Banning CRT is Censorship, Cancel Culture, Communist

Photo by Nonsap Visuals on Unsplash.

South Carolina members of Congress recently wrote to Clemson and University of South Carolina, the state’s largest public universities, urging them to stop teaching critical race theory. Multiple states including Idaho, Florida, Rhode Island and Texas have introduced or passed laws that would ban the teaching of critical race theory and certain wording or rhetoric about systemic racism, and even historic racism, in schools. Former president Donald Trump has called it “toxic propaganda,” and unfortunately, when he voices an opinion on something, certain people listen without questioning, even when his opinion is not based on facts.

I can’t help but wonder how many parents, and even legislators, who are against this theory and the 1619 Project have read even part of these texts. The opening words of the 1619 Project indicate that its aim is to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” Reframe, not rewrite. Consider what it would mean. This is not the language of thought control. This is a thought experiment, and it is comprised of a variety writers whose perspectives and experiences have historically not been a part of our country’s primary narrative.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the (in)famous mind behind the 1619 Project, writes in her contributing essay that “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.” She explains that when “All men are created equal” was written as our country’s creed, this was not the lived reality of enslaved Africans, nor was it the mindset of the authors about those Africans. She writes, “Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.” She writes that “black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers’” (emphasis mine).

What is untrue about any of this? This language places black Americans’ lives, contributions and experiences on equal footing with our traditional historical narrative, not above it, not in direct contradiction to it. And yet somehow Hannah-Jones’s words have come to be twisted to mean that the ideals on which the United States was founded are bad because we did not follow them truly. They have come to be interpreted as implying that the contributions of black Americans are more valuable than those of our traditional Founding Fathers, rather than of similar but unacknowledged importance. They have come to be interpreted as off-balance rather than balancing a patriotic ideology that is already weighted.

As for CRT, I can’t claim to have read every text associated with it, but one of the founding ideologists, Kimberlé Crenshaw, uses very similar phrasing to describe it: “Critical race theory is a practice. It’s an approach … that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.” This sounds like a typical academic theory, something that is used to look at and interpret history in a different way.

Legal prohibition — censorship — of a theory is far more worrying to me than any of the ideas I have read about that are presented in these texts and ideologies. We already teach theories and practices in public schools and universities that may go against our personal creeds or worldviews, even against the ethos of our country: Marxism and communism, fascism and a variety of world religions and spiritual practices. Are students not allowed to form their own conclusions and opinions about these theories and ideas? Shall we cancel these as well? This seems a very poor choice of platform for a party that lobbies for less government intervention and has been vocal about the dangers of cancel culture.

I’ve heard complaints against the public school system that our students are not taught critical thinking skills. This is one of the main conservative criticisms of higher learning institutions and universities, both by members of those institutions such as Jordan Peterson and by people who do not currently attend them. But forbidding the teaching of certain theories sounds like the opposite of teaching students to think for themselves, and the current attempts to do so are operating just like cancel culture.

To put this in perspective, I like to think of the history of Carolina Day as a clearly positive example of correcting the historical record. It is not common knowledge outside this state that the efforts of a small, diverse group of South Carolinians — men who were critics of and rebels against their country of origin — secured one of the most decisive and important victories of the American Revolution.

Is a project to raise awareness of Carolina Day and correct the historical record, as it were, rewriting history? Is the interpretation that it was an influential battle dangerous? Should it be prohibited because it may change how we look at our country’s history by placing emphasis on different people and causing us to rethink other facts in light of this new information? In the same vein, the 1619 Project, and critical race theory, attempt to correct the record with facts about slavery and racism that have been omitted from history books, and about historical figures who were not only heroes but also flawed human beings. Then they offer perspectives that add to our knowledge of history rather than subtracting from it. They suggest an interpretation of information. We might not agree with this interpretation — but we don’t have to, any more than we have to agree with Marx or Mohammed.

What we cannot do is suppress information and thought. The facts must be acknowledged and the interpretations left up to individual minds. Anything more, and we become what we are trying to avoid — and perhaps what we are accused of being.