Make history White again

Anti-DEI laws are an attempt to control the national narrative.

When I was in school, we learned a very narrow and sanitized version of history. We glossed over slavery, though we didn’t ignore it, and downplayed the atrocities. Our books largely forgave the Confederates, hailing the leaders as heroes, even if their cause was misguided. Reconstruction was portrayed as a heavy-handed attempt at forced submission led by corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags. We never spent any time learning about Black political leaders and elected officials of the late 19th century. We barely heard about the rise of Jim Crow at all.

I didn’t learn about the Wilmington Coup until I was long out of college. I didn’t know African Americans held political power in the state. I didn’t learn about George Henry White, the last African American Member of Congress from North Carolina for more than 90 years, until I was well into adulthood. We memory-holed much of our state history.

We learned a version of the Myth of the Old South. The country was built by brilliant White men with little input from African Americans, women, or any other citizens. We learned about Black leaders like Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in isolation, not as part of an ongoing struggle for freedom and justice that defined the American experience for African Americans. White leaders were always the real protagonists.

Republicans want to get back to that view of history. In North Carolina, the GOP Senate at the urging of Senate President Pro-tem Phil Berger passed an anti-DEI law that restricts speech and attempts to sanitize our complex history. Republicans are worried about making White students feel bad about themselves. They truly fit the definition of snowflakes. To quote conservative influencer Ben Shapiro, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Republicans have made “DEI” a rallying cry for conservative grievance. To hear them tell it, the government uses Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs to discriminate against White people. Their response is to ban certain concepts and words. Their restrictions are vague and hostile to the First Amendment.

To be fair to Republicans, they are able to push their anti-DEI agenda, in part, because of overreach from progressives. Some DEI trainings do the same thing the anti-DEI legislation does: suppress speech. They try to force a point of view and require so-called inclusive language that is often more divisive than unifying.

Helping people recognize their own prejudices is good. Restricting their speech is not, especially if the restrictions are imposed by governments or institutions. Words or phrases become unacceptable because people come to recognize them as disrespectful or insulting, not because they are prohibited. Government never legally banned the n-word. Society decided it was unacceptable and made people who use it social pariahs.

Progressives never passed legislation banning words or concepts. That’s what Republicans are doing now. They’re using the government to foment a backlash to a demand for civil rights. The movement to ban DEI is anti-free speech and reeks of authoritarianism. Anytime the government is banning concepts, they’re trying to restrict thought.

Republicans aren’t just trying to control words. They are trying to control the historical narrative. They don’t want students to learn about our flaws as a country or how we overcame them. They don’t want them to learn about the lingering impact of Jim Crow on many African American communities or the lasting damage of stripping land and dignity from Native Americans. The don’t want students to learn about the Stonewall riots or the AIDS epidemic.

In doing so, they deny teaching students the real power of the American story. We are a nation built on ideas and aspirations. Our story is the struggle to offer freedom, justice, and equality to all people. We are a great country because we work to overcome discrimination and prejudice to give everyone a fair shake, regardless of how often we fall short. This is how we make a more perfect union.

Pretending we haven’t discriminated and oppressed our own people is not doing our children any favors. They need to know where we came from in order to know who we are. They need to learn as much from our mistakes as they learn from our triumphs. They don’t need the legislature censoring their education.