I appreciate University of Massachusetts Amherst, College of Education professor Dr. Warren Blumenfeld's focus on book bans and censorship, while pointing in this piece very appropriate connections to Nazi Germany as well as to our own recent history in Arizona with the banning of the district's Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. This banning similarly also involved the banning of many books, some of which Dr. Blumenfeld lists below. Go to this Banned Books Link to see all of the books banned by the Arizona Department of Education.
I love this pertinent piece by the late Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez titled, Why ban Indigenous philosophies in the classroom? Actual philosophy that is as relevant to our times today as it was to our ancestors is what happens, as well, when we ban books.
Another great read by Dr. Blumenfeld is titled, "Are We in Higher Education Reverting to the Pitfalls of the Banning Books and Classroom Discussions Movement of K-12?"
I so appreciate the connections that Dr. Blumenfeld makes to higher education that I myself have always referred to as a "slippery slope." By this I mean the importance, as a policy maker or advocate to attend to K-12 issues as these migrate to higher education, as we are all witnessing at this very moment.
If this is something you care about, see today's earlier post about being present to protect literature at the December 13th meeting of the Texas Board of Education.
-Angela Valenzuela
Banning Courses for Political Purposes Violates Students Rights To Learn
The bill bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other discussions around the topic of the country’s racial history in the schools and diversity and inclusion training in corporations.
Under the guise of “freedom” to determine “their children’s” education, though not a new phenomenon, we are seeing some parents, legislators, and school administrators attempting to place severe limits on the teaching of our nation’s past and the legacies of this history upon the lives of people and the functioning of institutions today.
Republican legislators throughout the U.S. have enacted new laws and policies intended to define the narrow parameters of what and how students will discuss our country’s past and our present.
Many of these efforts have attempted to ban Critical Race Theory, even though CRT is not taught in the public school and is generally discussed in selective college and university graduate level courses.
Possibly because the notion of Critical Race Theory is so vague to most conservative voters, then Republican candidate for Virginia’s next Governor, Glenn Youngkin, calling himself the “parents’ rights candidate,” has attempted to instill further fear on the part of the electorate.
Youngkin has raised his racist bullhorn by declaring not only his intent to ban Critical Race Theory the day he was elected, but also to outlaw the reading of the critically acclaimed and award winning novel by author Toni Morrison, Beloved, which was turned into a major feature film.
By his own admission, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also attempted to prevent residents, schools, and corporations in Florida from becoming actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) in his rhetoric and his support for the state’s so-called “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act.”
In addition to demonizing Latinx and black immigrants coming from the U.S. southern border and using their bodies as props to promote himself and his far-right agenda, conservative Republicans in the state legislature, along with the Governor’s absolute backing, passed the act to supposedly provide businesses, employees, children, and families the legal means of opposing alleged “woke indoctrination.”
“DeSantis” in Italian means “of the Saints” or “of the Holy,” but Governor Ron is certainly no saint. The bill bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other discussions around the topic of the country’s racial history in the schools and diversity and inclusion training in corporations.
DeSantis announced during his second inaugural address, January 3, 2023:
“We reject this woke ideology. We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy,” he reiterated. “We will not allow reality, facts, and truth to become optional.” And then he pledged, “We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”
Now, DeSantis is attempting to cancel Florida students’ attendance into an AP course on African American studies because, according to the governor, it “significantly lacks educational value,” even though the College Board, the association that administers standardized test like the SATs, has dedicated over a decade in developing the AP African American studies course, which has been pilot tested across the nation in over 60 high schools.
Actually, in his statement and actions, DeSantis is not allowing reality, facts, and truth to enter the public sphere.
DeSantis is not only criminalizing discussions of race and racism, but he is also preventing Florida residents from actively attending to important societal facts and issues of sexuality and gender as well.
Florida’s so-called “Parental Rights in Education” law, called by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, was to take effect weeks later on July 1, 2022.
Passed primarily by Republicans in the state legislature and signed into law by DeSantis, the new law reads in part:
“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Though Florida has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity, school contexts, as reproductions of the larger society, function on an overarching system of racism, heteronormativity, and other forms of oppression.
We must never forget, however, the prophetic words of German poet, Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.”
Arizona as Case Study
By comparison, I ask how these attitudes and actions are any different from the draconian practices enacted by Arizona state officials in 2010 in stripping away primarily the Mexican American Studies programs from Tucson public schools? Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal, suspended the highly successful and student empowering program.
Then Arizona School Superintendent, Tom Horne, in 2010 when the state legislature passed the measure, House Bill 2281, asserted that the law is necessary because Tucson, Arizona’s Mexican American, African American, and Native American studies courses teach students that they are oppressed, encourage resentment toward white people, and promote “ethnic chauvinism” and “ethnic solidarity” instead of treating people as individuals.
Huppenthal released a list of books he had banned from classrooms throughout the state, including The Tempest by Shakespeare, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998) by Bigelow and Peterson, The Latino Condition: A Critical Reader (1998) by Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) by Delgado and Stefancic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) by Freire, United States Government: Democracy in Action (2007) by Remy, Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006) by Rosales, and Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1990) by Zinn.
Anyone who believes in academic freedom and cultural liberty must find practices of censorship offensive. Students previously enrolled in the Mexican American Studies program achieved a 94% high school graduation rate, up significantly from around 50% of Latino/a students not enrolled. The program had given students a sense of cultural pride, a passion and joy in the learning process, and a feeling of hope for their futures.
Unfortunately, however, Arizona politicians placed social and cultural conformity as the major considerations. This reflects educational researcher’s, Kochman, in Black and White Cultural Styles in Pluralistic Perspective (1994) contention that dominant society mandates linguistic and cultural assimilation as a requirement for social support:
“The nonreciprocal nature of the process of cultural assimilations of minorities does not permit the mainstream American culture to learn about minority cultural traditions nor benefit from their official social incorporation. It also suggests an unwarranted social arrogance: that mainstream American society has already reached a state of perfection and cannot benefit from being exposed to and learning from other cultural traditions” (p. 287).
Censorship as Cultural and Physical Genocide
As wisely and eloquently stated by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” this adage holds that the written word acts as a powerful tool in the transmission of ideas. Why else would oppressive regimes and other avid enforcers of the status quo engage in censorship and book bannings and burnings throughout the ages?
For example, Pope Gregory IX in 1239, in his quest to maintain the Catholic Church’s economic and ideological stranglehold, ordered all copies of the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, confiscated, and one of his successors, Pope John XXI, commanded that the Talmud be burned on the eve of the Jewish Passover in 1322.
Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, in his 1526 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, argued that “First, their synagogues should be set on fire.” Jewish prayer books should be destroyed, and rabbis forbidden to preach. The homes of Jews should likewise be “smashed and destroyed” and their residents “put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies, to teach them they are not master in our land….These “poisonous envenomed worms should be drafted into forced labor. The young and strong Jews and Jewesses should be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and the spindle and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses.”
As Luther’s dire pronouncements make perfectly clear, what begins as banning then torching of books and other property eventually results in the denial of civil liberties, torture, and eventually murder of people scapegoated by dominant social groups and by their government leaders.
This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. Nazi storm troopers, in 1933, invaded, ransacked, and padlocked The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish sexuality researcher.
The Institute conducted early sexuality and gender research, the precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States. Storm troopers carried away and torched thousands of volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations, and public and school libraries and confiscated books they deemed “un-German.” The German Student Association, (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.”
On May 10, 1933, the students along with Nazi leaders set ablaze over 25,000 volumes in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, “fired” up the crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
Joel Spring, in his book Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States, addresses “cultural genocide,” which he defines as “the attempt to destroy other cultures” through forced acquiescence and assimilation to majority rule and cultural and religious standards. This cultural genocide works through the process of “deculturalization,” which Spring describes as “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture and replacing it with a new culture.”
An historical example of “cultural genocide” and “deculturalization” can be seen in the case of European American domination over Native American Indigenous nations whom European Americans viewed as “uncivilized,” “godless heathens,” “barbarians,” and “devil worshipers.”
European Americans attempted to deculturalized indigenous peoples through many means: confiscation of land, forced relocation, undermining of their languages, cultures, and identities, forced conversion to Christianity, and the establishment of Christian day schools and off-reservation boarding schools where they took youth far away from their people.
The U.S. government under President Hayes approved and developed off-reservation Indian boarding schools, the first in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879 run primarily by white Christian teachers, administered by Richard Pratt, a former cavalry commander in the Indian Territories.
At the schools, officials stripped Indigenous children from their cultures: cut short the young men’s hair, forced all to wear Western-style clothing, prohibited them from conversing in their native languages and made English compulsory, destroyed all their cultural and spiritual symbols, and imposed Christianity on them.
As Pratt related to a Baptist audience: “[We must immerse] Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under, [hold] them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”
As Santayana reminds us: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” We now, though, have an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past by speaking out against the racism and cultural genocide that surrounds us.
Standing together and standing firm, we can reverse the tide of ruthless censorship engulfing our educational system.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
