks ago, mourning Tyre Nichols?  I wanted to say that it is only by confronting the social, political, and economic realities that CRT explores that we can understand why things like Memphis continue to happen, that efforts like the AP course are essential for that, and that the efforts by DeSantis and those who applaud him to keep uncomfortable ideas out of the schools stands foursquare in the way of living up to the principles of the Declaration that they profess to revere.

I wanted to say that those efforts are doomed to fail.  But when I thought about this fight as one between the intellectual values of the Enlightenment versus the retreat into dogma that gave rise to the Inquisition, I was forced to remind myself that for most of human history, it’s the Inquisitors who have prevailed.  They’ve always been popular.  When the Inquisitors are in charge you know where you stand.  You know what’s expected of you.  They promise order.  Security.  The truth.  What’s not to love?  DeSantis pledges to free you from doubt and to provide your children with an education that will never leave them confused or uncomfortable about their country or its history.  His opponents offer only struggle, ambiguity, more questions. 

In the stupid soundbite rhetoric that passes for debate these days, too many people angrily boil it down to DeSantis being a white supremacist pandering to other white supremacists.  As if that’s all anybody needs to know.  Such a lazy and useless formulation.  If those of us who believe that free inquiry is essential to the health of the American spirit, if those who believe in the necessity of a clear-eyed confrontation of all of the facts are going to prevail, we have to quit taking the bait and descending into the petty demonization that the warriors on the right are so much better at. 

When I was a kid, and then a teenager, and then a young man, as my understanding of the complex history of this country and its inner debates and contradictions grew, I always referred to the “American experiment” as something not yet proven.  But it’s only recently that I’ve come to realize that I never really doubted that it would prevail.  That confidence has been badly shaken in these last few years.  Not so much by Trump, believe it or not.  Dangerous as he is, the man’s a buffoon, emotionally crippled, acting out his narcissism in plain view.  But the Christian Nationalists found him useful, and elevated him.  Trump on his own was never a threat to the American experiment, he's too self-absorbed; but he fueled and legitimized those who believe they hold the truth about God and America.  What’s happening with education in Florida and in many other states is a reflection of how seductive those ideas are.  They speak to that longing for clarity, order and security, a greater meaning outside ourselves that, to some degree, I imagine most of us feel.  Their adherents haven’t so far been quite enough of a majority of voters to prevail nationally, but their successes in school boards and city councils, statehouses, Congressional elections, and the judiciary are ominous.  Will the values that ground a belief in the power of the individual to find their way to the truth through reasoned inquiry prevail, or will it be the Inquisitors, promising freedom from doubt?  They offer clarity, simplicity, protection.  In a world that looks scarier every day, where evil is unleashed at every corner, where predators lurk, not just on darkened streets, but in the classrooms and libraries of our schools, why wouldn’t you lean hard on the security of your Christian faith and the politicians who vow to make it the law of the land? Your Christian nation is within reach, if only you pray for it hard enough.