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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBrownstein: Voter Suppression for Adults, History Suppression for Kids
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/critical-race-theory-voting-rights-gop/621383/No paywall
https://archive.fo/T4iEt
In 2021, nine Republican-controlled states approved laws limiting the discussion of racism (and in many cases gender inequity), and four others imposed restrictions through the states board of education. This year, the pace has clearly accelerated, Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, told me. Of the 122 state bills that Sachs has tracked for PEN America, a free-speech organization, since January 2021, more than half have been introduced just in the past three weeks as state legislatures have reconvened for this years session. So many proposals are surfacing so fast that Sachs said his gut instinct is that all 23 states where Republicans control both the governorship and the state legislature eventually will see a [censorship] bill passed.
Like the restrictions on voting, these moves to limit the discussion of race in public educational institutions are being promoted by influential conservative groups such as Heritage Action for America. And like their companion laws, these measures are advancing through red states on a virtually complete party-line basis. Of the bills Sachs has cataloged, every single one is exclusively sponsored by Republicans, he said.
Experts agree that many schools are discussing issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation more explicitly than in the past, a trend that genuinely raises questions for some parents without a strong ideological agenda. But Ruthanne Buck, a senior adviser to the Campaign for Our Shared Future, a nonprofit group recently formed to fight the state restrictions, told me that conservatives pushing these bills have effectively performed a kind of bait and switch. With parents across the ideological and racial spectrum uniformly frustrated by the uncertainty and strains of schooling during the pandemic, she said, Republicans have successfully marketed their proposals as a way of amplifying parents voices. Yet the bills practical impact is very different. You have a disconnect between what is being messaged by politicians as parental voice and what is being put into policy, which is actually just stripping schools of meaningful content and good practice, she said.
Buck believes that more organized resistance to these classroom restrictions is coming, but so far the battle has been strikingly one-sided. Civil-rights groups havent invested in these fights in the states as heavily as they have in the battle against voting restrictions. President Joe Bidens administration has not directly opposed or even spotlighted these red-state initiatives either. The only major congressional proposals around curriculum issues have come from Republicans who want to ban the use of federal money to fund the teaching of the same concepts on race and gender that the state GOP laws are targeting.
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