Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, White people claim that King wanted them to be “colorblind,” yet King consistently discussed the legacy of enslavement and the need to address structural racism, topics now banned in one-third of the states. Right-wing groups such as Moms for Liberty fight to ban books because including them in the curriculum “makes children hate their country, each other, and/or themselves.” [Painting by Jonathan Harris]
Republicans cherry-pick King’s words to support their “anti-woke wars” and opposition to “critical race theory.” Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis claims that teaching about the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. is “basically teaching kids to hate our country and to hate each other based on race.” The conservative explanation of CRT causes condemnation of all lessons and books on racism and gender although CRT theory is used only in higher education and legal circles to discuss race as a social concept.
The ban on CRT, according to DeSantis’ handpicked state Board of Education, protects students from education that will “distort historical events, but the state policy prevents students from learning accurate U.S. history. An Oklahoma law blocks teachings that cast anyone as “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” or make them feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or sex.
The King family pointed out the misuse of King’s words. His youngest daughter, Bernice, said:
“The word ‘woke’ has been repurposed to deter the very work that people focused on awareness about injustice and on the urgent need to eradicate injustice were centering the word to accomplish. Many will distort a positive narrative so that white supremacy can persist.”
Blacks created the term “woke,” which white conservatives use in a pejorative manner, as a defensive survival tactic against police brutality and other unjust societal dangers toward the Black community. In 1923, the term was a call to Blacks to become more socially and politically conscious. Conservative whites co-opted the term to describe any progressive approach—indeed, any traditional education about racism in curriculum used for decades.
The conservatives’ decision to prevent anything “woke” expresses their desire for people to be unaware of political injustice. The purpose of “anti-woke” laws is to erase its context, to convince people that inequalities don’t exist and therefore don’t need to change. Instead, laws prevent any understanding of racism so that White people won’t be “uncomfortable.” Conservatives use “woke” as a slur and an attack just as they used “cancel culture” in the past when they themselves tried to cancel culture and identify themselves as victims.
King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written four months before the 1963 March in Washington and five years before his assassination, described an obligation to collect facts “to determine whether injustices exist” from police brutality, wealth inequality, and antidemocratic threats to voting rights. In the letter, he rebuffs “unjust laws” and white moderates with a “shallow understanding” of injustice.
Racism is one of the three greatest threats to the progress of society, according to King. In 1967, he said, “Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on western civilization.” The current hatred for teachers, books, and education discussing racism blew up when protesters marched against the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
Recently, House far-right Republicans have discussed the eradication of “woke” education in the military. Before their election, they promised to investigate Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because he thinks West Point students should be educated, including about racial issues, about different viewpoints.
DeSantis described Florida as “where woke goes to die.” With the death of “woke,” people become more ignorant and more willing to vote for conservatives. They also become more violent as demonstrated by their behavior in school board meetings and at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They fight for limiting rights to only heterosexual white people. “Anti-wokers” take positions as education leaders, setting statewide policies and educational standards. Their control censors books from classrooms and libraries while mandating curriculum that excludes teaching about minorities and unconstitutionally promoting evangelical Christianity in schools. Teachers and librarians are no longer professionals: they simply do what they are told.
Misrepresentations spread by conservatives:
“It’s not true … that the United States was built on stolen land.” – Ron DeSantis. [European settlers appropriated land occupied by Native Americans with little or no renumeration.]
Texas conservatives wanted to replace the word “slavery” with “involuntary relocation” in the social studies curriculum. They failed. (Earlier, Texas textbooks described slaves as “workers.”)
CRT is “state sponsored and state-sanctioned racism… America is not a racist nation.” – Former VP Mike Pence
Slavery was a “necessary evil” to build the nation—the thinking of the Founding Fathers. – Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)
White people are not responsible for Black enslavement, according to a South Dakota law requiring this ideology in school curriculum. Education can also not include topics about Native Americans topics and the history of their oppression in the South Dakota territory.
[visual – Book banning and guns]
When CRT was originally banned, conservatives claimed that they were going after only rascism materials; within the past year, however, the censorship broadened to LGBTQ materials, anything about “sex,” and whatever else makes conservatives “uncomfortable.” An Oklahoma library canceled a Sexual Assault Awareness Month program and the inaugural Shameless Romancebook club meeting. Instead of waiting for book challenges, administrators are simply stealing books from school library shelves.
“Woke” will continue in the courts. In mid-November, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against Florida’s Stop WOKE Act renamed the Individual Freedom Act, temporarily blocking the law restricting teaching about systemic racism in public school. The judge ruled that the law violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by preventing some viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting “unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints” favored by the State of Florida. State lawyers argued public school teachers don’t have First Amendment rights in the classroom because they are mouthpieces of the state.
The judge called the law “dystopian.” It banned teaching that people are “privileged or oppressed” solely because of their race, national origin, or sex and that a person’s race, national origin, or sex can predispose the person to biases, “whether consciously or unconsciously.” An expert on McCarthyism called these laws comparable with redbaiting and scare tactics in the “Second Red Scare” of the 1950s.
DeSantis has a new system to prevent higher education from teaching about systemic racism. He appointed five trustees to a politically progressive liberal arts school in Sarasota, the New College of Florida, and created a solid conservative majority on the board. One appointee, Christopher Rufo, started the battle against CRT two years ago. Other appointees are from the conservative Claremont College leading the MAGA movement, an editor of a conservative Catholic magazine, the cofounder of a Florida Christian school which uses textbooks from Bob Jones University Press for a “Biblical worldview” to history and creationism, and MAGA Candace Owen who threatened to kill Dr. Anthony Fauci if he “came at [her] kid with a vaccine.”
On the school’s website is standard “diversity, equity and inclusion” language, but the school also teaches the classics, Western history, and other approved “anti-woke” classes. The vast majority of its almost 300 independent study projects listed for the semester are in science with many of them traditional topics from the humanities. Yet a website announced views considered radical left such as events during Black History Month. Jonathan Chait wrote:
“[DeSantis] is not seeking to protect or restore free speech, but to impose controls of his own liking.”
Chait compared the “anti-wokeism” to the conservative institutional takeover in Hungary under the charge of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, cited as a model by the governor’s spokesperson at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami. With his single-party, anti-democratic rule, Orbán controls the judiciary, media, and elections.
Rufo plans “a top-down restructuring” of the college as his first step to “reconquer public institutions all over the United States.” He has these goals:
- Abolish “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and replace it with “equality, merit, and colorblindness.”
- Restructure the academic departments to reflect the new pedagogical approach.
- Hire new faculty with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles.
- Establish a graduate school for training teachers in classical education.
DeSantis and Rufo plan to model New College after the conservative Christian college, Hillsboro; one of DeSantis new trustees is Hillsdale dean Matthew Spalding. Recent Hillsboro speakers discussed the January 6 “hoax,” ways that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rigged the 2020 election, and the DOJ “persecution” of law-abiding patriots. Rufo accused DeSantis’ opponents and other progressives of “grooming” and insinuated public schools are filled with child molesters.
That’s the direction of public education—book bannings, revisionist history, and QAnon conspiracy theories. Less than a month ago, a survey of 2,000 people finds that 73 percent oppose banning books and 43 percent have looked for challenged or banned books to read during the year. Legislators’ next step is punishing “woke” corporations speaking out for social justice, but 71 percent of the population oppose these possible laws. GOP legislators, however, have a history of ignoring their constituents’ wishes.
By 2011, 94 percent of the U.S. population were favorable toward Martin Luther King Jr. If he were alive today, however, laws in one-third of the states would keep him from expressing his views in school.