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Tag: 1619 project
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

Texas Governor’s ‘Patriotic Education’ Law Puts Propaganda Over History

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

When former President Donald Trump, in September 2020, called for mandatory "patriotic education" for students in the United States, Democrat Susan Rice — former national security adviser under President Barack Obama — was appalled and told CNN's Erin Burnett, "I thought I was listening to Mao Tse Tung running Communist China." Republicans, however, haven't abandoned Trump's "patriotic education" idea, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed into law a bill that calls for "patriotic education" in the Lone Star State.

When Abbott signed into law Texas House Bill 2497, a.k.a. the 1836 Project, he declared, "The 1836 Project promotes patriotic education about Texas and ensures that the generations to come understand Texas values." But critics of HB 2497, according to Corpus Christi Caller-Times reporter Kailey E. Hunt, are arguing that "patriotic education" hasn't been clearly defined and fear that it will promote a narrow, rigid definition of patriotism.

Armando Alonzo, an associate history professor at Texas A&M College Station, told the Caller-Times, "What is patriotic education? They haven't really defined it. Does it mean we only select the high points and good points in Texas history? Well, what happens (then) to the other events in Texas history — where historical actors committed offenses and atrocities against ... (the) Native American people and.... the Mexican-American people?"

Shane Gleason, an assistant political science professor at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, told the Caller-Times, "The values chosen were to promote a particular version of Texas history. And indeed the name — the '1836 Project' — is very reminiscent of the '1776 Project' instituted by former President Trump to promote, again — patriotic citizenship, patriotic values, patriotic education. It's an easy way to grab some political points."

Another bill that Abbott recently signed into law was Texas House Bill 3979, which bans the teaching of the New York Times' 1619 Project in public schools. Between HB 3979, HB 2497, and Texas Republicans railing incessantly against Critical Race Theory, one is seeing a pattern of Republicans in that state downplaying the United States' history of racism or trying to pretend that it doesn't exist.

Brian Franklin, associate director for the Southern Methodist University Center for Presidential History, told the Caller-Times why he believes that HB 3979 is even worse than HB 2497.

Franklin explained, "I think there's a reason there was a little bit more pomp and circumstance about signing the 1836 Project than there was for [HB] 3979…. [HB 3979] actually puts some very specific restrictions on what and how teachers can teach in the classroom in the State of Texas. And that's not something that you want to publicize as a politician — that you're going to be limiting what teachers can say and do in the classroom."

When Tenure Becomes A Partisan Issue, Academic Freedom Shrinks

When Tenure Becomes A Partisan Issue, Academic Freedom Shrinks

As a onetime academic, I've always been of two minds about the institution of tenure. In theory, it protects intellectual freedom. In practice, however, junior faculty become so accustomed to keeping their heads down seeking a lifetime sinecure that timidity becomes second nature. They confine their heterodox opinions to the faculty lounge.

So I'm puzzled that a nationally famous journalist like the New York Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones thinks she needs it. The hullaballoo at the University of North Carolina provoked by its Board of Trustees declining to include tenure in its offer of a 5-year, $180,000 per annum contract has become a symbolic struggle on depressingly familiar racial terms. I quite doubt she intends to make a career in Chapel Hill.

Sometimes, however, symbolic struggles are worth having. But do spare me the high-flown rhetoric about UNC's inviolable academic standards. This is the school whose department of African and Afro-American Studies got caught awarding phantom "A" grades to varsity athletes for classes that never met. Literally did not exist.

The scam involved some 3000 students over two decades. Supposedly, UNC's football and basketball coaches knew nothing.

Sure they didn't.

But back to today's racial controversy. Nikole Hannah-Jones, of course, is the author of the Times's celebrated, and controversial "The 1619 Project" — an ambitious attempt to reassess American history through the shame of slavery.

It's UNC's Hussman School of Journalism that has offered her the job. And that, in turn, has drawn the interest of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman, the school's namesake, whose $20 million gift to his alma mater ensures that his phone calls and emails will always be answered.

Three big things trouble Hussman about the "1619 Project." First, its monthly magazine-style blend of fact and opinion, which the publisher finds unseemly. But that ship has sailed. Times readers know what they're getting. More substantively, Hussman objects to what serious historians have called into question about the work: Its assertion that the Revolutionary War was fought largely to prevent the abolition of slavery in the 13 colonies.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Hussman was greatly influenced by a Politico column by Northwestern professor Leslie M. Harris headlined "I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me." Harris had warned that the insupportable claim would give critics an excuse to disregard an otherwise important work, which is "exactly what happened."

But should a piece of journalism whose headline allegation is somewhere between dubious and downright false be lionized? OK, so Hannah-Jones has earned a Pulitzer Prize. But would she be offered tenure in a first-rate history department? Probably not.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who has publicly criticized her work, put it this way: "There are, no doubt, reasons to object to awarding a tenured position on the faculty to Hannah-Jones, in which scholarship and qualifications are the primary considerations. The substance of her work on 'The 1619 Project' is controversial. So is her choice to sometimes dismiss and demean her critics instead of engaging with their arguments on the merits."

All too often, it goes like this:

"You're wrong."

"You're white."

The End.

Wilentz nevertheless emphasizes that the decision is the UNC faculty's to make, not politically-appointed trustees or alumni donors.

Yeah, well, good luck with that. UNC is a publicly-funded university, a liberal bastion in a largely conservative state.

If Hannah-Jones has become a partisan lighting rod, it's a role she's clearly chosen. And yes, it's all about race.

As for mega-donor Hussman, he's found himself pillored in Slate as "a mini-Rupert Murdoch," which surely seems unfair to anybody familiar with the newspapers he publishes. The Democrat-Gazette's news coverage is vastly superior to any newspaper in the region, and Hussman has risked a lot by offering IPad subscriptions (complete with IPads) to cut printing costs.

I wrote a column there myself during the Clinton and George W. Bush years. Although I'm confident he disagreed with most of my opinions, Hussman never interfered. When the publisher says he resents Hannah-Jones's assertion that "Black Americans fought back alone," he's thinking about white Arkansas journalists who risked everything (and won Pulitzer prizes) championing racial justice from the 1957 Central High integration crisis onward.

One such, the late Paul Greenberg, edited the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. We didn't agree about much else, but Greenberg stood strong for racial justice at a time when it could get a man killed.

Indeed, he was the editor and Hussman the publisher when I got myself unceremoniously dumped from a half-time teaching job in the midst of several columns lampooning the propaganda barrage used to sell the Iraq war.

"This isn't conservatism," I'd written. "It's utopian folly and a prescription for endless war." The dean said the college had no funds to pay me, transparently false. Colleagues pretended they didn't know I'd been sent away. Students were told I'd resigned.

You see, I didn't have tenure.

Republicans Drop Criminal Justice Reform, Revert To Reactionary ‘Law And Order’

Republicans Drop Criminal Justice Reform, Revert To Reactionary ‘Law And Order’

That didn’t last long.

For a while, it looked as though the distance between the parties had narrowed on the issue of criminal justice reform. Bipartisan cooperation passed the First Step Act, a small step indeed toward remedying America’s mass incarceration crisis that disproportionately, in a historically skewed system, burdens minorities and the poor in everything from arrests to sentencing. Increasingly, though, the rhetoric resembles a partisan return to form.

But is the public changing?

With a nudge from viral videos and reasons to doubt the “official” story, as well as attention paid to inequities built into the history of policing in America, more aware citizens may have evolved more than politicians.

For past presidential candidates like Richard Nixon, “law and order” became mantra as well as code, a promise to protect a silent (white) majority from young people protesting war, African Americans demanding equality, anyone looking to shake up the status quo. It was a page from a very old playbook — and it worked for those afraid of change.

You can hear the refrain, amplified, from the current president, when he bolsters law enforcement on the border and speaks of an invasion. Donald Trump may take a cue from “consultants” such as Kanye West and Kim Kardashian when he intervenes in the individual case of a nonviolent drug offender or feuds with Sweden over a jailed rapper. But the president has always seemed more comfortable when he has advised police officers not to be “too nice” to suspects or maligned cities as criminal cesspools — even when the city was El Paso, Texas, relatively peaceful until a white domestic terrorist echoing the president’s words blasted its tranquility to bits.

With 2020 looming, other members of the administration and other Republicans are falling in line and reverting to the past.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, so eager to release police departments from agreed-upon consent decrees to reform corruption and misconduct, had nothing on successor William Barr.

In a recent speech to the Fraternal Order of Police conference in New Orleans, Barr took a partisan blowtorch to the legitimacy of duly elected prosecutors, saying the appointment of progressive district attorneys is “demoralizing to law enforcement and dangerous to public safety” because they “spend their time undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook, and refusing to enforce the law.”

In a column in The Washington Post, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Democratic nominee for commonwealth’s attorney in Arlington, Mark Gonzalez, district attorney for Nueces County, Texas, and Wesley Bell, county prosecutor for St. Louis County, Missouri, hit back, writing: “We are dedicated to safety and justice. We understand that our current criminal legal system throws away too many people, breaks up too many families, destroys too many communities and wastes too much money. And we refuse to accept that a wealthy democracy cannot figure out how to keep its people safe without criminalizing as many things as possible, prosecuting as hard as possible and punishing people for as long as possible.”

These are officials who campaigned on the promise to respect all citizens instead of reflexively treating entire populations as potential perps. As someone who grew up in an urban neighborhood that was at once under protected and over policed, I recognize the challenges these prosecutors were elected to alleviate.

Because of videos and education, the general public and those not affected by unequal treatment have learned, as well, of the names and cases of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile — and the list goes on. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision not to run for another term was hastened by the delayed release of the video of Officer Jason Van Dyke, now serving time for his crime, shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times.

When Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City officer who placed Eric Garner in an illegal chokehold before he died, recently was fired, the police union president was the loudest voice objecting to the move, and now Patrick Lynch is hinting at a work slowdown in response. To those haunted by the voice of Garner saying “I can’t breathe” 11 times and the sight of officers and EMT personnel standing by, Pantaleo was lucky no charges were filed.

Props must also be given to efforts such as The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which examines, it says, “the consequences of slavery” and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. Its all-too-true stories draw the line from injustices then to those that persist, including the fact that law enforcement throughout the country’s history was often the brutal enforcer of repressive policies.

In the 2020 presidential race, Democratic candidates are not afraid to be vocal about criminal justice and police reform plans. In fact, candidates have had to explain their past records as mayors and prosecutors and, in front-runner Joe Biden’s case, his role in helping to write the 1994 crime bill, acknowledged to have played a large role in the mass incarceration that followed.

It’s a big change from when Democrats were reluctant to speak out, afraid of being judged “soft on crime.”

So, while for a moment it seemed Democrats and Republicans might be moving closer to a tentative truce on the issue, unfortunately the importance of seeking a more just “justice” is becoming, like so much else, another opportunity to disagree.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.