This stark new state of political affairs presents an urgent challenge to our institutions of higher education. There is a constant tension within and outside of these institutions; most notably, between the reassertion of white dominance and the retention of power on one end of the spectrum, and the struggle to change systems, culture, and power relationships on the other. Scholars and citizens residing at points in between these two poles appear to be waning in their leadership capacities and influence, signaling a profound conceptual breaking point. This breaking point is what now imperils American democracy, as has become unmistakably clear during the campaign of state-sponsored censorship targeting critical race theory. The fervor to elect conservative school board members nationwide under the guise of reforming the public education system is at bottom a campaign to resurrect a mythic past of untroubled white impunity; it promotes a revisionist American history intended to erase America’s continuing legacy of racial hierarchy, subordination, and oppression. The scapegoating tactics targeting CRT are plainly bids to whitewash history in the service of a contemporary agenda of antidemocratic racial retrenchment—they seek to disempower and disfranchise minoritized people while distracting populist voters from seeking meaningful economic, social, legal, and political reforms.
One telling illustration the political goal of this distraction campaign is hiding in plain sight: the stated objective of this anti-truth movement is to “abolish critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project’ from the public school curriculum.” In other words, the prime directives that could not be accomplished by EO 13950 are now getting approved as state legislation; specifically, through measures known as punitive memory laws.
Memory laws come in different types and are enacted to address the historical record or the shared perception of the past. Memory laws can be used to achieve varied purposes. With respect to EO 13950 and state legislation banning or proposing to ban CRT, these measures seek to ban a negative perception of a violent past, in this case America’s history with slavery. These types of memory laws are undemocratic, as they are imposed “to limit public debate on the national past by banning oppositional or minority views, in contrast to the principles of free speech and deliberative democracy.” Memory laws have the potential to create a body of legally defined and legally enforced knowledge that a government—in this case, state governments endorsing bans on the teaching of CRT—protects from public scrutiny. This act of intellectual isolation becomes in short order an act of intellectual quarantine, removing the stigmatized knowledge from the realm of historical dispute. In this case, state legislation proposing bans on teaching CRT are meant to elevate a whitewashed history of America’s complicity with slavery and genocide, generally, and its maintenance of systemic racism, oppression, and subordination, specifically.