"The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner
Near as I can tell, Republicans in Arizona are a collection of quivering cowards. Judging from the laws they've recently passed, they're afraid of people who don't look like them, sound like them or think like them. But that's just the start. They also appear to be terrified of history, truth, change and children. In sum, they fear salad.
(Cross-posted from TalkingPointsMemo.com.)
Following up on its infamous "show me your papers" law, Arizona's government passed a law that attacked ethnic studies and teachers with "accents."
Arizona's wingnuts, in this crusade, are indulging in a few self-contradictions--
* they don't want politics taught - except they want
their politics taught;
* they don't want ethnic history to be taught - except they want
their ethnic history taught;
* they don't want group identity - except they want
their group identity;
-- but the really funny parts are the laughably weak "justifications" offered for the new laws.
The primary excuse for these heavy-handed measures is the assertion that undocumented workers commit a lot of crime - an assertion that was thoroughly discredited by none other than American Conservative just a few weeks ago: "His-Panic: Talk TV sensationalists and axe-grinding ideologues have fallen for a myth of immigrant lawlessness."More damaging datahere:
The phrase "border security" is sometimes used to mean "keeping economic migrants from crossing into the United States." I understand it to mean "keeping drug smugglers and human traffickers from crossing the border with their cargo," because the economic migrants, as a group, are not particularly criminal. Given that, they should be understood as separate though related issues. And one of the points of relation is that immigration reform, or the lack thereof, is hindering efforts at enhancing border security because resources that are meant for security are being used to crack down on undocumented workers, who are not really a security threat.
Texas, for example, has a $110m programme called Border Star that was ostensibly to help law enforcement track drug criminals. The American Civil Liberties Union analysed 11 of the departments getting the funds and found that ten of them detained 656 deportable aliens, and arrested only five gang members. The exception was the El Paso Police Department, which arrested 53 criminal gang members and didn't detain anyone.
The goofiest reason offered by an Arizona legislator for the ban on ethnic studies was the fear that children would overthrow the US government. Check out this exchange between state legislator Rep. Vic Williams and reporter Linda Valdez in the Arizona Republic:
Williams: We have a study program here that was teaching the overthrow of the United States.
Valdez: Have you ever sat in one of these classes?
Williams: Oh. No I haven't sat in.
Valdez: Have you seen the curriculum?
Williams: No I haven't seen the curriculum, but I've been given excerpts.
Valdez: But certainly as an intelligent man, you know things can be taken out of context.
The award for the most hypocritical reason offered by an Arizona legislator for the ban on ethnic studies has to go to state Sen. Frank Antenori who said he believes the classes teach kids to despise the government. Why is that hypocritical? Antenori is a Tea Party leader giving speeches at which the crowd proudly waves signs expressing great contempt for our government, a "Tenther"who has sponsored and voted for bills based upon the secessionist nullification theory, and a guy who recites the GOP talking points about government being evil. The man's entire political career is built on how much he despises the government.
The award for most ironic attempt at justification goes to Arizona state Sen. Jack Harper, who excused his anti-ethnic studies vote with a flat-out denial of reality: Hispanic-themed ethnic studies, he said, are "trying to say that somebody who came to this country illegally is somehow oppressed. That's crazy stuff." Had Harper taken an interest in the lives of Hispanic immigrants - you know, ethnic studies - he would know that one of the big reasons they are brought here illegally is because they can be so easily oppressed and exploited. Living under the constant threat of being turned in, arrested and deported, undocumented workers must work for whatever pay, for however long and under whatever conditions their employers dictate. Those employers are notorious for their brutal exploitation and inhumane treatment of these workers.
The crappy way history is taught is sometimes errantly blamed on a powerful elite, but in this instance that analysis seems more sound. When you have a stratified society, as Arizona does (31% of its Hispanics, compared to 8% of its whites, live in poverty), how people think about themselves, what groups they identify with and what history they know becomes more important. If history convinces the upper crust to view their privileged position as justified and earned, they're not as likely to yield opportunity to others. If history convinces members of deprived groups to believe their deprivation is their own fault, they're not as likely get "uppity" -- to demand access to opportunity -- and there will be less need to use force to keep them "in their place."
The Republicans who passed this bill expressed some rather astounding sentiments: The bill says schools will lose funding if they offer courses that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." And this:
The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.
Let us pause to dissect. Arizona's Reckless Right is asserting:
* that students must be taught to believe in, rather than study, the creed of individual identity over group identity;
* that questioning the dogma of individualism creates racism and hatred;
* that courses in which the ideology of individualism is studied in a way that shows it has sometimes been used in reprehensible ways must be banned.
Individualism is an idea, a fine idea, but just one of many competing good ideas and, like all ideas, useful in balance but dangerous in extremes. Ideas are for studying, pondering and employing, not for declaring, exalting and imposing.
"Who controls the present controls the past," - George Orwell
In this act, the Republicans of the Arizona Legislature are not just determining what history will be taught, they are imposing their political and ideological beliefs on the students of Arizona. Less important, but worth noting, is that they're making some pretty wild assertions, without offering either evidence or an argument in their favor, and striking a rather high and mighty pose - educators, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers and moralists all rolled up in one package.
Tom Horne, another wingnut Arizona politician, is the originator of the attack on Arizona's elective ethnic studies courses. He cites as his motive his opposition to separating the kids by race (remember, the courses are electives) and his belief that we shouldn't teach the "downer" parts of history - such as when white people oppressed non-white people. (Horne, by the way, has also never sat in on one of the ethnic classes, although he's repeatedly been invited to during his now 4-year fight to ban them.)
This brings us to the first serious part of this issue. What history do we teach and why? (James Loewen's book Lies My Teacher Told Me provides the most accessible answer to that question.) I am always amazed when I hear white people attack "ethnic studies" of non-white ethnicities because they never seem to attack "white ethnic studies," which is what passes for American history in most texts and most classrooms. The absence of non-whites from our recorded and celebrated history is one of the most well-documented facts about us, and the deleterious effects of that absence are not only that it causes TV hate talkers to say outrageously stupid things.
For instance, Loewen notes:
"Arthur Schlesinger Jr., found himself able to write an entire book on the presidency of Andrew Jackson without ever mentioning perhaps the foremost issue Jackson dealt with as president: the removal of American Indians from the Southeast."
Alabama law once required schools to avoid "textbooks containing anything partisan, prejudicial, or inimical to the interests of the [white] people of the State" or that would "cast a reflection on their past history."
"One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner... and simply remember the things we regard as credible and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but id does not tell the truth." - W.E.B. Dubois
The whitewashing of American history (a beautifully apt double entendre) hurts Americans in many ways:
* it causes us to lie to our students, at least with some rather damning lies of omission;
* it denies us an understanding of our past;
* in denying us an understanding of our past, it renders us incapable of thinking effectively about our present;
* it denies us a better chance to shape our future (If we understand what has caused what in the past, we may be able to predict what will happen next and even adopt national policies informed by our knowledge.);
* it suggests that everything's been going along on the right tack and prevents us from even pondering whether our nation, or our species, should change course;
* it deprives students of perspective about the issues that affect them most; and
* it leaves students (and the adults they become) with scant ability to understand, accept or rebut historical
referents and assertions used in arguments by TV and radio talkers, candidates, professors and journalists.
If knowledge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.
Horne's aversion to teaching the "downer" history isn't just about leaving out the shameful things Americans have done, or just about leaving out historical conflicts and times of confusion, or even just about leaving out the history of women and minorities - it's also about what Loewen calls "heroification."
"What passes for history in American is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors." -- James Baldwin
Selling George Washington as a hero to black students when they learn he owned slaves, or to Native Americans when they learn what he did to the Iroquois, might be pretty tough. And for those deeply vested in our national myths and icons, hearing the truth can be uncomfortable. Questioning the lies we tell ourselves about our past - from the racist distortion of Reconstruction in Gone with the Wind to Columbus Day and the Alamo -- can be made to seem un-American.
Of course, that's not new or unique to Arizona. In 1975, the National Assessment for Educational Progress asked lay reviewers what they thought about social studies and reviewers replied that "references to specific minority groups should be eliminated whenever possible" and "exercises which show national heroes in an uncomplimentary fashion though factually accurate are offensive." Teach white history, keep it upbeat and hide our idols' feet of clay.
My personal favorite example of "heroification" is President Woodrow Wilson, both because his life and his legend are rife with contradictions and because his example applies to what's happening in recent events, in Arizona and across the nation.
Typically, American students learn that Wilson entered WW I reluctantly and, afterward, led the effort to create the League of Nations and (sometimes) that he was involved in women's suffrage, worker's comp and other progressive causes. He is portrayed, almost always, as a hero, a man of great character and vision, a "good" man "ahead of his time." Rarely do we learn that about his strident racism, his white supremacist beliefs, his connection to the KKK, his codification of Jim Crow principles, his nativism, his colonialism, his over-the-top anti-communist paranoia or the shameful and lingering consequences of these flaws - or their implications for our lives today and tomorrow.
We don't learn that Wilson intervened in Latin America more than any other president, sending troops to Mexico (first in 1914 and 10 times after), Haiti (1915) the Dominican Republic (1916), Cuba (1917) and Panama (1918).
Wilson's intervention in the Mexican civil war was prior to getting approval from Congress, prompted demands from both sides of the civil war for the US to leave and was finally brought to an end by pressure from US and world public opinion.
In Haiti, Wilson used our Marines to fix the Haitian presidential election, to dissolve the Haitian Legislature, to rig a referendum that replaced the Haitian constitution with a far less democratic document, to crush small farmers in favor of huge plantations, and to force peasants into shackles to work road construction. We occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and, as US Marine General George Barnett complained, "Practically indiscriminate killing of natives has gone on for some time...."
Wilson kept US troops in Nicaragua throughout his presidency and used them to fix a Nicaraguan presidential election and force treaties that favored the US.
Wilson's interventions set the stage for the rise of the likes of Batista, Trujillo, Duvaliers and the Samozas and undermined US relations with Latin America for decades. His "bad neighbor policy" also undermined the US reputation around the world. If Americans knew these facts, they'd be better equipped in trying to understand Latin America and its relationship with the US. If we knew that our country had made 13 separate forays into Nicaragua, for instance, we might be better equipped when trying to understand why Nicaragua embraced communism in the 1980s.
Of course, we Americans -- being ignorant of our own history -- can't understand why the rest of the world doesn't share our view of ourselves as the generous, peace-loving, democracy-promoting, fair-minded good guys.
We don't learn that Wilson conducted a secret war against the Russian Revolution - sending money to the "White" side of the civil war in 1917, then creating a naval blockade and sending troops to Russia in 1918 (5,000 to Archangel and 10,000 to Siberia) that were not withdrawn until April 1920. Wilson refused to extend diplomatic relations to the Soviet Union and helped bar Russia from the post-WW I peace negotiations.
Because we Americans don't know about this secret war - which prolonged the civil war and cost thousands of additional lives -- we don't understand why the Soviets didn't trust us, didn't think kindly of us and didn't believe we weren't out to destroy them. Unaware of the crap we've pulled, we think of ourselves as the universal good guys and we think their mistrust of us is simply "proof" that they are evil.
Most especially - and most relevant to Arizona's new law -- we don't learn that Wilson was a racist of the most vile sort. Under his Republican predecessors, blacks were routinely appointed to important government positions, took part in the party's national conventions and were given some access to the White House, but Wilson's Democratic administration was openly hostile to blacks. Wilson and his wife were outspoken white supremacists (the First Lady often told "darky" jokes at cabinet meetings). Wilson put together an aggressive legislative agenda to curtail black civil rights (which Congress rejected). Wilson used his presidential power to segregate the federal government (integrated since the Reconstruction), pointedly putting Southern whites in offices traditionally held by blacks. He segregated the Navy, limiting blacks to service in kitchens and boiler rooms. He put newspapers, organizations and unions that were led by blacks under government surveillance and smeared them with suspicions of communism. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one time he did meet with black leaders, he was rude and belligerent and virtually threw them out of his office. Wilson had a White House screening of "Birth of a Nation" - a film of joyful praise for the KKK over its role in putting down "black-dominated" Republican state governments during Reconstruction - and declared it "all so true." The filmmaker later used the declaration in defending the film against charges that it was racially inflammatory.
The atmosphere created by Wilson's personal and official racism was one of the causes of a burst of racial violence committed by white Americans during and immediately after the Wilson presidency. The KKK, once thought nearly dead, used "Birth of a Nation" and Wilson's support to revive itself and become a national force. A wave of anti-black race riots swept the nation, with whites lynching blacks as far north as Duluth, during Wilson's second term.
It wasn't just blacks that Wilson hated, he also hated what he called "hyphenated Americans" - that is white ethnic groups. For instance, he saturated the country with propaganda linking Germans with barbarism. As a result, white ethnic groups also suffered a wave of violence.
A not-so-tangential side note: The notion of the "hyphenated American" is far, far older than modern Americans know. The term itself was used more than 110 years ago, mostly as an insult to question people's loyalties with a very narrow sense of patriotism. The phenomenon of Americans retaining their ethnic heritage and identity while embracing American principles and patriotism is as old as the nation itself. The notion that America is a "melting pot" in which old identities were either replaced by, or blended into, a new, singular American identity - precisely what wingnuts in Arizona and elsewhere cling to in their crusade against ethnic studies, multiculturalism and diversity - never has been true. As was documented in the 1960s by the book Beyond the Melting Pot, ethnic identity is extremely durable, and what we Americans are is not a stew but a salad, in which all the individual ingredients retain their unique flavors and nutrients but combine to create a greater meal. This has always been true, as we have always been a nation of immigrants, and it is even more true today as we become ever more diverse. (And I say that as a white male whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War - Mom's family for the Colonies, Dad's family for the Crown.)
It wasn't just racism and nativism that inspired Wilson's attacks on civil rights: Wilson took any opposition to his ideas personally and emotionally, and he reacted with witch hunts aimed a labor and anti-war activists. Wilson made it illegal to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces or that caused others to view the American government or its institutions with contempt - a law so broad that any expression of disagreement with Wilson could land you in jail. Wilson failed in an attempt to give himself direct censorship powers, but his postmaster suppressed all mail that he deemed anti-war, anti-British, pro-Irish or pro-socialist. The producer of "The Spirit of '76," a movie about our Revolutionary War, spent 10 years in prison because the film depicted the British unfavorably (they were the "bad guys" in that one, right?). Wilson's own attorney general recommended a presidential pardon for Eugene Debs, who was serving time for attributing WW I to economic interests and denouncing the Espionage Act as undemocratic, but Wilson emphatically refused (President Harding pardoned him later).
Wilson's hand-picked successor, James Cox, won only 34% of the vote against Harding - who never even campaigned. Why? Mainly because when Wilson left office he was widely despised, although you'd never know it from his whitewashed, shining status as a national hero today.
We could use much of this history, if we knew it, in understanding what's happening now. Haiti, Mexico, racism, nativism, immigration, ethnic identity and the silencing of one view in favor of another have all been issues for us lately. We could learn from this history that there is a connection between racist leadership and racial hatred, oppression and violence among the people. We could learn that the "hyphenated American" is not a creation of the 1960s and 1970s, but lives at the historical heart of the nation. We could learn that the sort of nativism and racism that is now spewing from the leadership of Arizona has real and ugly consequences.* We could learn the same about much of what we've heard from national leaders on the Right over the past 10 years about how disagreeing with them is un-American, perilous to the nation and even already destroying the country.
(*As just a starting point of "consequences," consider that an English teacher in Texas wasmaking an Hispanic student sit in a front desk while she talked about Arizona's new laws and called Mexicans racists who expect handouts.)
Banning Bible Spice
"What's past is prologue." -Shakespeare
On of the more humorous - to me anyway - parts of the Arizona wingnuttery is that Arizona has told schools thatteachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.
First, there's more than a little irony here, given that the state spent a decade recruiting teachers for whom English was a second language, mainly in an attempt to meet President Bush's No Child Left Behind funding requirements. In the 1990s, Arizona hired hundreds of teachers whose first language was Spanish as part of a broad bilingual-education program. Many were recruited from Latin America. Then in 2000, when Arizona voters passed a ballot measure stipulating that instruction be offered only in English, bilingual teachers switched from Spanish to English for teaching.
Second, there's ironic humor in the fact that three of the Right's headliners - Sarah Palin, Henry Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger - would fall among those now unqualified to teach English in Arizona. All three have accents that are dramatically different from the accents of most Arizona Republican leaders, Arnold struggles with sentence structure and Sarah is the absolute queen of butchered language.
Third, Arizona's wingnuts have mandated the impossible: everyone speaks with an accent, no one speaks with proper grammar and English isn't "a" language, but an ever-changing blend of many languages. It is humanly impossible to speak without an accent. It is improbable, if not impossible, to teach school with precise grammar (itself, an evolving thing). And it isimpossible to declare "this" is English, so "this" is what you must use.
Perhaps the politicians can save us. Perhaps they could form a caucus and come up with a slogan to help us know which words to use and which to avoid. Of course, they couldn't tell us about it, because "caucus" is an Algonquin Indian word and "slogan" is Gaelic. And that just wouldn't be English.
Finally, history - dare I say ethnic studies - can help us put this issue in perspective. Arizona is simply repeating forgotten history. For example, Arizona's wingnuts point to a report noting that some classroom instructors pronounce words such as violet as "biolet," and think as "tink." Other teachers swallow the ending sounds of words, as Spanish-speakers often do. This has happened before.
The accent of many European immigrants in the 1930s had this same trait, and the bigots knew it, so they often asked applicants for teaching jobs to say words ending in "ng." If you said "teachin" instead of teaching, or "learnin" instead of learning, you were rejected as having "failed" the test. You might be the most knowledgable person the planet, you might be the greatest teacher in the history of our species, but if you spoke with the wrong accent, you were not allowed to teach. (Robert Frost himself would have failed this test, had he taken it, because his New England accent also swallowed the Gs.)
Later, black applicants in New York were often turned down for the same reason. Rather than overtly rejecting black applicants for their race, examiners failed them for using so-called "regional" speech. In one case, two black applicants - who had never even been to the South -- were rejected because the examiners said they spoke "with a Southern accent."
The best story in this regard, now forgotten because we don't like ethnic history or "downer" history, is about Bel Kaufman, who, at 12 years old, emigrated to the U.S. from Russia. Applying to teach school in New York in the 1930s, she was rejected because her accent was too heavy. Keep in mind that Kaufman graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College and went on to write the best selling novel Up the Down Staircase. But because she retained the rolling Russian R of her childhood, Kaufman recalled, so she was blocked from teaching.
Kaufman's rejection was mirrored by thousands of other talented and knowledgable immigrants, most of them Jews from Eastern Europe. They had full command of English, but they pronounced it differently - just like many of Arizona's teachers today.
Kaufman, by the way, finally passed the oral exam - after several failures - got a teaching job and enjoyed a long teaching career. Up the Down Staircase satirized the New York school system, even having a passage about an applicant who gets turned down for her accent after reciting a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
"We want our country back!"
Arizona's Reckless Right's fear - and that of their counterparts in Tealand and the GOP across the nation - of a changing world, of a changing America, was precisely predicted in an article in Time magazine more than 20 years ago:
"While know-nothingism is generally confined to the more dismal corners of the American psyche, it seems all too predictable that during the next decades many more mainstream white Americans will begin to speak openly about the nation they feel they are losing. There are not, after all, many nonwhite faces depicted in Norman Rockwell's paintings. White Americans are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the very picture of their nation.... For older Americans, raised in a world where the numbers of whites were greater and the visibility of nonwhites was carefully restrained, the new world will seem ever stranger. But as the children at Brentwood Science Magnet School, and their counterparts in classrooms across the nation, are coming to realize, the new world is here. It is now. And it is irreversibly the America to come."
In our fear, we create false histories devoid of our failures and full of super-human heroes. We fabricate an impoverished, monochromatic history that tells us we're wonderful and always have been. We lie to ourselves about who we are and what we've done.
We lie to our students, our children, because we fear that if they learn the truth they will lose all respect for our society, they will despise our government, they will "overthrow" our power structure.
In short, we lie because we're afraid of our kids. In 1964, a judge tried to cover up President Harding's love letters to a married woman with the excuse that "anything damaging to the image of an American President should be suppressed to protect the younger generation" - and there were too many juvenile delinquents as it was.
Despite what Arizona's wingnuts in power desperately want us all to believe, we do not need lies to protect us. We can face the truth of the people we have been, the people we are and the people we are becoming. We can learn of, learn from and live with the totality, the humanness, of earlier Americans and ourselves. Openly facing topics that seem divisive might actually unify, rather than divide, Americans across racial, ethnic and other lines. We need not fear the American salad.
Fear is a lousy foundation for both law and education, and fearing the mistakes of our past so much that we refuse to face them merely dooms us to repeating them. As we are seeing.