In Alabama, two bills were signed into law this year that would ban books and curricula that “attribute errors, blame, [have] a tendency to oppress others or [create] the need to make people feel guilty or distressed solely because of their race or gender.”
In Georgia, lawmakers passed a bill that would ban books or curricula that “teach” students or “promote one race or gender over another.”
In New Hampshire, Gov. Chris Sununu signed a state budget bill that prohibited teachers from “discussing race, gender, and other identity characteristics in certain ways in the classroom.”
Together, these challenges to books or classroom teaching are the latest attempts by political conservatives to disguise racist policies and statutes as something more acceptable to the voting public, he says Meredith D. Clarkassociate professor and founding director of Northeastern's Center for Communication, Media Innovation, and Social Change.
And the movement has deep roots.
In the 1980s, Republican campaign consultant Lee Atwater clearly a key tenet of Richard Nixon's “Southern Strategy”: Use abstract language to appeal to some white Southern voters' opposition to racial integration and equality without using overtly racist language.
“I go back to the Lee Atwater quote all the time, because it makes the strategy so clear,” says Clark. “If you want to mobilize a base, but you can't speak in honest and unpopular terms, you find ways to remove your language and your approach so you can get more people in that group to buy into your agenda.”
Clark says the wave of legislation to ban certain books or parts of K-12 education because they contain elements of critical race theory—an argument that distorts the true meaning of critical race theory as an academic theory about how systemic racism seeps into all aspects of society — is yet another example of Atwater's strategy at play.
The bans, he says, fall “under this general guise of banning critical race theory [because it’s] something that is harmful, rather than a legal framework for examining race and diversity.” The misrepresentation of what critical race theory is serves as a cover “for banning books that people don't agree with,” Clark says.
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