Opinion | It's not racism. It's anti-antiracism. - The Washington Post
By: Paul Waldman (Washington Post)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
When you see some of the positions taken by the Republicans running for president on issues that touch upon race, it can be hard to ascribe to them anything but the ugliest motives.
Why, for instance, would Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence each announce their intention to change the name of an Army post to honora Confederate general? Why would DeSantis advocate for new school standards in his state that appear to present slavery as a brief and salutary job training program?
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Some will simply answer, "Racism." But there's a more complicated answer that better explains what's happening on the right.The true commitment of today's Republican Party is not to racism (though there are plenty of genuine racists who thrill to what the GOP offers, and especially to former president Donald Trump).It is to what is best described as anti-antiracism.
In a sense, anti-antiracism is its own ideology. It holds that racism directed at minorities is largely a thing of the past; that whatever racism doesexist is a product only of individual hearts and not of institutions and systems; that efforts to ameliorate racism and promote diversity are both counterproductive and morally abhorrent; and, most critically, that those efforts must not only be stopped but also rolled back.
Listen to conservative rhetoric on book banning, affirmative action, teaching history or any of the ways race touches their war on "wokeness," and you hear this theme repeated: We must stop talking and thinking about racism, and most of all we must stop trying to do anything about racism.
Virtually all racists, of course, would also beanti-antiracists. But there are also millions of people who are not racist yet who are fervent anti-antiracists. That's the conclusion of some fascinating research from a pair of political scientists, Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer.
Their research explores people's agreement with ideas such as "As a country, we have done everything that we should do to equalize wealth and income between Black people and White people," and "People these days can't speak their minds without someone accusing them of racism."
Adherence to these kind of anti-antiracist ideashas become "a matter of partisan identity," going to the core of "what it means to be a Republican," Wetts told me. "More than 80 percent of White Republicans endorse these views at very high levels." In fact, in Wetts and Willer's analysis, the only variable that predicted support for Trump more strongly than anti-antiracism was whether you identified as a Republican.
That helps explain why Republican candidates are so determined to call attention to their efforts to dictate what can be said about race in classrooms, to punish companies for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), or even to undo attempts to stop honoring the Confederacy.
Those efforts are happening on both the national and local levels. In Missouri, for instance, a new conservative majority on a suburban school board last weekrevoked a resolution the board had passed in 2020 to "promote racial healing." It might not have much practical impact, but they were determined to make a point.
For some people, "opposition to antiracism is a way of expressing racial animus without explicitly endorsing it," Wetts said. For others it's about "distaste, anger and frustration with antiracists themselves," an expression of revulsion against liberals and everything they want to do. Anti-antiracism is one more way to own the libs.
Feelings have become central to the way conservatives think about race; it's no accident that many of the laws regarding critical race theory passed in conservative states explicitly outlaw discussions in schools that could make students feel "guilt" or "discomfort." Anti-antiracism is fueled by White people's unease with the growing diversity of American society, the knowledge that they've lost their dominant position — and to boot, liberals keep trying to make them feel bad.
But most of the anti-antiracism efforts are meant to win the support of people who have little or no personal experience with the supposed excesses of antiracism.
Their primary audience is "people whose life experiences never collide with this kind of antiracism stuff," says Ashley Jardina, a political scientist and author of "White Identity Politics." The states that have passed laws limiting discussions of race in the classroom "have long had pretty conservative school boards and state legislatures that dictate what's being taught" in public schools, Jardina says, so students were already getting an extremely thin education on America's racial history. The party's base is White people without college degrees; most of them never took a class on Black history or had to sit through DEI training.
This is a vital part of the anti-antiracism picture: Though anti-antiracists are convincedthey are beset on all sides by liberals demanding they atone for racism they believe is an artifact of history, they're only likely to encounter critical race theory or DEI when watching Fox News or listening to conservative talk radio. Wetts and Willer's research shows that anti-antiracism is highly correlated with consumption of right-wing media.
It is easy to see why Republican politicians think anti-antiracism is so potent. It allows people to claim a commitment to equality while opposing policies meant to achieve actual equality. It enables them to proclaim their own victimhood, which has become absolutely central to the conservative worldview. And it reinforces borders of racial identity, which can be a powerful motivating force in politics.
Which is why all the GOP presidential candidates — even the non-White ones — will trumpet their commitment to anti-antiracism, even if they won't call it by name.By now, the Republican base expects nothing less.
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I favor anti-anti-antiracism.
Why would DeSantis advocate for new school standards in his state that appear to present slavery as a brief and salutary job training program?
Why are so many progressives and the journalists that cater to them so proudly and brazenly dishonest? Or is the whole lot incapable of reading?
As if the absurdity of focusing on one sentence to encapsulate a 216 page document isn't bad enough, Harris and her parrots can't even read that sentence correctly. As Professor Sheehan explains:
Progressive have manufactured an issue based on an inability to read or think logically and seem fine with that.
There is no good reason to include the 'benefit' thing in the standards. Which means there was likely a bad reason.
Maybe they were just following the AP example.
Other than it's true?
Why do you oppose Florida, and only Florida, teaching facts to kids? Illinois teaches kids the same.
nymag.com /intelligencer/2023/07/desantis-and-scott-struggle-over-anti-anti-racism-movement.html
DeSantis and Black Republicans Struggle for the Soul of the Anti-Anti-Racism Movement
By Ed Kilgore 5-7 minutes
When he criticizes the Black Republican validators of the GOP’s racial righteousness as woke, DeSantis is playing with fire.
Ron DeSantis is playing with fire. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty
If Ron DeSantis is famous for anything these days, it’s for opposing any public- or even private-sector program or activity based on fighting discrimination against racial (or for that matter, gender or sexual orientation) minority groups. Florida under the DeSantis administration is, as the governor regularly boasts , “where woke goes to die.”
Even Republicans who aren’t big fans of DeSantis seem pleased by this posture. So you wouldn’t figure he’d have much to fear in the way of criticism by other Republicans (pretty much his entire universe at the moment, as one might expect of someone locked in a cage match for the presidential nomination) for being insensitive to Black folks and their distinctive concerns. But DeSantis is currently locked into a fractious and politically perilous argument with prominent Black Republicans about the new un-woke standards he has imposed on Florida schools for teaching Black history, and especially the legacy of slavery. At first, the governor and his mouthpieces appeared to take the mild criticism of him expressed by Black Florida congressman Byron Donalds as just another example of a Trump ally smearing him, and they fired back without inhibition, as Forbes reported on Friday:
Then another Black congressman who supports Trump escalated the conflict, per Politico :
But the brouhaha reached a whole new level when a Black member of Congress who is not in Trump’s camp, 2024 presidential candidate Tim Scott , weighed in and, as Politico notes, and DeSantis whaled away at him, too:
DeSantis is really playing with fire here. He does not appear to fully appreciate the important role the Black Republicans he’s trashing play in protecting the self-image of white Republicans. As the Washington Post ’s Paul Waldman explains , white Republicans really don’t want anyone to confuse them with racists:
Black Republican pols (and more generally, Black conservative voices) regularly reassure white brethren that their own successes in life and politics demonstrate America’s fairness, and that despising anti-discrimination measures (from affirmative action in college admissions to corporate DEI programs) is not only kosher, but essential to the “color-blindness” that is the only real guarantor of equality. While nonwhite candidates Scott, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy have other qualities attractive to Republican voters, the value of their validation of white anti-wokeness as non-racist is hard to overestimate.
To put it another way, DeSantis is engaged in a struggle for the soul of the GOP’s anti-anti-racist movement with people who are much more credible than he is. And worse yet, when he goes out of his way to insult Black Republicans, he’s running the risk of looking actually racist — and only Donald Trump can get away with that.
It depends. 33 years ago, Illinois passed a law requiring public schools to teach a unit of African American history. But that law lacks an enforcement mechanism, and the state doesn't track when Black history is taught or what is being taught.
There are no state standards, no required textbooks or curriculum. Each teacher does their own thing. Who knows what's being taught?
Good point. Illinois is just not as progressive as Florida
This article is not about Illinois. It is about anti-anti racism.