The complaint alleges that H.B. 1193 produces a wide range of consequences: To make sure they’re compliant with the law, constitutional law professors must cut out references to the Fourteenth Amendment and to cases about discrimination—a huge branch of American judicial history—from their lectures and even their textbooks. Classes at all levels must proceed without any discussion related to sex and gender identity. Canonical books by canonical American authors—Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and William Faulkner among them—would be subject to de facto bans, because you cannot talk about them, let alone teach them, without getting into race or gender.
The lawsuit also claims that the new law will force a complete revamp of various K–12, postsecondary, and law-school curricula and require fundamental revisions to Mississippi’s educational offerings in history, biology, and English literature, altering education as we know it in the state.
These are terrible outcomes for Mississippi students, and they all result directly from the problem at the heart of H.B. 1193: How can you ban from state classrooms anything that “increases awareness or understanding of issues related to race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or national origin” while still claiming to offer a full education?
For that matter, how can you ban anything “that increases awareness or understanding” of a subject? Isn’t that the entire point of education?
MISSISSIPPI IS ON THE FRONT LINES of the battle over American culture, as we’ve always been. If this law holds, it may serve as a model to other states. Remember that the Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning Roe v. Wade, handed down exactly three years ago today, originated in Mississippi with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
While visiting classrooms to discuss my books, I’ve found that students invariably get into deep conversations with me and one another about slavery, reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the Holocaust.
I was invited to talk about my recent memoir, Where the Angels Lived, during my spring course; the book was made possible by a Fulbright scholarship that gave me an opportunity to teach at the University of Pécs in Hungary, where I researched my mother’s Jewish family. Most of them were murdered in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by white German Christians against Jews. How do you teach about the Holocaust without getting into race, religion, or national heritage?
The answer is that obviously, you can’t.