Considering how rapidly the right’s “war on woke” is expanding, it was perhaps inevitable: Self-identified “mama bears” on a Texas school board are angry that a classroom had a poster showing people of different races holding hands. Last week, the school board in Conroe, Texas, a small city north of Houston, turned the right-wing mania for censorship into a dark parody of itself. At issue? A poster that seemed to imply that interracial friendship is possible.
According to ABC 13 Eyewitness News in Houston, things started when school trustee Melissa Dungan declared that she had spoken to parents who were upset about “displays of personal ideologies in classrooms.” When pressed for an example, according to the news report, “Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.”
“I wish I was shocked,” Dungan said of the poster. “I am aware these trends have been happening for many years.”
Just call them racist. It’s a racist tantrum. That’s it.
Stop talking about them in their terms.
Yup this is a racist tantrum, “anti woke” is just the new coat of paint. It isn’t “anti woke” that’s getting more common, it’s racism, xenophobia, and hate in general.
If you’d read the article, you’d know that it is not all it is.
If you have, in fact, read the article, read it again. To the end. Maybe take in some of its links too.
This is not ‘just’ a racist tantrum. It is a billionaire-funded fascist takeover. Lazily dismissing them won’t work. People need to start turning up to school board meetings to outnumber these fucking psychopaths. Even if no one is paying them to do it.
I didn’t mean “that’s it” as if it’s merely a racist tantrum. In fact, calling it a tantrum like the article does infantilizes the problem - as if they’re harmless babies and we can ignore their crying. I didn’t mean to imply it’s “just” a racist tantrum. Rather, what I meant is that we need to call racism racism and be precise with language, not lazily dismiss them as “anti-woke” as if that means anything.
I take your point about language. It is important to say “racist” when you mean “racist”.
But they’re also targeting LGBTQ+ people and women, and any other group they can use to distract attention from the fact that billionaires are robbing us blind lest they lose one tiny drop of power.
So, in this case, “anti-woke” is a perfectly reasonable term to use. Not least because if we want to destroy these fuckers, it will take every single one of us making common cause, not fighting about who gets top billing.
This is about racism but it is about racism because it is about power. Power protecting itself by throwing everyone else under the bus. “Look! Over there! The poor people have all your money!”
We cannot defeat them by retreating into identity siloes. Obviously, we all have different specific battles to fight but they’re all the same war. Against fascism. We do need a language that acknowledges that.
Fair. Connecting this specific spate of racism to the broader fascist trend of smearing everyone who isn’t an affluent straight white male christian (i.e. part of the in-group) is good politics, but there’s already a word for that: reactionary
I refuse to let them define themselves.
Yes, that is a fair point and one I’d missed a bit from your original post. I appreciated the scare quotes in the article but you’re not wrong.
That said, I don’t know if you’re exactly right either. “Woke” was co-opted by the fash. I don’t think we should just let them have it. A good starting point is for every interlocutor to stop them and ask them to define the word every time they use it. The word is not the problem.
They call themselves anti-woke; by calling them anti-woke you are letting them have it. Practically giving it to them, in fact.
You’re only letting them have it if you also let them define it. They are anti-woke. Woke (aware of structural injustice) is not a bad thing to be. 90% of the population has every reason to be woke because 90% of the population is subject to structural injustice. But far too many have been distracted by the idea that some other fucked-over group has it better than them, or gains consolation from not being quite at the bottom of the pile.
It’s a neat trick but so easy to expose. And one of the simplest ways to expose it is to make them spell out what they think it means.
“Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.”
can’t wait until the Supreme Court reverses Brown
the way this country has been working… I don’t even doubt it… fuck…
In practice there’s still extreme racial segregation across a lot of US schools. I recall a good article on the NY school system but can’t find it.
oh I know. but they’ll dial that ratchet straight to 11 once Brown is gone.
You mean it hasn’t already happened? God maybe there is some hope still
not unless the Ds suddenly decide they want to fight back and pack the court or something. barring that, the right has a majority on the court for the next generation.
Moms for Liberty has heavily promoted trainings for conservative activists on how to take over school boards, which ought to make clear how we should understand stories like this one, which just sound like a racist tantrum in a Texas suburb. These aren’t random or isolated events — they’re part of a large, well-organized and well-financed attack on public education across the country.
I feel like it’s important to keep the eye on the ball here. The right has been incredibly successful at organizing at the local level and has flipped a lot of seats because of it, and not just in the rural south either.
Per the article, this is part of an organized effort on the part of formerly respected institutions on the right to actively push a racist agenda. Our star villain in this case is the Claremont Institute:
Last week, the New Republic published a lengthy and terrifying investigative article by Katherine Stewart about the Claremont Institute, once a vaguely respectable conservative think tank and now among the leading right-wing organizations pushing the anti-education and anti-democratic agenda below the surface of the Conroe incident. One of the many Claremont alumni Stewart profiles is Christopher Rufo, who spearheaded the recent hysteria over “critical race theory” in education. In reality, critical race theory was an approach used in law schools and other graduate-level academic spaces, and had basically nothing to do with public schools. Rufo’s ingenious idea was to turn it into a catch-all scare term that could be used to demonize any and all forms of anti-racist education, even something as previously noncontroversial as a poster depicting interracial friendship.
Here’s the more detailed article on Claremont from the New Republic. Excerpt below:
The saga of the Claremont Institute in the Trump years is readily told as one of moral collapse. Once upon a time, the men of the Claremont Institute (they are almost all men; more on that in a moment) idolized George Washington for his “prudence” and “civility.” From its founding up through the Obama years, the institute was certainly situated on the right, but it was not, or did not seem to be, conspicuous for its extremism. It was probably best known for publishing the Claremont Review of Books, which was sized and laid out to resemble The New York Review of Books, as if to suggest that it was in direct competition with its more established and exalted Manhattan counterpart.
But in 2015–16, the Claremont men threw their support behind the man who descended that golden escalator with a mouthful of hateful rhetoric. In an earlier time, they defended intellectual rigor against the alleged relativism of contemporary academic culture. But now they provide a platform for white nationalists, racist “replacement” theorists, and the Pizzagate man. Nate Hochman, the erstwhile DeSantis staffer who was fired after he reportedly created and distributed a campaign video featuring Nazi imagery in July, is a former Claremont Institute Publius Fellow (2021). ”Most haunting of all—they once hailed the United States as “the best regime in Western civilization.” But in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat in 2020, Claremont board member John Eastman was instrumental in the plot to recruit fake electors and overturn the election—and the men of Claremont rose to his defense. Eastman currently faces potential disbarment in California and appears to be a person of interest in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations. Yet Claremont board member and founder Christopher Flannery has called John Eastman a “hero” and has asked us instead to condemn “the Stalinist machine” (meaning U.S. federal law enforcement) for persecuting him. Eastman was the unidentified (and uncharged) co-conspirator 2 in the August 1 indictment of Trump over his January 6 actions. (Claremont did not respond to emails from The New Republic asking if the institution endorsed Eastman’s behavior on this matter, in addition to some other issues addressed in this piece.)
The Claremont Institute’s seeming embrace of political violence against the government of the United States is not limited to Eastman’s efforts to whip up the mob that gathered at the Ellipse in preparation for the assault on the Capitol, nor can it be excused as mere metaphorical excess in the war of ideas. “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”
The first friend I made in preschool was different from me. Damn bigots
My mom’s anti-racism was very liberal white savior but I will always thank her for the fact that she actively encouraged me to make friends with our black neighbors when I was like 4. I unfortunately still lived mostly in white dominated areas growing up and had very few black acquittances and no close black friends. Though I did have a few close asain friends in highschool I guess. But still, I went to a highschool with like a grand total of two black people, and the one I was friendly with had been adopted by a white family. So while my mom did instill that racism is wrong, i still lacked necessary perspective for a long time. Pretty much didnt really get interested and involved in race issues until I was on tumblr when Mike Brown happened. And I still haven’t really had as many one on one conversations and friendships with black people as I would like.
Idk, maybe I’m being weird about race even with this post. I just kind of regret the fact that being in white dominated areas meant I didnt get to have the kind of experiences that would help me have been better on race earlier. I did at least have no open racists in my family growing up, which was good. And in addition to my mom my paternal grandma has always been proactively anti-racist. Both in a liberal way, but better than the upbringing a lot of white Americans have.
Sorry for the info dump lol.
ETA: OH I should mention that one positive experience with racial diversity in my life has been working with POC children in my past jobs with kids. Thats been beneficial I think. For example I specifically remember viscerally feeling the anxiety my latine students had during the rise of Trump.
fucking exhausting
I’ve been on this rock for around five decades now, and some of the best people I’ve ever met were not of the same flavor I am.
Make racism wrong again
My only friends in grade school for a significant time were different race than me.
now personally I think politicians like this should be legally condemned to death
Making them a martyr really won’t help.
Turning up to oppose them might. I know, it’s harder work than violent fantasies. But it’s work that urgently needs doing.
Violence has historically been extremely effective, and oh man guess who has a massive incentive to convince people that violence is bad?
then we wouldn’t have someone to run against trump.
well besides bernie, but he’ll never get the nomination no matter what.
spoiler CW
I had a coloured friend once when I was nine and susceptible. Thank goodness that my mother (now a local leader in Moms for Liberty) was there to beat some sense into me. Who knows what I might have been if I continued down that path.
Please cw for use of racist language, even for satirical purposes
Will do.
Send in the national guard Biden
The US should let the south succeed, then, when their government colapses, bring them back as protectorates with ZERO political power.
