DeSantis, Youngkin and Teaching White Supremcay

In Republican controlled statehouses in the South and in Virginia's governor's mansion we are witnessing the steady effort to "white wash" and "de-gay" history courses and other aspects of public school and college curriculums to please the ugliest elements of the GOP base and, in Glenn Youngkin to please his masters at The Family Foundation, an organization that traces its antecedents to the "Massive Resistance" movement which closed public schools in Virginia rather than integrate the schools. There is, of course, a precedent for this effort to censor and delete anything that offends the prejudices of Christofascist and white supremacists (the two are largely one and the same which is why matters of race and LGBT people are both being erased), namely the pre-Civil War and post-Reconstruction South where materials critical to slavery and the "Lost Cause" were censored and simply removed from school textbooks. Thus, Ron DeSantis and Youngkin have not created anything new, but rather opted to pick of the pro-slavery and white supremacy agenda of the past.  Of course, this very action underscores the need for accurate history, the good, the bad and the ugly.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

As you have probably seen by now, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has signed another bill that limits classroom instruction on racism and racial inequality. This one applies to colleges and universities, banning so-called divisive concepts from general education courses. I mentioned all this in my Friday column, tying it to the broader Republican effort to give public institutions the freedom to censor.

As it happens, I’m reading the historian Donald Yacovone’s most recent book, “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity,” on the relationship between history education and the construction of white supremacist ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s an interesting book, filled with compelling information about the racism that has shaped the teaching of American history. . . . . in one section on Southern textbook writers and the demand for pro-slavery pedagogy, Yacovone relays a voice that might sound awfully familiar to modern ears.

As Yacovone explains, pre-Civil War textbook production was dominated by writers from New England. Some southerners had, by the 1850s, become “increasingly frustrated with the ‘Yankee-centric’ quality of the historical narratives.” They wanted texts “specifically designed for Southern students and readers.” In particular, Southern critics wanted textbooks that gave what they considered a fair and favorable view to the “subject of the weightiest import to us of the South … I mean the institution of Negro slavery,” as one critic put it.

Part of the reason for Southern elite frustration, and the reason they wanted history textbooks tailored to their views, was the rise of pro-slavery ideology among slaveholders whose lives and livelihoods were tied to the institution. It helped as well that slavery had become — against the expectations of many Americans, including the nation’s founders — incredibly lucrative in the first decades of the 19th century. By the time Yacovone begins his narrative, Southern slaveholders had moved from the regretful acceptance of slavery that characterized earlier generations of slaveholding elites to an embrace of slavery as a “positive good” . . . .

It was in this context that J.W. Morgan, a Virginian contributor to the southern journal De Bow’s Review, excoriated northern history textbooks and called for censorship of anything that hinted of antislavery belief. Here’s Yacovone summarizing Morgan’s argument:

Books that did not praise the “doctrines” that ‘we now believe’ should be banned and never come “within the range of juvenile reading.” . . . . Even spelling books could not be trusted, as they contained covert condemnations of “our peculiar institutions.”

What I find striking about this is not just that it is a prime example of the hostility to free expression that marked the slaveholding South — southern elites instituted gag rules in Congress and prevented the circulation of antislavery materials through the mail in their states — but that Morgan is as concerned with the effect of abolitionist arguments on the “minds of youth” as he is with their effect on enslaved Americans themselves.

It was vital, to Morgan, that the slaveholding South reproduce its beliefs and ideologies in the next generation. Education was the tool, and anything that emphasized the equality of all people and challenged existing hierarchies as unnatural and unjust was the threat.

Truly, some things have not changed a century and a half latter.  The far right manufactured "parents' rights" movement that Youngkin used successfully, is really nothing more than a dusted off version of the white supremacists of old.