politics

They Banned Woke And Suzy Still Can’t Read

Far-right school board officials are finding out the hard way that the political pendulum has swung

Sometimes I imagine trying to describe the mania that defined the COVID-era anti-education movement in the US and I know I would sound unwell, maybe deeply so.

The exact timeline isn’t exactly clear to me, an observer of Things, but it went something like this:

-As thousands of Americans died every day and morgues overflowed with fresh bodies killed by COVID-19, some schools in the United States either mandated or politely suggested that children wear masks to school as to mitigate the spread of the virus.

-Parents prone to far-right hysteria politics, driven mad by the TV and the internet, said no, their kids would not be wearing masks because it was a violation of their god-given rights (doing whatever they want no matter the consequences) and because the concept of society is a fiction, a left-wing myth.

-These parents, told by their phones that liberals and communists and maybe Jewish and Muslim folks were trying to overthrow the existing order with a virus created in a Chinese lab, began attending school board meetings for the first time. For many it was their first interaction with democratic self governance beyond casting a vote for the Republican presidential candidate every four years.

-These parents saw that their children were learning Real History and all its messiness and ideological inconvenience. They were being taught about the subjugation and oppression and brutalization that defines American history – and the never-ending fight against these horrors – and they did not like it one bit. Their kids were learning that LGBTQ Americans deserved rights and that Black Americans didn’t have rights until sixty years ago and that a worthy goal of the US was to extend freedom and liberty to all people. They were being taught the vital importance of human dignity. Their kids were learning that slavery existed in the US. They were using students’ preferred pronouns, a word these parents had never once heard before their phones told them it was bad and scary, and like everything else they didn't like, a left-wing plot. Jesus, after all, did not use pronouns, except for when he referred to himself and his dad (God). This would not do.

-These parents bullied and threatened dutiful school board officials and well-meaning principals and ran for office and eventually took over school boards and banned and burned books with which they did not agree and there was nothing the courts could do because good and bad things are exactly the same. In blue states, as I learned the hard way, these anti-education forces leveraged bad-faith politics to trick folks into voting for radicalized weirdos whose only goal was for schools to be propaganda outlets for their preferred messaging. These fear-mad people said in one voice: My child will only learn what I want them to learn, and your child will only learn what I want them to learn.

And so the backlash against what was called wokeism was complete and school boards and school districts across the US had been hijacked by people who sought to undermine real, actual education and transform school curriculum into fascist propaganda through a clumsy retconning of American history. That Americans have no sense of their own history beyond pilgrims and Native Americans purportedly having a meal around Thanksgiving made their job easier than it should have been.

The inevitable backlash to that backlash is here, just a few years after it took hold in all its manic glory, and Americans are voting in droves to boot the anti-education activists who temporarily took over school systems because they did not want to wear a mask indoors sometimes. Fascist weirdos on school boards across the country were thrown out of office in November 4’s total rejection of the Trump regime. In blue and red and purple districts alike, those who won school board seats in 2020 and 2021 because their children were learning that white folks aren’t perfect lost to pro-education candidates backed by organizations that recruit and prepare progressive candidates.

The pro-education candidates drew support this year from people who wanted a return to boring school board governance. The hysteria of COVID-era politics wearing off and their dopamine receptors exhausted, Americans seemed (mostly) done with those who had told them the Real Problem with American schools was the wokeness ingrained in schoolbooks and lesson plans and that teacher with the blue highlights in her hair, the one who has a BLM sticker on her Subaru Outback. You know the one.

Falling math scores, plummeting literacy rates, kids sent out into the Real World without any understanding of the Real World: All of this could be fixed if we flush woke out of the schools. Suzy and Franky would learn to read, the argument went, if only they were not told transgender people exist and are as human as they are, and that slavery might have been good for the enslaved. This was the pledge from Moms For Liberty and other anti-education groups that may or may not be funded by foreign entities aiming to exploit divisions in American society.

The belief that schools and teachers should be told by parents what they can and cannot teach – the ferocious rallying cry of the fascist Trojan horse known as the parental rights movement – was mainstreamed in those dark days of COVID.

Bolstered by bad-faith online influencers who saw a path to eternal engagement via various school-based outrages and right-wing media outlets that seized on the panic around left-wing indoctrination in U.S. schools, the anti-education forces convinced fellow parents that they should be in charge of every aspect of their kids’ education, that it was their job to keep their children ignorant about subjects that would undermine the larger fascist project. They didn’t know they were advancing such a project – they would have to have read a book to know that – but that’s exactly what they were doing.

It’s all bubbling under the surface for now, but the pendulum is not swinging back toward pro-democracy forces – it has already swung. We are fully in the grips of what might be (half jokingly but kinda seriously) called Woke 2. It’s a backlash to the backlash, powered by normies who were taken in by those who said in 2020 that the only thing wrong with U.S. institutions – schools among them – was their acceptance of marginalized groups and its acknowledgement of historical injustices and the legacy of those injustices. The normies, if this month’s sweep elections were any indication, are through with that nonsense.

OK, they say, you burned books with references to same-sex couples and black liberation and references to butt cracks, but our schools still suck and my kid remains unprepared for college or the workplace or whatever comes next for them. Conservatives found out the hard way that screaming about trans people in American society is not One Weird Trick to winning every election and consolidating power.

Maybe the normies who had been swept up by the anti-education movement in 2020 and 2021 truly believed these school board candidates wanted to fix schools and provide a better education for children in the community. And maybe those anti-education school board candidates talked a big game about all that. They never meant it though; it was all in bad faith, the worst faith.

They only meant to seize the power over what kids learn and don’t learn, to intimidate educators into submitting to their Libs-of-TikTok agenda, and to stop their offspring from learning the virtues of freedom and dignity for all Americans, not just those who drive Ram trucks and take family Christmas family portraits with machine guns and always – always – vote Republican.

Colonization, Victimization, Things Of That Nature

My fourth-grade daughter came home a couple weeks ago with her Thursday folder, full of school work she had done over the past five days. It included the usual: Drawings, short stories, some math homework that I didn’t really understand because of New Math and whatnot (which is way better than Old Math). When I saw she was learning about the colonization of America, I winced, assuming it was a whitewashed version of actual events.

But no. Her teacher and the books she was reading on colonization were honest in their depictions of brutality against native people. My daughter told me in hushed tones about a Native American leader who was killed by a colonist with her child in her arms and about a tribe that tried to secure peace with settlers only to be tricked and slaughtered while they slept one night. The race of these settlers was never mentioned explicitly but their duplicity toward and destruction of Native tribes was spelled out in unflinching detail.

My daughter was fascinated, and asked me why she hadn’t learned about this earlier. I told her many Americans never learn the truth – or any variation of it – about the genocide of Native Americans and the blood-drenched colonization of the Americas. Most people you’ll meet in your life, I told her, will have no comprehension of how our country was founded. She nodded, considered this for a moment, and slid a math equation in front of me.

Elon Musk might be surprised to learn I didn’t take this opportunity to tell my daughter she should be ashamed of her ancestry and hate her own skin and herself. A guy like Musk, who's training his fascist Wikipedia alternative with neo-nazi chat logs and websites, imagines a guy like me sitting there with his kid, demanding that she learn these real historical facts and feel bad about her very existence.

Musk, like many black-pilled online burnouts, has successfully flipped power dynamics on their head so that white children in the US (and in South Africa, naturally) are a beleaguered, oppressed population being taught to hate themselves and their families. Maybe that's not surprising coming from the guy who last year told Germans to stop remembering the Holocaust. It’s among the clumsier efforts to turn oneself into a victim, a smol bean that can lash out culturally and politically because, well, they are being victimized by forces seen and unseen.

All of this sits at the heart of bad-faith politics. One must reposition oneself as the victim before one's agenda becomes viable and acceptable and maybe even popular if one can trick enough people into adopting the same corrupted mindset.

The key to being a right winger is to never stop whining.

Like the hysterical parents and right-wing broken brains who briefly grabbed control of school boards in the US, Musk's politics cannot tolerate Real History. He can't hold the monstrous views he wants to hold if he acknowledges what really happened in his home country of South Africa or his unfortunate adopted home, the United States. His hate and resentment and and all the vile race science he promotes on the X platform formerly known as Twitter would have no basis if he were to accept historical facts for what they really are.

I hope the renewed commitment to school boards that don't function as local authoritarian fiefdoms is here to stay, though I have my doubts in the Age of Dopamine, where our overstimulated brains crave dopamine at any cost – even electing seditious insurrectionist to the land's highest office. Fascists might be bad, but they are darkly interesting to large swaths of the public. Sometimes that's all that really matters.

My hope – our hope – is that Americans might have finally learned a lesson when they went along with the bad-faith actors who took temporary charge of our schools during the backlash to marginalized people demanding some dignity and Starbucks baristas asking for slight raises.

Memories are short and social media timelines are long, however.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.