White Anxiety, Redefined: The psychic wages of disfiguring the meaning of critical race theory, by Anthony Conwright

There is so much wisdom to be gleaned from this piece authored by Anthony Conwright writing for the African American Policy Forum in the context of the current political and policy context with respect to the anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT), extremist moment we're in. 

What makes this piece important is its signaling of psychic wages to white people who, as Conwright aptly states, "no longer know who they are when Black people avow their autonomy," resulting in a caricatured view of CRT spun "into groundless abstraction [that denotes] its effective social meaning to be anything that triggers anxiety in white people."

What this extremist agenda seeks is to numb children—and society, as whole—to the horrors of slavery and genocide not unlike that which Holocaust deniers seek. Conwright writes cogently on the impact of this agenda on white people themselves:

"If society is numb to the murder and structural oppression of Black Americans, then society will not be moved to change the laws that govern these evils.  The white Americans who denounce critical race theory as an unthinkable source of inner angst and distress thus betray their own rarely acknowledged psychic investment in the justification of systemic violence meted out toward Black people in the service of white supremacy."

 Again, Conwright gets to the heart of the matter:

"Indeed, this core evasion of Black Americans’ humanity has become so compelling, some white people are willing to destroy their history at the cost of their own humanity." 

White people manifesting white anxiety clearly need grounding opposite that which is indifferent toward, or numb to, black and brown people's suffering. Do note that people of color can similarly fall prey to such ideologies through an internalization of white supremacy that manifests as self-hatred, or hatred toward one's own racial or ethnic group.  

A good first start is to stand up against this unethical re-writing of history, these legislated sins of omission, that reinscribe a white identity that ill-serves white people anyway.

-Angela Valenzuela

White Anxiety, Redefined

The psychic wages of disfiguring the meaning of critical race theory

Anthony Conwright | March 31, 2022

To loot an object of its meaning, the object must be seized and its identity erased through an abracadabra flourish of semantics so it can be made anew. Philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon described this process in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks. “I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance,” Fanon wrote. “And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!”        The project of overdetermining Black people extends well beyond the corporal form and bleeds into academia. Under the lenses of “white eyes,” Black studies, hip-hop scholarship, and critical race theory are not what their pioneers defined them to be. These fields of study are seized, undressed and converted into symbols that marshal anxiety among white Americans who no longer know who they are when Black people avow their autonomy. We’ve witnessed this process at close remove in recent months, as much the same rhetoric and legislation that transmogrified enslaved Africans into non-beings have been revived to spin the definition of critical race theory (CRT) off into groundless abstraction—and then denote its effective social meaning to be anything that triggers anxiety in white people.        If this sounds hyperbolic, just consider the testimony of the lead propagandist in today’s CRT moral panic. “Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American,” said Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo. “ ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain.” True to his word, Rufo has been aggressively promoting a wholly imaginary version of CRT while projecting just about every conceivable brand of white anxiety onto it—in exactly the fashion that Fanon long ago diagrammed.        Seizing on this new front in the right-wing culture wars, legislators across 33 states have appointed themselves expert interpreters of critical race theory, further disfiguring its meaning and assailing it as “divisive.” This ritualized exercise in bad-faith demagogy not only means that conservatives are undermining the basic facts of their own identity as Americans benefiting from long-established racial hierarchies; it also serves to hollow out the history of the country into a series of untrue, inoffensive nostrums. Today’s anti-CRT inquisitors thus condemn educators who seek to tell the truth about America’s identity to silence themselves—or else join in the make-believe and bowdlerized version of the country’s racial history—at the cost of their own livelihoods.            To see this process in action, consider an episode that actually predates the full onset of the CRT moral panic. On August 27, 2020 Matthew Hahn, a former teacher in Sullivan Central High School in Sullivan County, Tennessee, talked about “white privilege” with his students during his Contemporary Issues course. During the lesson, Hawn showed a video of the family of Jacob Blake, an African American shot by police officers in Kenosha, Wis., speaking to the press. He also showed a picture of Kyle Rittenhouse with one hand on his rifle and the other hand in the air walking toward police. Rittenhouse, a white American, shot and killed two people in Kenosha during protests of Blake’s shooting. After showing the media to his students, Hawn said, “this is white privilege and it is a fact. Not up for debate, but what are we going to do about racism in the U.S.?”        On September 9, Hawn received an email from Dr. Brent Palmer, Director of High Schools for Sullivan County Schools. Palmer suggested that Hawn was in violation of the Tennessee Teacher Code of Ethics, which says that an educator “shall not unreasonably deny the students access to a varying points of view.” Palmer took issue with Hawn saying white privilege “is a fact.” After receiving Palmer’s email, Hawn did not talk about racism in his classroom until the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when a mob of predominantly white Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building as they sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.        On January 13, Hawn assigned “Donald Trump: The First White President,” an Atlantic article written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, that argues white supremacy is the reason Donald Trump won white voters of every economic class during the 2016 presidential election. Hawn stipulated to his class that the article represents one viewpoint, but four days after he assigned the article a parent complained that Hawn did not offer an opposing viewpoint.        On February 13, Hawn received a formal letter of reprimand. Hawn revisited the concept of “white privilege” in April 2021. This time, he asked if there was such a thing as “Black privilege,” and included a CNN.com article by John Blake called “It’s Time to Talk about Black Privilege”—a clearly varying viewpoint on notions of privilege. This effort did not alleviate anxiety among school leadership; Hawn received formal dismissal papers on May 5, 2021. “Your job is not to teach one perspective,” Ingrid Deloach, the assistant director of Sullivan County Schools, told him. “Your job is also not to ensure students simply adopt your own personal perspective.”

Legislation that defines critical race theory as a “divisive concept” has no standing as a logical or moral argument, and, much like the bid to neuter Holocaust denial, is entirely dishonest.

Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature. The common denominator? Fear of Black liberation.

History repeats itself. One should indeed go back 200 years to learn about the banning of abolitionist literature, but don't forget that it was only 9 years ago on January 10, 2012 when the Tucson Unified School District Board dismantled the Mexican American Studies program, banning not just courses, but also books as I've posted on this blog, e.g., The Banned Books List for Arizona Ethnic Studies (search "banned books" on this blog for more information).

I researched the impact of Arizona on the Mexican American Studies advocacy community here in Texas—of which I am a part—and found that what happened in Arizona surrounding Mexican American Studies is what inspired us in 2013 to organize what is today the contemporary Ethnic Studies Movement in Texas. I predict that this conservative movement—under the banner of "Critical Race Theory"—will ultimately fail as have all previous attempts.

The main difference today from years and decades past is greater awareness of our country's possessive investment in its racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic ways of knowing and being that underlie the violence we've witnessed against dark-skinned people for much too long. We undoubtedly share a common humanity such that these dispositions are simply neither desirable nor sustainable. 

What the larger advocacy community must learn from all of this, as well, is the interconnectedness of these struggles in order to build unity and a shared sense of purpose for collective action. Many of us are having this very conversation right now here in Texas.

Así es...and there is no better time than now to advocate for a good and just education that disavows hostile, domineering, and dehumanizing ways of knowing and being in the world.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature.

The common denominator? Fear of Black liberation.

ANTHONY CONWRIGHTSEPTEMBER+OCTOBER 2021 ISSUE

by Anthony Conwright | Sept.-Oct. 2021 | Mother Jones

There have been many contributions to help make sense of the Republican obsession with critical race theory, a framework developed some 40 years ago to analyze the ways racism is endemic to our laws and policies. Conservatives have decided it’s a domestic threat, and, as of this writing, 11 states have already banned teaching it in public schools. But perhaps the best explanation for the hysteria is in a journal entry written on April 7, 1829, by a schoolteacher named Susan Nye Hutchison, who lived in Augusta, Georgia, and whose diaries illuminate a quarter century of life before the Civil War. “Great fear begins to be prevalent that the negroes are about to rise,” Hutchison wrote.

Georgians had experienced a spate of fires, as rumors of insurrection made the citizens of Augusta both negro- and pyro-phobic. Four days before Hutchison’s entry, another “terrible fire” burned about a third of the city, according to a contemporary news article. Estimated damages totaled half a million dollars, with nearly 350 homes destroyed. Hysteria ensued, and enslaved Black people were blamed, rounded up, and tried without evidence.

Months later, a pamphlet named the Appeal, David Walker’s polemic against slavery, emerged in the South. “My object is, if possible,” Walker, a free Black man, wrote, “to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness.”

Southern politicians viewed Walker’s Appeal and its repudiation of their values as “incendiary,” a pyrotechnic of another kind. When Walker’s treatise reached his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, magistrate James McKee issued a warning to Gov. John Owen:

The dissemination of Walker’s pamphlet…[proves] beyond a doubt that a systematic attempt is making by some reckless persons at the North to sow sedition among the slaves [of] the South, and that this pamphlet is intended and well calculated to prepare the minds of the slave population for any measure, however desperate, that they may propose for accomplishing their emancipation…unless some measures are taken to counteract this design in time, I fear the consequences may be serious to the extreme.

North Carolina quickly passed two laws aimed at stemming slave rebellions by repressing the spread of abolitionist literature. An Act to Prevent the Circulation of Seditious Publications made it a felony to import and distribute “any written or printed pamphlet or paper…the evident tendency whereof would be to excite insurrection, conspiracy or resistance.” A second law banned “the teaching of slaves to read and write,” saying it “has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion to the manifest injury of the citizens of this State.”

Walker’s Appeal also led to Georgia’s December 1829 anti-literacy law, which made circulating insurrectionary texts punishable by death. Virginia, Missouri, and others followed. As a Missouri state archive website puts it, the bans were deemed necessary because “an uneducated black population made white citizens feel more secure against both abolitionists and slave uprisings.”

“This is a terrorist assault in our country, and rioting cannot be tolerated,” Ted Cruz said last year as citizens rebelled against police murder. Republicans had little scripture to demonize protests against the public torture and execution of George Floyd, so they deferred their anti-rebellion rhetoric into new laws against looting, property damage, and even protesting, suggesting that failing to do so would bring a conflagration that would consume the country. “These people are violent, domestic extremists,” Marco Rubio said. “They hate the police, they hate the government, and they want this country to fall apart…some of them want a second civil war.”

Anti-protest bills were an opening salvo against the Black Lives Matter rebellions, but there would be another volley. As demonstrators and their allies picked up How to Be an Antiracist, White Fragility, and other books—which helped them articulate demands to dismantle white supremacy, to rebel against state-sanctioned murder, to call for defunding police and obliterating qualified immunity—Republicans turned to locking down these texts and the ideas they carry.

From 2012 to 2019, critical race theory was mentioned on Fox News only four times. From June 2020 to May 2021, it was mentioned in 150 broadcasts. By July, it was 250 times a week. Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow who started banging the CRT drum on the network, was quite frank about how and why he’d engineered the upward trend. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans,” he tweeted in March.

In attacking the things they’ve labeled as critical race theory, Republicans are seeking to erase the entire contemporary genre of abolitionist oratory. Critical race theory, diversity training, anti-­racism, DEI, discussions of white fragility, Nikole Hannah-Jones and her New York Times 1619 Project—to them, it’s all interchangeable jargon in the Black Lives Matter anthem, seditious lyrics that prelude uprisings against the proper order of things. This campaign to annihilate anti-­racist speech is not only the ideological offspring of the laws banning abolition literature; it’s a ruse to veil their hatred and fear of Black Lives Matter rebellions.

Literacy among enslaved Africans was not always antithetical to slavery in the colonies. It was once permissible for the enslaved to read Bibles, but when colonists realized the skill could be a gateway to liberation, literacy was outlawed. The first anti-literacy legislation in the colonies was in the wake of South Carolina’s 1739 Stono Rebellion, led by the purportedly literate slave Jemmy and resulting in the death of some 25 white people, as many as 50 Black people, and the burning of at least six plantations. Afterward, the colony passed An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province. The law contained a bevy of provisions to keep enslaved Africans in “subjection and obedience,” essentially ending manumission and prohibiting them from writing or growing their own food.

The fear of insurrection and rebellion—and the spread of thoughts and words that might fuel them—persists today. “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other. It is state-sanctioned racism and has no place in Florida schools,” said Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor. A bill he signed into law forbids teaching “that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” It also says educators “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” The text echoes an op-ed article published in the Richmond Enquirer in 1856:

Every school and college in the South should teach that slave society is the common, natural, rightful and normal state of society. Any doctrine short of this contains abolition in the germ: for, if it be not the rightful and natural form of society, it cannot last, and we should prepare for its gradual but ultimate abolition…To teach such doctrines we must have Southern teachers and Southern school books. It is from the school that public opinion proceeds, and the schools should be set right. No teacher should be employed in a private family or public school at the South, who is not ready to teach these doctrines. Parents, trustees and visitors should look to this thing.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon shared this prophecy on his podcast in May. “The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards.” That fight played out mercilessly at the University of North Carolina, where the conservative-­controlled board of trustees’ unprecedented obstructions to hiring Hannah-Jones caused her to walk away from a prestigious position on the journalism faculty.

Locally, parents have taken heed, turning school board hearings into tribunals to eradicate anti-racism. Elana Yaron Fishbein, founder of No Left Turn in Education, a grassroots movement against critical race theory, claimed in a letter to her district’s superintendent that such curricula “plan to indoctrinate the children into the ‘woke’ culture.”