The Fight Against the White Supremacist Whitewash and Fascist Suppression of Historical Truth

Part 2: What is driving the Republican fascist assault on education?

by Rafael Kadaris

August 23, 2021 | revcom.us

 

The fight against the fascist suppression of historical truth, in education and beyond, will be a critical and ongoing struggle over the coming period. This battle raises political, legal, and epistemological questions of extreme importance. We will be covering it here at revcom.us and strongly encourage our readers to write in and share your experiences encountering this, research you’ve done on this, or any ideas you have on how to wage this fight. Email: revolution.reports@yahoo.com

As I wrote in Part 1: “In recent months, Republican fascists have launched a nationwide assault on the right of students to learn the true history of this country. They aim to force teachers to teach a false version of American history—where the foundational role of slavery and genocide is erased, or whitewashed and justified once again, and the big lie of American ‘greatness’ is shoved down everyone’s throat. And this time the erasure and whitewash has the force of law and the power of the state behind it.”

Republican fascist politicians and media like Fox News have whipped their “base” into a frenzy to stop schools from teaching “critical race theory”—a catch-all buzzword for any discussion of the actual history and reality of systemic racism against Black people and other people of color—which they claim is “divisive” and racist against white people. Twenty-eight states have proposed, and seven have already passed, dangerous anti-critical race theory (CRT) laws to control what can and can’t be taught about U.S. history and racism. White supremacist mobs are swarming school board meetings trying to oust school board members and get teachers fired. Educators have been driven out, and students censored. All this is already having a chilling effect and is likely to intensify when school starts in the fall and these laws go into effect.

Fascist Clampdown, Backed by Law and Mob Violence

There have been some initial efforts by educators to oppose all this. The Zinn Education Project created a “Pledge to Teach the Truth,” which has been signed by over 6,000 teachers, and has called for “Days of Action” August 27-29 to make this pledge public. But fascist forces have hit back with a vengeance, creating a “database” (in other words, a hit list) of teachers who signed the pledge, calling on “concerned citizens” to report critical race theory advocates and hold them “accountable.”¹ Raving Fox News mouthpieces Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin have called for teachers to be monitored and policed with classroom cameras. Fascist parents’ groups across the country are pushing for mandatory body cams on teachers.² One teacher recently reported: “I was told by my principal that a student will be recording my classes for his parents to ensure I'm not teaching CRT or Marxism.”³

This witchhunt for “unpatriotic” teachers (in other words, teachers who teach the TRUTH about U.S. history and society) is not only backed by law in many states now, it is backed by the growing threat of violence—converging with escalating attacks against educators who support mask mandates.⁴

Just look at this recent email from Donald Trump Jr. on behalf of the “1776 Project PAC”:

There are people out there in the far-off corners of the world who hate everything that the United States of America stands for—and they have made it their life's work to destroy our country.  But they're not who I'm worried about. I'm worried about the people right here in our own backyards who share the same hatred for our country as the terrorists hiding in the caves of Afghanistan. Because when President Lincoln said "America will never be destroyed from the outside…” he was RIGHT.  The most dangerous threats to our republic aren't hiding in caves—they're hiding in plain sight in our K-12 classrooms.⁵

Dangerous threats. Hiding in plain sight. He’s literally saying that teachers who teach Black history should be viewed as equivalent to wartime enemies of the U.S.! This is going somewhere very bad, very quickly. It is not a joke. It is not a misunderstanding. It is not going away. And it is not going to stay confined to the “red states.” For the Republicans waging this assault, the clampdown on education and suppression of historical truth is a necessary part of restructuring society with a new fascist order, where dissent is outlawed, critical thinking is stifled, and white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations are even more aggressively enforced.

Much More Than an Election Ploy

Some believe that this is simply a backlash by ignorant racists upset that more truth is coming to light in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, and an effort by Republicans to mobilize this for the upcoming elections. As Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the original founders of critical race theory, put it:

This is a 2022 strategy to weaponize white insecurity, to mobilize ideas that have been mobilized again and again throughout history, using a concept or set of ideas that they can convince people is the new boogeyman.⁶

While these Republican fascists are most certainly weaponizing white ignorance, fear, entitlement, and resentment—and while this will almost certainly be channeled into the 2022 election—this is not mainly just another vicious cycle of racist dog-whistling to get out the white vote.

What is going on here is not essentially an election strategy, but a fascism strategy:

1) Preparing people to accept a draconian white supremacist regime, and training a hard-core force with the ideology necessary to carry out atrocities against Black people and other people of color. Right now that means stripping away voting rights, but it could lead to all-out genocide. As Bob Avakian said of their leader, Donald Trump:

Donald Trump hates Black people and everybody who is not a “white, English-speaking, Christian American.” If he could, he would kill off a whole lot of them, and put many of the rest in jail for life, or drive them out of the country.

2) Mobilizing fascist shock troops to “defend our children.” In America, horrible crimes have been committed in the name of “protecting” white women and children, from horrific lynchings to violent opposition to housing and school desegregation.  Already, they are flooding school board meetings, getting people fired, and threatening that “we know where you live.”⁷

With this strategy, these fascists are training people NOW to go into battle around the basic position that America is good, and they are sending “warriors” out into the field, from the public square all the way down to where people live.

What Is Driving These Fascists?

These Republican fascists see the mass resistance to police murder, the women rising up all over the world, the desperate refugees coming across the border, the irrefutable science of climate change and COVID, the weakening hold of America’s founding myths and declining patriotism among the youth… and fear that the country is coming unraveled. All this has led to deep divisions, among the ruling powers and in society, over how to deal with this situation.

In “THIS IS A RARE TIME WHEN REVOLUTION BECOMES POSSIBLE—WHY THAT IS SO, AND HOW TO SEIZE ON THIS RARE OPPORTUNITY,” Bob Avakian goes deeply into this:

[[A]] section of the ruling capitalist class, represented by the Republican Party, has all along resisted even… partial concessions to the fight against oppression, and has become convinced that these changes have now gone too far, that they threaten to destroy what has held this country together and enabled it to dominate the world.

The Republicans have become a fascist party—a party based on open and aggressive white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations—a party convinced that only it deserves to rule, moving to manipulate elections and suppress votes in order to gain and hold onto power, refusing to accept the outcome of elections it does not win, determined to gut and pervert “the rule of law,” trample on people’s rights, and adopt what amounts to an undisguised capitalist dictatorship, ready to use violence not only against masses of people but also against its rivals in the ruling class.

Just listen to the words of Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn speaking recently about the “Judeo-Christian principles and values that this country was founded upon”:

The foundation of America was built on solid rock, just like the foundation of the church… that rock has deteriorated. And a house built on sand will not withstand the storm that is coming...⁸

There are communist elements in our government today… they’re all over our education system. Card-carrying communist elements. And they go all the way down to school boards.⁹

In Flynn’s reference to the “storm that is coming,” we see real concern for how the U.S. will deal with coming crises, and a signal to QAnon lunatics and fascists more broadly to prepare for holy war to vanquish America’s enemies,¹⁰ which he very directly locates within the schools. As Bob Avakian goes on to say:

These Republicans have mobilized a significant section of people who believe, with an intense, irrational passion, that white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations (as well as unrestrained plunder of the environment) must be firmly upheld and enforced. They have been driven to a state of vicious insanity, embracing all kinds of lunatic conspiracy theories, along with a crazed Christian fundamentalism, as a response to the threat they see to their entitled (or “god-ordained”) position and their insistence that further concessions to the struggle against oppression will destroy what has “made America great.”

The problem in education, as the fascists see it, is twofold: first, once you begin to teach even a partial understanding of the real truth about American history, the whole thing can come unraveled. Like all important truths, it raises the question of WHY. What are the underlying causes of these horrors? Why do they keep happening? How can they finally be ended?

Second, as stated above, they are preparing to commit horrendous crimes against Black people and other oppressed nationalities—far beyond the “normal” workings of this system. They need to justify these in advance in the minds of the people.

All this is why this fascist assault on education is coming to a head now, at a moment of deep divisions and crisis for this system, with great dangers but also potential openings for revolution. Bob Avakian writes:

as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.

This fascist attack on “critical race theory”—taking people’s jobs, threatening violence against those who speak out, forcing teachers to teach lies—bears this out.

 

Coming: A Scientific and Accurate Understanding of America’s “Racial History”

 

1. https://exposecriticalracetheory.org/ [back]

2. https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/tueafter-success-police-body-cams-parents-campaign-cameras-teachers [back]

3. https://twitter.com/BisforBerkshire/status/1426566647859621889 [back]

4. See Episode 66 of The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. [back]

5. https://www.salon.com/2021/08/20/to-trumpers-critical-race-theory-is-as-bad-as-the-taliban--and-theyre-not-kidding/ [back]

6. https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-business-education-government-and-politics-905c354a805cec1785160cf21f04c7ec [back]

7. These insane fascists are also using this “defend our children logic” to oppose mask mandates in schools—“justifying” their increasingly violent aggression under the rubric of “defending the innocent,” while they spread a disease that disproportionately kills Black, Latino, and Native people.  And this same theme comes up in the drumbeat of attacks against transgender students, and is a big part of QAnon’s lunatic theories. [back]

8. https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1428720984329129992 [back]

9. https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1428742131166769166 [back]

10. revcom.us/a/662/qanon-cultivating-lunacy-in-the-service-of-fascism-en.html [back]

An unhinged mob in Tennessee attacks scientific anti-COVID measures & those who dare to support them in schools.

These are FASCIST, white supremacist shock-troops, brought forth by powerful forces in the Republican Party.@SunsaraTaylor on RNL Ep. 66: https://t.co/w2Pe1YVftQ pic.twitter.com/IHir6aWe2F

— The Revcoms (@therevcoms) August 21, 2021