Abbott's Agenda Says Yes to Conspiracy Theories, No To History

(This is the third article in a three-story series examining critical race theory: What it is, why there's opposition to it, and whether its components pose a danger to students.)

DALLAS, TX — How does a society thrive over generations when its leaders deliberately hide the truth and expose children to the craziest of fantasies?

That's part of what should be on lawmakers' minds as they consider Gov. Greg Abbott's special session agenda. While the governor's restrictive voting laws are — rightly — consuming much of the media oxygen right now, other action items on his agenda could have devastating long-term consequences.

Consider that, on the one hand, Abbott seeks to penalize social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter for their restrictions on "free speech." Such speech includes QAnon notions that America is being run by a "deep state" cabal, that Democrats want to destroy America, and that liberals are pedophile blood drinkers.

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On the other hand, the governor is deeply concerned that critical race theory — which is a construct more than a curriculum and has never been taught in a K-12 school anywhere in the nation — could brainwash kids into hating their country.

Facts Don't Lie

His fear is that if school kids learn about the reality of Japanese internment during World War II, the fact that the very land Americans call their home was systematically stolen from Native Americans and built up by Africans imported at gunpoint to work for free throughout their lives — well, those kids won't admire America quite as much as they should.

Is that a problem with students? Is that a problem with curriculum? Or is that a problem with the sad truth that America has a very spotty, to say the least, record of racial justice?

As stated earlier, maybe the people who don't want school kids to learn about race history only want what they believed the founders promised: a nation where white Protestant heterosexual men of means were first among equals. After all their writings about freedom, it's well known that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and their contemporaries were people who owned other human beings and liked it that way. They also had no grand vision of ever sharing power with women.

That argument is now moot, according to local historian Dr. Michael Phillips, the author of the first comprehensive history of race relations in Dallas, "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001."

"The country created by the founders simply will never exist again," he says. "The founders did create a racial dictatorship. The irony is that the society the founders created was so economically stratified that some of those neo-Nazi marchers would have never climbed the ladder to 'the middle class.'"

If You Could Turn Back Time

Phillips explains that those advances were "in many ways a creation of early 20th century progressives, through FDR's New Deal, and LBJ's Great Society — eras of political reform the right wishes they could erase. When people yearn for dictatorships to create 'order,' they always picture themselves in charge. They are often greatly disappointed. "

Indiana University professor Lasana Kazembe amplifies Phillips' point: "That’s what really keeps [the far-right] up at night. This central question: How do we maintain White majority rule in an increasingly multicultural nation even as we [White Americans] are getting older and grayer? The answers to those questions scare the MAGA hats off of the heads of the White ruling elite and therefore they’re in a revolt against the future."

The most recent census data seems to bear this out. For the first time in recorded history, the number of white people in the United States is in decline. That can only fuel fears that the country is being lost and, to use the antiquated term, "mongrelized" by intermarriage.

What will encouraging crazy theories about liberals being blood-drinking pedophiles while tamping down historical facts do to successive generations, if these bills are allowed to become law? Would white conservatives truly prefer to reject democracy if it means sharing power with people they detest?

Can't We All Get Along?

That, according to professor Kazembe, "serves the ends of empire and White rule. The latter aligns squarely with preserving a White cultural ethos and providing the kind of psychocultural comfort through which Whites can continue the tradition of conveying unearned and undue privilege, status and resources to successive generations. For Whites collectively, the latter is far more attractive."

The problem is, no one sees a way forward to racial reconciliation, or a figurehead who could exhort Americans back to the idea that we have more in common than what divides us. There's no Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Kennedy brother on the political horizon, and even Barack Obama seems to be a more polarizing than unifying presence in the public arena.

"I’m not sure there was ever an era in which there was a person everyone trusted," Phillips opines. "My racist, Mobile-born dad who was born in the Jim Crow era and who fought in Vietnam, thought that Walter Cronkite — the “most trusted man in America” — was a communist. Many white Southerners in the Jim Crow era hated the establishment media and described it in antisemitic terms."

He sees the current situation as more cyclical. "The media landscape has fragmented quite a bit in the last three decades," Phillips observes, "but what one heard on the evening news in the 1950s and 1960s wasn’t always what one heard from the pulpit, at the bar, or on the street corner. I think we exaggerate the consensus of the past. Conspiracy theories fed the Red Scare after World War I the America First movement in the 1930s and McCarthyism in the 1950s."

Phillips says we're in another revolutionary era, "and revolutions are periods in which the establishment is widely distrusted, right and left. It’s important to also remember that consensus can be wrongheaded and dangerous. Almost every serious person with authority in the 1960s thought that military intervention in Vietnam was a great idea."

It's true that there's no leader on the national stage who could call us to "the better angels of our nature," as Abraham Lincoln impelled. "We don’t have a Martin Luther King or a Nelson Mandela now, but that absence is the norm," says Phillips. "I think great movements come from the bottom, not the top, and that local leaders, often unheralded, end up being the key figures who change the world in the long run."

Ultimately, Kazembe muses that "history is a heavy burden. It does not forgive those who lose their way. Two immutable forces over which none of us have control are time and gravity. In the end, I think the panic-stricken, non-critical revolt against the future will not stand the test of time."

(Here is the first article in the series.)

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