In a recent New Yorker article, Susan Glasser wondered “Why aren’t we in the streets?” As Trump — who now refers to himself as a “king” and toys with the idea of serving a third term in the White House — and his co-president Elon Musk rip through the government, mocking legal barriers, scolding allies, and shredding the lives of millions, we remain, Glasser laments, “quiescent.” Perhaps we have simply been “overwhelmed by the unimaginable becoming real,” as M. Gessen suggested.
While the abysmal cruelty of Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the trans community is intended to isolate and terrify those vulnerable communities, his campaign to dictate what can and cannot be taught in our nation’s schools threatens to reinforce the structures of white supremacy and undermine the very purpose of education itself.
Consider the email recently sent by the Provost of the Naval Academy, Samara Firebaugh, to her faculty. In it she instructed faculty to comb through course materials to extirpate such offensive words as “diversity,” “minority,” “belonging,” “bias,” “representation,” and “oppression.” “Do not use materials,” she commanded, “that can be interpreted to assign blame to generalized groups for enduring social conditions, particularly discrimination or inequality… Do not employ readings or other materials that promote the concepts of ‘gender ideology,’ ‘divisive concepts,’ ‘race or sex stereotyping,’ and ‘race or sex scapegoating,’ including critical race theory, intersectionality, privilege, patriarchy or other such theories.”
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After Class 