GREENBELT, Md.—Now that they are in power in the White House, the white nationalist U.S. government is purging the nation’s schools of anything, including books, curriculum, and people who refuse to literally whitewash U.S. history. After attacking alleged “woke” policies in government institutions for years the right wing is going on a real thought control drive of its own that is telling the nation’s schools, teachers and students what they are allowed to read, say and even think.
The Teachers (AFT) and the American Sociological Association are suing in federal court in Greenbelt, Md., to stop the Trump government from forcing the nation’s K-12 schools to literally whitewash U.S. history.
The February 24 lawsuit seeks an injunction against Trump’s Department of Education and, ironically, its Office of Civil Rights, for enforcing their letter to school districts mandating the schools remove all references to racism, Jim Crow, Supreme Court rulings overturning it, the Civil Rights era and more from their curricula.
If the schools didn’t stop teaching those topics, or anything else that smacks of “diversity, equity and inclusion” by February 28, they’d lose federal dollars, the Trump agency threatens. The attack on schools follows “right-wing woke” attacks on the freedom to read.
Research by the PEN America organization, which tracks censorship, found that of the more than 10,000 books banned in public schools last year, the vast majority dealt with topics or themes related to people of color, LGBTQ people, and other minority demographics.
“We create safe and welcoming classrooms where students are cared for and accepted,” said Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten, a New York City civics teacher who holds a law degree. “We teach the skills and knowledge they need to navigate a diverse and complex world. And we value critical thinking, which requires us to present history in an open and honest way.
An attack on knowledge itself
“This vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself. It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenant of the United States since its founding.
“It would ban meaningful instruction on slavery, the Missouri Compromise, the Emancipation Proclamation, the forced relocation of Native American tribes, the laws of Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It would upend campus life.”
The lawsuit against the Trump Education Department is both financially important for schools, and also part of the ideological war pitting Trumpites and their white nationalist legions against teachers, students, parents and school administrators seeking to defend the right to free speech, the right to free learning and discussion and even the right to disagree.
Federal aid makes up approximately 10% of all educational spending in the U.S., but is a far larger share in poor school districts, districts with high concentrations of students of color, or both. It’s also a larger share of K-12 spending, due to Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which established federal school aid programs for districts with high shares of low-income students.
The case seeking to halt white nationalism from taking over U.S. schools is one of a raft of lawsuits filed in the opening month of the Trump government. Those 75+ suits, in turn, are prompted by Trump’s 200+ executive orders imposing his right-wing ideology on the government and letting his puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk, take a chainsaw to the ranks of federal workers, agencies, programs and priorities.
That includes the Department of Education, where Musk’s minions have already invaded, seeking reams of personal information accompanying student loan applications. The loans themselves are in limbo. Trump wants to kill the department. The agency is a favorite bugaboo of the radical right.
Jamming white nationalism down the throats of schools violates both the Constitution’s freedom of speech and teachers’ freedom to teach, the suit says. It didn’t use the words “white nationalism” but the details make it clear that’s what Trump wants taught, and nothing else.
The Education Department’s letter is part and parcel of Trump’s crusade to take the U.S. back to the 1950s or before. His white nationalist allies and appointees want to return the nation to the time when Blacks “knew their place,” women were under male domination and reproductive control and Spanish-speakers were braceros.
In that era, all minorities, including religious minorities—all but white Anglo-Saxon Protestant “Christians”—suffered discrimination or worse in jobs, universities, accommodations and more.
Though the suit doesn’t say so, Chicago Teachers Union/AFT Local 1 President Stacy Davis Gates, a social studies teacher, said several weeks ago that Trump really wants to take the U.S. back to the 1850s. Then, slavery was rampant and legal, and Southern aristocrats bullied their slaves, or worse, while controlling the federal government. The widening ideological gulf between North and South over slavery led to the Civil War.
“Though gradual and uneven, our country has expanded universal access to free education, from the establishment of the first public schools in the original colonies, to overturning ‘separate but equal,’ in Brown, to passing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Equal access to education is central to creating a vibrant society, economy, and democracy,” the suit says.
Equal access calls for diversity
The suit says equal access to education means it must cover diversity, flying right in the face of Trump’s edict abolishing “diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI)” programs in the federal government. His diktat prompted corporations such as Ford, Best Buy, Meta, Google and Walmart to eagerly dump their own DEI programs and return to discriminatory hiring, firing and promotion practices.
The union, the sociological association “and countless schools, organizations, and individuals” nationwide “recognize diversity is a critical ingredient to fostering intellectual curiosity and educational attainment. Schools, from pre-K to college, are where we learn about our world and each other.”
That learning encourages creativity and open-mindedness, as well as creating scholars, the suit says. Curbing teaching and curbing learning would shut it off. “Ideas are sparked through debate and not stifled through homogeny,” they declare. Trump’s threat “radically upends” both debate and teaching.
The Trump government’s Education Department bases its about-face on a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving Harvard University. That decision ended consideration of race in college admissions, and overturned decades-old precedent. The Republican right-wing High Court bloc authored it.
“No federal law prevents teaching about race and race-related topics, and the Supreme Court has not banned efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in education,” the lawsuit replies. “The Department of Education is attempting to establish a new legal regime when it has neither the lawmaking power of Congress nor the interpretative power of the courts.”
The Trump regime not only “misstates the law” but gives no “definitions or objective standards” for what schools can teach about U.S. history. Though the suit does not say so, lack of such standards leaves local school systems and school boards open to organized mobs of radical rightists threatening violence to force schools to impose their white-based ideology.
Those invasions got so nasty that in the final years of the Democratic Biden administration, the National School Boards Association had to seek Justice Department help and protection.
“The letter suggests a wide variety of core instruction, activities, and programs that schools, from pre-kindergarten through post-graduate education, use to teach and support their students now constitute illegal discrimination,” the suit says.
Among the subjects banned “as discriminatory” is teaching “about systemic and structural racism…It is not clear how a school could teach a U.S. History course without teaching about slavery, the Missouri Compromise, the Emancipation Proclamation, the forced relocation of Native American tribes, the laws of Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Civil Rights Acts, the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act without running afoul of this prohibition.”
The Trump Education Department’s letter and threat also “appears to ban any existing voluntary associations or student groups, such as a Black Student Union” and “all programming in support of diversity, equity, and Inclusion, again despite the fact that such programming is lawful.” Prior presidents of both parties, including Trump in his first term, supported it, the suit notes.
“The only way” the union, its members and the sociologists “can ensure they are not targets for enforcement is: Curtail any teaching that references any diversity, equity, inclusion, race, ethnicity, or national origin, or systemic discrimination; cease all teaching that voices any support for any diversity, equity, inclusion or similar principles; eliminate all student groups, including affinity and support groups; terminate any diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, and; immediately terminate any admissions, financial aid, student life, or other campus activities that could even possibly concern this administration.
“Many legal, evidence-based, and well-accepted ways to foster inclusivity and increase diversity of all types are nevertheless considered discriminatory by this administration. It would have devastating impacts on schools.”
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
