23 Comments

The Three-Fifths Compromise was an attempt to end slavery in the same way the Trail of Tears was a nice getaway package from the United States government. This coordinated effort to whitewash American history is deeply disturbing to me.

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I think of my teaching days in the 1970s and later in the 1990s. I taught about the Holocaust and how it came about because a class from college that stays with me today taught fully about the Holocaust. No one stopped me. I taught it to a full 6th grade class and then a multiage gifted class. Both were before my own understanding of white privilege or systemic racism. But, it didn't matter. It was about how a country could go from being educated, advanced and modern to killing a whole group of people and thinking they could get away with it. I found children's literature on the subject and taught about the Resistance, about how people let a new leader come to power slowly and over time. Anyway, you are writing about something so important, Judd, and I am angry about these people who want to rewrite actual history and get teachers sanctioned for not going along with it. Thank you.

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I have degree in history. I am from the South. Throughout the 20th Century we were never taught that even the White House was built on the backs of enslaved people nor did I know Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, had a family with Sally Hemmings his slave. As for the Civil War, we were held in awe of statues to the glorious past of the Lost Cause.

AMERICAN History texts were carefully crafted to toot the horn of White America.

Other than hatred of Japan, Japanese were held in concentration camps during WWII so it wasn't just Colonial and Civil War history.

Civil Rights Activists brought about change, but did it change the hearts and minds of those who promoted racism. NO. Many white folk wanted the same old standards of inequality.

They have re-emerged like a plague of locusts funded by dark money and GOP wrath. Makes me sick to my stomach.

Good reporting. Thank you but what will change? I fear it will get worse rather than better.

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Judd, keep up your work to hold these history erasers feet to the fire. These actions are exactly like what has continued to happen since WWII. Racists, White Supremacists, Nazis and their sympathizers push the narrative that the holocaust never actually happened. It did. Just like Slavery and the atrocities that came from it. It happened, it ALL happened.

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It still boggles my mind as to how they successfully created a narrative that is completely false and are now pushing legislation for this nonexistent issue!

That this was allowed to happen without a large enough outcry from those with national voices who know the truth & with the participation of mass media who report w/o ever addressing the lie it’s built upon, is unbelievable!

No one is trying to push CRT into K-12. But here we are with all of these new bills being introduced (& turning into law) to make teachers jobs even harder, which is going to ultimately mean even more teachers walking away from the profession which certainly means an even dumber America in the near future.

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Historical facts such as restrictive covenants and redlining are part of law school real property curricula. Anyone who attended law school in this country must be confused by the attempt to pretend these things didn’t happen. They are part of the historical record, and unless the anti-CRT movement plans to add book burning to its tactics (which wouldn’t surprise me, actually), at least some of these deluded students will find out the truth, eventually. But as offensive as this legislation is, it seems unlikely to be effective, in the long run, because school is only one of many places where students learn. They will continue to learn about the sad legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in this country because it is part of everyone’s lived experience. And if there is a disconnect between what students live, and what they are taught, the credibility of the entire education system will suffer.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught that China didn’t exist because the US didn’t recognize it (or at least that’s what I heard). I remember looking at the world map and thinking that China was awfully big to just pretend it wasn’t there. Slavery was too big to pretend it wasn’t there, so it seems inevitable that the long-term effect of these laws will be to undermine confidence in public education. And we thought we got rid of Betsy DeVoss…

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Excellent article. Coincidentally I read an article this morning in WaPo covering the dismissal of a White (male) high school teacher in Kingsport TN, allegedly for not fostering debate in his current events classroom (or maybe for accidentally fomenting it in his personal finance classroom, hard to tell), which transgressed TN law. It’s particularly painful for this (White, retired woman) lawyer to see such legislation proposed in “live-free-or-die” New Hampshire. At the same time it’s curious to me that no one sees fit to bar discussion of (what used to be called “White”) sex slavery, or even wage slavery, both arguably more relevant in Northern high school classrooms these days than this continual relitigation of the American Civil War. —maybe there’s another way to rehabilitate Marxism?

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Thanks Judd for another enlightening post!

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