“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

- Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell

“A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink, and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege.”

- Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley

Among all the political sex scandal revelations, there’s this revelation: Answering quiz show questions about world history is at an all-time low. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino revealed that when a reporter once asked her a question referencing the Cuban Missile Crisis, she had to admit she didn’t know. She didn’t know how to answer the question because she didn’t know about the Cuban Missile Crisis. “It had to with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.” History-challenged Perino said she asked her husband if the Cuban Missile Crisis referred to the “Bay of Pigs thing?” What do you bet she’s all for bombing Cuba?

Well, with Blackberries a person doesn’t have to remember what happened yesterday or what will happen today or think about tomorrow. Anyway, the corporate media does all the thinking.

These are the people who believe in invention. They think everything they do is new! So these rulers have invented pre-emptive war, complete with a campaign of “shock and awe.” They have invented ID cards for Brown immigrants and Black voters. They have invented schools and curriculums for the elite. They have invented imperialism unlike any other seen before in - in, dare I type the word - history. It is all so damn new it’s blinding! They have invented an Empire led by a “maverick” King who shoots from the hip, and even missed shots are “collateral damage,” serving to open new avenues for ingenious “negotiators” and “entrepreneurs” trained to make a profit from dry brush. By not being cognizant of the world, these rulers believe they have invented a way of being new in the world!

Ignorance is a sweeping variant of the new! King George’s library will feature his autobiography, and it will be in the form of a “pop-up book” - his words, mind you!

The normalization of ignorance in the U.S. is intended to sacrifice some white children in an effort to nullify Black and Brown children. This normalization of ignorance among Black children is far more devastating as it attempts to sap the life blood of the Black Left and its potential for the maintenance of progressive resistance movements. We pay a much heavier price if Black and Brown children are turned into mass weapons of their own destruction. In contrast, the unabashed ignorance of Perino whose racial privilege, ideological politics (not subject to repression by the thought police/Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act 2007), and available social ladders propels her to the front of the class at the right side of King George and serve as his mouthpiece.

King George and his cadre of white, Black, and Brown mouthpieces, administrators, and judges are not alone. Common Core, a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization commissioned a phone survey in which American teenagers were asked “basic questions about history and literature” (“History Survey Stumps U.S. Teens” New York Times, February 26, 2008). The group, according to the report, hopes to argue that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law has “impoverished American’s public school curriculum by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and math but in no other subjects.”

When a school receives a failing grade, it is closed and a charter school appears in its place overnight. Think - privatization of education! Any surprise that the schools receiving a failing grade are Black and Latino/a schools?

For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.

‘What are we supposed to do?’ Ms. Paramo [high school teacher] asked. ‘Shut down every school?’ (“Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard” New York Times, October 16, 2007).

The study, Still At Risk: What Students Don’t Know Even Now conducted by Frederick M. Hess, suggests an even more sinister scenario regarding the role of “educational” institutions in this new era.

Let’s come back to failing schools and the privatization of educational institutions.

The Still At Risk study reports that 17 year-olds thought Columbus sailed after 1750 and many didn’t know what Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated. They couldn’t identify Adolf Hitler and couldn’t give a time frame for the U.S. Civil War. These young people, the future, didn’t know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom of speech and religion while “barely one in two could identify the plot of George Orwell’s immortal 1984.

It is easy to make light of such ignorance. In reality, however, a deep lack of knowledge is neither humorous nor trivial. What we know helps to determine how successful we are likely to be in life, and how many career paths we can choose from. It also affects our contribution as democratic citizens (Still At Risk).

Common cultural exposure is limited. According to the report, “two-thirds of all 17 year-olds have attended a play or read a work of literature outside of school and about half have visited an art museum or participated in a choir or orchestra” (Still At Risk). Having taught at the college/university level for twenty years, I know the extent to which students lack knowledge of cultures and history outside the U.S.

It is not clear if the study considered U.S. history as history of conquest and repression, genocide and enslavement, and the literatures of Native, Black, Latino/a, Chicano/a, and Asian Americans a response to that history. But the study is nonetheless revealing about the extent of ignorance and how this ignorance resonates, for example, in the current, never-ending presidential campaign.

Obama’s insistence that there is “one America” seems to be clashing with the “other America,” where words conjure up familiar images drawn from justifying narratives used to maintain slavery and then later the legal repression of Black Americans. Slavery’s justifying narratives had their Sambo (happy, content Black) or Nate (the defiant Black) (The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, John W. Blassingame). The “Black Beast” was a handy image to remind white women to stay clear of Rapist, that is, the Black man, the terrorist. But this is calling on U.S. history!

The team of Hillary and Bill Clinton, familiar with these narratives and their images, are operating from within the realm of Darth Vader’s “darkside.” Who will answer the phone in the White House at 3 in the morning? Will it be someone with dark skin and the middle name of Hussein? And reminiscent of the minstrel shows where, as David R. Roediger writes, “rubbing on blacking was an accumulating capitalist behavior” (The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised and Expanded Edition (Haymarket)), in other words profitable for whites. Bill Clinton played at being Black for 8 years to the detriment of Black Americans. You think the Dixiecrats are back in business? Have they ever left? But this too requires a knowledge of U.S. history!

And this Obama, according to Geraldine Ferraro, wouldn’t be a front runner in the ’08 presidential campaign if he had been born a white woman. He’s a front runner, her words imply, because he is Black. He isn’t qualified because he is Black - wink, wink! Forget all that Harvard University business. Think - affirmative Action!

The general public, “trained” to hear certain words as cues that conjure up knowledge of an individual or situation, are beginning to see what the corporate media wants them to see. Corporate media knows history, knows how to distract the public’s attention away from the issues of unemployment, single-payer health care, foreclosures, housing, poverty, war, and education. Corporate media relishes disseminating disinformation to a general public entrenched only in the knowledge of justifying narratives. That white Americans benefited from affirmative action, called Jim Crow, for over 150 years will not be televised for discussion any time soon. Don’t dare attempt to enlighten the masses. But this is history - again! A little McCarthyism and a little 1984!

With substantive and meaningful knowledge of U.S. history and common cultural exposure, white Americans for example, could begin to hear and see what some of us Black Americans see and hear when the discussion turns to torture. The “breaking” and “taming” methods used on Arab and Muslim prisoners in Abu Graib and Gitmo are similar to those used against Blacks, particularly Black women enslaved in the U.S. (Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism). This kind of knowledge would halt these verbal assaults to the intelligence and halt, too, the perpetuation of endless discourse acclaiming “innocence” about the U.S.’s use of torture - as if is has never happened on American soil!

Obama is Nafta, Cafta and like is friends he is “afta” the repression of Black and Brown, consciously or unconsciously. Obama is a capitalist as are the Clintons and Ferraro, but I wonder if he is learning something about that “other America” that we Black Americans know so well?

Now back to that study. How does this new world order of ignorance relate specifically to Black and Brown children?

Black and Brown children have been designated for canon fodder for the rulers’ continual wars and for the cheap labor they supply the prison industrial complex. Who wins with this scenario? Halliburton, KBR, and their politicians who make sure more canon fodder and cheap labor continues to flow their way with legislation (the Violent Crime Control an Law Enforcement Act 1994 and the crack-powder Cocaine disparity/Clinton, the Gang Abatement and Prevention Act 2007/Feinstein, and No Child Left Behind/Bush) targeting Black children directly and indirectly targeting the demise of the Black Left. Both Obama and Clinton support renewing the atrocious No Child Left Behind (NCLB) agenda. In a “democracy” that isn’t democratic, placing more value on math and science benefits the interests of the ruling class. A select few ascend to the top of this educational pyramid to serve as engineers and science for the corporate capitalists - and an even smaller select few are Black or Brown. The strategy is to prohibit thought that isn’t approved, programmed and controlled in order to achieve an outcome beneficial to the imperialist rulers.

The “new” is the same “old” imperialist hegemony, concerned with repression rather than liberation. Black and Brown children have borne the brunt of this repression, and, as a group, have suffered from betrayal and abandonment. They are the causalities of the war on drugs, terrorism, racial and class differentiation, and “education” in the U.S. - for the goal of education is to privatize education for the select few who will serve as engineers and scientists - and these young people don’t need to have a knowledge of history or knowledge in a “common culture” or any culture.

Reform, the Still At Risk study concludes, is not enough. Stuffing a literature book here and a line or two about slavery and genocide there, offering “scattered kernels of awareness” is no more than “romanticized images flickering in the national conscience. What we need is confidence that all our children will be familiar with the highs and lows of the compelling narrative that is our common heritage.” But the people who believe they have invented the wheel, a new world - are tearing and slicing their way to “somewhere” else and the hell with those dispensable beings.

So when the prisons are all filled with Black, Brown, poor, and “radical” people, when the asylums can’t hold one more body, housing isn’t available to one more lower-working class family in any city, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, when we have encamped outdoors, hungry and tired, will we see the hippie-yuppies order the filing of detention camps, the ones being readied as I write this? Then when those camps are filled, will the hippies-yuppies, contractors, developers, negotiators, will we see them call for the extermination of us - expendable people? History tells us this has happened before, but then who will remember? We will only hear silence.

For us, there’s only our liberation narrative. History tells us there’s always been resistance. And the time for resistance against imperialism is now, before we are solidly drawn characters in the narrative of the old.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.