Safe vs Comfort: The Battle over Education
"Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future." - Wilma Mankiller
You have probably heard of the Florida-born, conservative group Moms for Liberty, but have you heard about their foremothers, the United Daughters of the Confederacy?
The UDC was founded in 1894 by white women throughout the South dedicated to honoring the legacy of the Confederacy and its soldiers. The group still exists today and continues its mission to preserve the memory of the Confederacy in its vision. As heroes. As patriots. Part of the UDCs legacy is erecting statues of Confederate generals and hanging their portraits in buildings across the South. Since their founding, they worked with other groups that align with their values. This included the United Confederate Veterans, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and most notably, the Ku Klux Klan. The UDC and the KKK had the same vision for America. White supremacy.
After the Civil War came Reconstruction which was an attempt at integration, defining, and exercising citizenship and liberties for newly freed African people. This attempt at progress was swiftly met with physical violence, institutional oppression, and destruction by white Americans.
I honestly cannot recall if I ever learned about Reconstruction in school, and that is the problem. It’s a huge chunk of American history missing from the timeline. We go from Slavery (bad)- Emancipation (good)- Jim Crow (bad) - Civil Rights (good). Reconstruction (and race and racism) is not adequately taught in schools, according to 200+ prominent scholars and the Zinn Education Project 2022 Report, Erasing Black Freedom Struggle. This reality of a half-true, faulty memory is due to decades of intentional erasure, misinformation, and minimization efforts by white people like the Dunning School and the UDC. Once you start learning about Reconstruction, it feels like the missing piece of the puzzle has been found.
Reconstruction and the Dunning School deserve an entirely separate newsletter. For the purpose of this newsletter, I want to focus on the tactics used by UDC to change the school curriculum as it echoes the efforts by Moms for Liberty and Florida’s recent approval of the curriculum created by PragerU. More on that in a bit.
One of the UDCs key pillars is “collect and preserve the material for a truthful history of the War Between the States.” Debating the “truthful history” of the Civil War is an old, exhaustive argument. To be abundantly clear, Confederate sympathizers, like the UDC, say the war was about “states’ rights'” which it was…it was about states’ rights to refuse federal laws that would abolish slavery. States rights = the right to slavery. This is a fact.
The UDC and other “Confederate heritage associations” started to reshape the Southern school curriculum by publishing textbooks that integrated the Lost Cause into their books. Greg Huffman explains in Facing South,
the Lost Cause is “a false version of U.S. history developed in response to Reconstruction that minimizes slavery's central role in the Civil War, promotes the Confederacy's aim as a heroic one, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, and portrays the white South as the victim…These lessons were taught to multiple generations of Southerners to uphold institutionalized white supremacy.”
“Mildred Lewis Rutherford served as historian general of the UDC from 1911 to 1916, strongly endorsed the Lost Cause and the importance of the Ku Klux Klan in her speeches, books, and pamphlets on Southern history, slavery, and the Civil War. She included information on the history of the KKK in the educational programs she began developing in 1916 for the Children of the Confederacy, an auxiliary group of the UDC for children under age 18.” via Atlanta History Center
Today, our latest education crusaders are Moms for Liberty and the state of Florida, who have taken a page from the UDC guidebook. Let’s compare the two:
Mischaracterization and Minimization of Slavery
UDC: Conflating white indentured servitude with Black chattel slavery - intentionally removing the significance of race and racism.
MFL + FL: Will teach the differences and similarities between serfdom and slavery.
UDC: Taught that enslaved people were well-treated, happy, and loyal to enslavers. Stated that the white colonies and slavery saved enslaved people from a "savage life" in Africa.
MFL+ FL: Will teach lessons that the enslaved people personally benefitted from slavery by developing skills and that the European explorers were sympathetic with slave traders in Africa.
Book Banning
UDC: Banned books that did not comply with their version and perception of history.
MFL + FL: Moms for Liberty, Florida, and Republican leadership across the country have banned thousands of books. Arkansas even tried to jail librarians and teachers for six years if they gave kids “obscene” materials, as decided by the State (thank goodness a judge blocked the bill and raised concerns.) According to The Guardian, 30% of the banned books are about race, racism or include characters of color, and 26% have LGBTQ+ characters or themes. They’ve banned books about police violence, books about MLK Jr. and the March on Washington (because it is “anti-American” and “anti-White”) banned books about Ruby Bridges, slavery, queer love stories, and banned books that introduce and educate teens about sexual assault.
Whitewashed America History
UDC: Pushed the narrative that the Civil War was over the North violating the South's constitutional rights and recommended racist books for classrooms that portrayed white saviors and white supremacy.
Florida: They will teach that white political figures fought to end slavery, namely George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. This is a lie. As Michael Harriot points out,
“George Washington never freed an enslaved person a day in his life…Washington never proposed a single piece of legislation, an executive order or a declaration that even sought to abolish slavery. He characterized the whipping of a woman he owned as “very proper” and hunted Ona Judge, a woman who escaped his forced labor camp at Mount Vernon, until the day he died. He died owning 317 enslaved people.”
And Lincoln’s true intention for ending slavery was,
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
This is where PragerU comes in.
Via Media Matters, “‘Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,’ — part of PragerU Kids’ ‘Around the World’ series — the titular character learns about climate change in school, only to have her eyes opened by her parents, who are helpfully equipped with decades of climate denialist talking points. Ania soon becomes a denialist herself and is ostracized by her peers, who ‘barely talk to her anymore.’ She finds comfort in history, however, as the video analogizes her situation with one of the most famous antifascist acts of resistance in memory. ‘Grandfather Jakub tells her about the Warsaw Uprising, when the city’s Jews fought back against the Nazis,’ the narrator says. Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,’ the narrator concludes.”
The Florida Department of Education recently approved materials from the conservative media nonprofit that creates “pro-American”, conservative, and Juedo-Christian based content for kids K-6. They are not an accredited university.
Some videos are “How to embrace your feminity” by encouraging 6th-grade girls to embrace stereotypes because they are natural: wear makeup, be a wife and a mom, make your house beautiful, smile, be grateful, and be encouraging. They also tell girls that men and women are naturally different and warn girls to not wear clothes in a way that would bring unwanted attention. “How to embrace your masculinity,” says there’s no such thing as toxic masculinity, and that masculinity was necessary for defeating the Nazis, mining coal, and saving damsels in distress.
Their cartoon videos show kids meeting historical figures like Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglas, and Booker T. Washington who all agree that slavery was “no big deal”, it is better than being dead, that future generations should not feel bad that slavery existed because everyone did it, and that the Founding Fathers owning human beings was a compromise. Other messages include going to church for your health, skepticism over human impact on climate change, and that Ronald Reagan was a hero who saved millions of lives, despite ignoring the AIDS epidemic. (Please scroll through Mattxiv's post.)
The estimated number of students who learned the UDC curriculum of the Lost Cause is roughly 69,706,756. Imagine those 70 million people raising children, starting businesses, and becoming doctors, teachers, police officers, bankers, and politicians. It becomes clear how our country can continue to be systemically racist, divided over facts, and welcome content from PragerU while banning AP African American studies because it “significantly lacks educational value.” We cannot maintain progress without education that upholds truth and values equity and diverse perspectives.
Like UDC and the KKK, Moms for Liberty has close ties with the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, QAnon, and white Christian nationalists. This is why they have been named an extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And this is the group, along with their Republican politicians, who are shaping our children’s future. How will our textbooks explain January 6th?
Jennifer Wolf’s (a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education) perspective feels like a bit of clarity in the hazy chaos that is America’s battle over education,
“We talk a lot in teacher preparation studies about teachers’ responsibility to create a safe space in the classroom. That’s different from a comfortable space. Learning involves growth, and growth involves stretching and changing. That’s not always comfortable, but it’s productive and necessary.”
Safe v. Comfort.
Coded as ‘parents’ rights’, Moms for Liberty and their supporters are fighting for a version of society that is comfortable for white, straight, cisgender parents at the expense of truth, accountability, and safety for students who do not fall within the white, straight, cisgender boxes. Moms for Liberty is lying, exaggerating, and intentionally mischaracterizing what is being taught to children in school (referring to Teacher Unions as terrorist groups, calling LGBTQ+ people groomers, and so on). The “Pro-American” position does not mean pro-democracy or pro-inclusion which was once America’s rallying cry. Instead, it means denying our original sins, silencing marginalized groups, and excluding those who do not reinforce those same white, Juedo-Christian “values”. That is the advantage of hegemony.
Hegemony is “the dominance of one group over another, often supported by legitimating norms and ideas.” When our education reinforces hegemony, speaking against it paints YOU are the indoctrinator while you are just trying to course correct. This is why I feel like we are living in a trick mirror. The Right claims the “woke mob” is indoctrinating children which is a projection. I see my “woke-snowflake-leftist agenda” as righting the wrongs of the indoctrination of white supremacist cis heteropatriarchy. No, it may not be comfortable, but growth and accountability never are. Learning about white supremacy and slavery shouldn’t be comfortable, which should be a unifying idea!!! I want our society, as a whole, to teach the truth about our wars, our wounds, and our violence. You have to face the truth so you can heal from it.
Whenever there is social progress, the pendulum swings back towards regression. It further proves that education is a powerful tool. Whose stories and perspectives are told is power. It shapes the cultural beliefs, attitudes, and actions of millions of people and therefore shapes our future. Whose stories are you going to share?
Further reading:
The intimate ties between the UDC and the KKK
Why the SPLC deemed Moms for Liberty an extremist group
Banned Book archives from The Grio
Buy books banned by Moms for Liberty
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Adriana <333