YOUR
COMMENTSThe tragic deaths of now over a thousand Indigenous
children not only reveals the horrors of Canadian settler colonialism
at the heart of the country’s policies, but it also exposes
how a politics of systemic racism and disposability is reproduced
by the erasure of history. While the genocidal acts committed
against Indigenous people are once again making visible the
crimes of racist state violence, it is crucial for Canadians
to acknowledge how history can be erased by examining not only
their own past but also how a politics of racial cleansing through
an attack on the teaching of history is at work in the United
States.
The genocide
inflicted on Native Americans and Black slaves, the horrors
of Jim Crow, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, among
other historical events is disappearing into a disavowal of
past historical events with the emergence of right-wing policies,
embracing a political and pedagogical language of censorship
and erasure. At work here are attempts to eliminate from public
and higher education any trace of racism committed as part
of its long history of violence against those considered unknowable
and disposable. These efforts are not about education reform
but about institutionalizing bigotry in the schools.
For example,
the Republican Party’s attack on the teaching of critical
race theory in the schools, which they label as “ideological
or faddish” both denies the history of racism as well
as the ways in which persistent racism is enforced systemically
through policy, laws, and institutions. Forbidding the teaching
about racism is now justified with the ludicrous claim of
protecting students from learning about the diverse ways in
which racism persist in American society — a history
labelled as unpatriotic.
This whitening
of history is now largely being reproduced by right-wing attacks
on diversity, critical race programs in the public and higher
education. The fight to censor truth-telling versions of a
history shaped by racism is part of a larger conservative
project to prevent teachers and students from speaking openly
about historical issues that legitimated race-based practices.
It is also an attempt to erase the struggles of those who
resisted and risked their lives in the fight against racism.
What is shared by all of these attempts to censor school curricula
is the claim that critical race theory and other “anti-racist”
programs indoctrinate students and undermine the alleged foundations
of Western Civilization — an argument that has always
been central to a ruthless ideology of colonialism.
Under such circumstances,
education becomes an object of oppression, and a way of deskilling
teachers who address matters of racial inequality and injustice.
Right-wing politicians now use education to discredit any
critical pedagogical approach that enables students to realize
themselves as critical citizens. In doing so, they undermine
and discredit the critical faculties students and others need
to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded
on radical notions of liberty, freedom and equality, and a
nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.”
The current attacks
on critical race theory, if not critical thinking itself are
part of a larger authoritarian attempt to normalize racism,
class inequities and economic inequality while safeguarding
the interests of those who benefit from such inequities. In
pursuit of such a project, Republican Party politicians are
pressing for curricula in some 47 states that teach complacency,
obedience and mindless conformity. They undermine matters
of injustice and the common good in the curricula, and rarely
embrace notions of pedagogy that sharpen a student’s
civic skills, sense of justice, and openness to empathy. They
embrace former president Donald Trump’s claim that teaching
about racism is comparable “to teaching people to hate
our country.”
In light of this
attack on empowering forms of education, there is a need to
rethink and relearn the lessons of history by considering
the role that it can play in educating students and others
in the values of inclusivity, compassion and democracy. This
points to the challenge of interrogating history while addressing
those repressive elements of its past. Central to this task
is the recognition that a democracy cannot exist without informed
citizens.
Given the increasing
visibility of its colonial past and the violence directed
against the most vulnerable of those populations considered
disposable — Indigenous children, Canada must reject
the attacks on historical memory in order to avoid what is
happening in the United States. It must invest in an educational
system that is empowering in its support of racial justice,
and civic culture. If democracy is “to breathe again”
in Canada, history must be an object of critical inquiry rather
than an act of blind reverence.
