Why is that the Trump administration threatening to censor the way schools teach about slavery and racism within the United States?
The President's declaration came in acknowledgment of a tweet from an unsubstantiated account declaring that California schools were teaching the 1619 Project curriculum. In response, Trump tweeted: "Department of Education is watching this. If so, they're going to not be funded!"
The 1619 Project is long-form journalism and multimedia initiative of The NY Times Magazine, started in August of 2019, 400 years after African slaves first landed on America's shores. In its words, the project "proposes to reframe the country's memoir by setting the consequences of slavery and therefore the supplying of Black Americans at the very center of our social anecdote." The 1619 Project coupled up with the Pulitzer Center to acquire a foundation curriculum to use 1619 Project content in classrooms.
Trump's Sunday morning tweet continues a trend of his administration's provocative actions regarding educational approaches to racial injustice in America.
For example, on Friday, the Trump administration announced that it had been getting to cease diversity training deemed anti-American. During a two-page memo addressed to the leadership of federal agencies, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought specifically directed national executives to start the method of identifying contracts with race-related content that it finds offensive.
"All companies are commanded to start to locate all contracts or other company operating compared with any education on 'critical race system,' 'white prerogative,' or the other training or publication effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the us is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil," the memo states.
Despite the timing, Trump's tweet is not the first instance the Trump administration and its allies targeted the 1619 Project. In July, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced congressional legislation, titled the "Saving American History Act of 2020," with the stated purpose of "preventing federal funds from being made available to show the 1619 Project curriculum in elementary schools and secondary schools."
The recommended legislation challenges that "an activist change is now gaining impulse to dismiss or confuse this history by pretending that America wasn't founded on the ideals of the Declaration [of Independence] but rather on slavery and oppression." It goes on to state that "the 1619 Project may be a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying truth principles on which it had been founded."
Both Trump's tweet, also as Cotton's proposed legislation, beg a troubling question: why are Republican leaders trying to censor the teaching about the history of slavery and racism within us, and why now?
During a time when we are engaged in an emotional and increasingly confrontational dialogue over the legacy of its racist past, educators across us also are exploring ways to raised teach the narratives of racial privilege and injustice that have led to the pervasiveness of institutional racism in America. By threatening to censor content that it finds objectionable, the Trump administration isn't only treading dangerously on the underlying principles of a free and democratic society; it's also acting during a deeply hypocritical manner because it otherwise generally endorses local autonomy on problems with education and faculty choice.
But perhaps most troubling of all, Trump's tweet and, therefore, his administration and allies' arguments demonstrate a belief that history should be taught how that limits criticism. Further, Trump himself has shown that he is willing to require actions to constructively censor those whose views of history conflict with those of the administration.
That's not teaching history, that's shaping national propaganda.
For a president who proudly proclaims that he has done more for the Black community than the other President in American history, his efforts to censor the painful story of the Black experience in America are a slap within each Black's face who lived that account from the past to this.
