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Republicans
are quickly upgrading a series of insurrections as a response to the
growing influence of ethnic minorities across multiple spheres in
American life—education, culture, and politics. These
initiatives reveal more volatile outcomes as Blacks, Asian and
Pacific Islander, Latinx, and Indigenous Americans increase.
The
assault on education is most visible from K-12 through higher
education. Parallel to the quiet undermining of public education in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the privatization of
public education has grown exponentially during the COVID-19
pandemic. Republican legislators at the state level are introducing
and passing laws to increase and/or expand and fund the number of
voucher, religious, and charter schools with limited public
accountability.
Supporters
of K-12 public education are largely ignoring this reality and
directing their focus toward the more volatile issue of the
Republican attacks on teaching critical race theory and systemic
racism in public schools. They reject teaching the truth about the
intersection of race and oppression in the origins and development of
our nation.
Teachers
are being threatened with sanctions and/or dismissals for the
so-called indoctrination of students by informing them of the facts
behind U.S. growth and prosperity. These concerns reached an apex
after the publication of the 1619 Project in the New
York Times which
chronicled the 400-year period of American slavery and was widely
heralded by literary and academic bodies.
To
eliminate this Project at its root, the right-wing
Republican-controlled Board of Governors of the University of North
Carolina System recently refused to vote on tenure for an endowed
professorship for Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning and
MacArthur Fellow, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
after a unanimous vote by the faculty. Instead, they offered her a
five-year contract despite her exemplary record.
Although
the Board of Governors' vote is usually a perfunctory measure, here
it declined its normal duty as a way to send a message to what it
deemed to be the critical race theory lobby. Similar actions are
taking place throughout the country.
The
opponents of these revelations label them unpatriotic and accuse the
1619 proponents of proliferating unwarranted and inaccurate
criticisms of America's founding fathers. The Trump administration
countered with the establishment of the specious 1776 Project which
airbrushed and sanitized the nation's brutal period of slavery.
Republicans
attempted to negate and demean cultural manifestations of ethnic
minority personhood in terms of dress and hairstyle, especially among
African Americans, and to suppress elements of pride and identity
preceding this controversy. The Republicans took further actions and
suspended students for ethnic hairstyles and barred their
participation in sporting events in efforts to prevent
self-expression.
The
fear among Whites is that these demonstrations of ethnic solidarity,
coupled with their aggregate numbers, would place this expanding New
American Majority in an advantageous position to wield broader
influence and to displace the prevailing power elite. Thus, one way
to disrupt this course of human development was to cut it off before
it gains further traction. Although White America has historically
employed this approach, it now views ethnic minorities’ robust
focus on personal identity as a threat.
While
they are reconfiguring who has the power to approve vote counts at
the state level, insurrectionists are rampantly using another ploy in
their efforts to suppress the voting rights and access of ethnic
minorities. As noted in previous columns, these initiatives are
occurring at warp speed across the 50 states along with new audits of
the 2020 presidential election.
That
election has been duly certified by Democratic and Republican
officials, alike, after numerous recounts. Republicans, however,
have continued to launch round after round of audits, starting with
Arizona and Georgia in the hope of further undermining voter
confidence in the electoral process as we move toward the 2022
midterms.
They
hope these tactics will sow enough doubt that Republican voters and
non-voters in the 2020 elections will turn out in droves to enable
the Republican Party to regain majorities in the House and Senate in
2022 and return Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024.
What
we have here is a series of inter-connected insurrections that are
meant to destabilize the current political arrangements and
re-segregate ethnic minorities in the nation’s educational,
cultural, and political life. The question is whether Democrats and
the New American Majority will aggressively fight back against these
machinations in order to continue to move toward ethnic and racial
parity.
Both
groups need to realize that they are in a fight for their very being
as we move further into an increasingly multi-cultural and
multi-racial America. The 2022 electoral midterms and the 2024
presidential election are shaping up to be watershed events that
could determine whether we will continue as the world's leading
democracy.
Ex-President
Trump is provoking these insurrections as he did the January 6th
attack on our nation’s Capital as well as promoting the mugging
of the critical race theory concept and disputing the systemic racism
that was central to the founding of America. Trump is a key reason
for the polarized racial divide among us.
And
he is solidly supported by more than half of Republicans who
fervently believe the Big Lie that the presidential election was
stolen from him and that Trump is the rightful President despite
reams of hard evidence to the contrary.
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