It’s important to understand that anti-woke ideology is just as much an identity politics as any identity politics ascribed to the liberal left. Instead of the white-straight-cis-male-patriarchy, the anti-woke feel oppressed by the creeping specter of Marxism. They will criticize the woke for causing division and inventing enemies but this is pure projection. They too seek justice against a pervasive enemy that has infiltrated institutions and unfairly stacked the cultural deck against them simply for who they are as people.
Politics is the business of distributing resources within a society. It was Huey Newton who said that politics is war without bloodshed and war is politics with bloodshed. Political power is gained by creating political constituencies formed around an animating ideology. The easiest and most effective way of creating such a constituency is to define an enemy other. The enemy is whoever would take from you the resources that you have, or prevent you from acquiring the resources that you need. The genius of modern movement conservative political formation has been the willingness to find new enemies with which to blame for the increasing alienation and economic stratification that is a natural consequence of capitalism.
This is not to say that they don’t do a bit of recycling. Schools have always been a target of right-wing enemy discourse.
In a speech George Wallace gave during his 1968 presidential campaign, he said this:
“They have taken our schools away from us, the senior and apprenticeship list of our labor unions, our businesses, and now the ownership of our property, and I am the only candidate of either three national parties that tell you in Georgia, that when I become your President, I’m going to turn back to you, in this state, the absolute control of your public school system, and you run them any way you want to run them.”
Just to be clear Wallace is referring to the integration of schools as having them be “taken away” from “us”.
In a 1997 Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth said this in his opening remarks for a Senate hearing on whether federal funds should be used to recognize AAVE or Ebonics as a dialect and teach inner-city kids standard English using ESL techniques:
“And I simply want to say that I think ebonics is absurd. This is a political correctness that simply has gone out of control. As Rev. Jesse Jackson said, it was teaching down to people, and that is the last thing we need to be doing. Now, I am very much aware that teaching children in schools in the inner cities and poor neighborhoods all over the country, rural or inner-city, has never been easy, and it never will be. But rather than trying to lower the academic standards, we should try some of the old-fashioned remedies that I think would still work. Nobody should be passed from grade to grade unless they can master the basic three R's of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and I think we have left that.”
Let’s pause here to appreciate how exquisitely stupid the phrase “three R's of reading, writing, and arithmetic” looks in print.
In 2015, after a Black president had the audacity, not to hope, but to decide the standards and best practices of K-12 publication, the Tea Party lost their shit. Common Core was not a very good program, but it also was not the Soviet-style indoctrination that movement conservatism made it out to be. The business community was actually more an author of Common Core than the very Black president. But in the end, demonizing Common Core as a new threat to children presented by the radical left was worth more electorally than having slightly better educated Amazon fulfillment center workers. Even Republicans who had once championed Common Core (because their corporate sponsors supported it) were forced to come out against it. Like Chris Christie during his ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign:
"We need to take [education] out of the cubicles of Washington, D.C., where it was placed by the Obama administration, and return it to the neighborhoods of New Jersey."
You might be noticing a trend. It would appear that whenever schools threaten to become Blacker, either culturally or just with actual Black people existing in them, conservatives point to a nefarious enemy hiding within our education system attempting to harm your (read: white) kids by being slightly more considerate of Black kids. The debate over CRT is perhaps the apotheosis of this particular political strategy. Conservatives lost the debate over whether Black kids were even allowed to go to school with white kids, so the fight over Blackness in schools became so abstract and detached from material reality that today a major animating political issue is whether or not the government should allow kids to be taught graduate school law theory.
But there is something deeper at play here. Yes, racism plays a big role in this dynamic. However, Blackness isn’t the real issue for conservatives, rather it serves as a signifier for invading otherness. A threat to the natural stability of white western society. Whether it’s Black history or just simply Black people, the affinity to see the education system as an enemy is not just a product of racism in America. It's also a response to the fear of losing your children.
Americans are the most overworked people in the developed world. We are also the most productive we have ever been as a nation. This is a great state of affairs if you want to produce a new world's richest man every other year. It’s not so great if you want to spend time with your kids. This has been a growing problem in America since industrialization. If that wasn’t enough, the rapid advancement in communication technology has created the conditions for wild swings in popular social attitudes and ideas. It seems as though every generation enters a social context wildly different than their parents.
Parents spend more time at work than they do with their kids and kids spend more time at school than they do with their parents and this is the result of a capitalist economy that requires exponentially increasing productive capacity from its workforce. This alienation creates a fear for parents that they will not be able to successfully create an individual legacy through their children. They are afraid they will be parents to children who reject them and their worldview. Children who won't see America as they do but will feel shame at being forced to reckon with our country's many crimes.
The problem for liberals is that too often they are unwilling or unable to acknowledge the ways that our capitalist context fuels racist attitudes. They are likely to call this kind of analysis “making excuses for racists”. And in doing so they miss a very important part of what is going on with the current debate over CRT. There is a fair amount of Black people willing to publicly oppose CRT. Not just famously conservative public intellectuals like Glen Loury, Thomas Sowell, and (ahem) classical liberals like James McWorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, but actual Black parents of actual Black children.
Indeed as Liberals pass around videos of angry and deranged white parents threatening school officials over their imagined implementation of CRT in preschool, conservatives repost videos of passionate Black mothers and fathers admonishing school boards for teaching their children to be a victim. You could say this is a product of internalized racism or selling out, but it’s reasonable to believe that these Black parents hate CRT for the same reasons white people do. They are afraid.
For perhaps the first time since the post-Civil Rights Act political realignment, republicans are beginning to include Black people in their politics of fear. Remember that conservatives use constructed enemies to distract from the failings and alienation produced by capitalism. Marginalized people typically feel those deleterious effects more acutely than those who can claim hegemonic whiteness. Black people are not a monolith and for the segment of the Black population who still believes in the meritocratic ideal of American capitalism, the idea that democrats are more concerned with adopting a youth-driven woke aesthetic than properly preparing Black kids to succeed can be a compelling argument.
This kind of conservative outreach to Black America has not yet found widespread purchase, However, as Democrats continue to ineffectually flail about in their attempts to deliver the most meager amount of material change, Republicans have started to pick at the edges of what was once thought to be the most durable of political constituencies. In 2020 Trump gained the most Black votes for a Republican presidential candidate since Nixon. Not only are conservatives activating their base with calls to confront an enemy, but they are also slowly expanding their coalition.
This may sound dire, but we must keep in mind that Republicans aren’t anywhere close to building a popular majority. The conservative path to electoral success remains to suppress the raw number of voters and swing enough of the reliably voting middle class with fear-mongering over culture and the debt. Where centrist Democrats like Terry McAuliffe in Virginia fall short is failing to construct a more compelling enemy than their opponents.
To be clear, recontextualizing American history and building counter-hegemonic narratives is an important step to building the class consciousness necessary for true material change. It’s also pretty hard to make the case that CRT (which still isn’t being taught in public schools) on its own will directly lead to the material benefit of anyone. The conservative case is clear. Ban the teaching of CRT or any other Marxist adjacent theory and children will be better prepared to succeed in the American meritocracy. The liberal case is a bit more muddled. For one thing, it’s not even clear which Democratic candidates actually support CRT or anti-racism or the woke aesthetic. They aren’t so much making a case for CRT as they are accusing their opponents of dog-whistle racism for invoking it. While this may be true, it’s not a very animating political message. While conservatives are always seeking new external enemies to rally the American public against, the modern Democratic strategy for political formation is to seek enemies within themselves.
It’s you. You are the enemy.
The modern Democratic party constituency is principally focused around the educated professional middle class. People who have gained some measure of comfort within our exploitive and unequal system. As such, the character of democratic politics is to seek absolution for their relative comfort. Not so much to materially make things better, but to make themselves feel better by performatively holding themselves and others accountable. The message to the poor and marginalized isn’t so much “here’s what we will change to make your life easier” so much as it’s “look how sorry we are that your life is so hard”.
The Democrats have policies. Those policies are on the website. But the substance of those policies is often hard to distinguish from what republicans are materially offering. For both McAuliffe and his victorious opponent, the solution to poverty and economic uncertainty was begging private corporations to provide jobs to the citizens of Virginia. There is the promise of slightly more funding for means-tested social service and welfare programs. Democrats will defend the right for women to access abortion and for trans people to exist in public spaces. However, these issues fail to identify a coherent enemy responsible for the economic and social alienation that people feel. It doesn’t mean that most people will buy what the conservative is selling, but it does mean that a lot of poor and marginalized people will feel like there is no point in participating in the political process.
Whether or not CRT is being taught in schools, or even its very definition, does not matter to Republicans. Its purpose is to serve as a boogie man, a totem for the alienation and anxiety that people feel. Whether or not we want to be talking about it, it will remain a wedge issue for the midterms and perhaps a few electoral cycles beyond. If Democrats want to be serious about maintaining and even building upon the small amount of power they currently possess then they need to find a more effective counter-message.
There is a notion, ironically shared by both parts of the left and the centrist middle, that Democrats need to abandon the language of social justice to effectively neutralize conservative culture-war politics. Not only is this not true, but it’s exactly what Republicans want. Democrats don’t need to performatively disavow or affirm wokeness. They should be defining an enemy that directly speaks to people's social and economic anxiety. While also explaining how efforts toward social justice can be a path toward making a positive material difference in everyone’s lives, not merely an admonishment for white people.
The problem with American schools isn’t that some history classes are decentering the American mythos from the historical record, or that some teachers are thinking critically about the traditional methods for teaching literature or science. The problem is that our schools are grossly underfunded and our curriculum is more geared toward producing a functional and compliant workforce than it is activating intellectual curiosity and helping children self-actualize.
The enemy of parents isn’t secret Marxists infiltrating our education system, but rather the capitalist system that takes parents away from their kids and funnels them away from what animates them and toward what the market deems valuable.
So much of our politics is defined by the artificial notion of scarcity. This idea of scarcity is why the political defining of enemies is so effective, especially for reactionary politics. The enemy that Democrats should be identifying is not located within individuals with retrograde ideas but rather the very purposely constructed idea that for some people to gain others must lose. Messaging that starts from that premise has a greater potential to reach people who are otherwise inclined to believe accommodating the cultural and material circumstances of marginalized people will negatively impact their and their children's lives. As well as activate people who believe that politics is something that happens to them, rather than an avenue to improving their material condition. There’s no guarantee that this kind of messaging will stave off the looming 2022 congressional bloodbath currently staring Democrats in the face, but it would be the start to building a more robust and durable political formation for the future.
Solidarity Forever.
In a world where the primary context for our lives is defined by the ego, it’s a justifiable fear. If all we have to guide us are our personal egoic needs and wants, then we’re in a kind of zero-sum game with everyone else’s egoic needs and wants. So if we suppress our own egoic drives, we’ll end up getting pushed around by others. Our behavior will be driven primarily by the needs and wants of those around us. Black people have always survived by doing what they need to do for themselves and their families by working extra hard to make ends meet where there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut way out I believe what we forgot was the hard work it takes to get there... and many white people feel threatened that giving blacks and minorities a leg up on education and politics only puts them in an unenviable position, crt frightens them because it shows what has happened in the past was horrific towards a group of people that could do them no harm... Having a way to control those less fortunate and dismiss their needs over theirs is looked at as the only way out... Fear that what goes around comes back to bite them in the butt... This has no basis because those that seek to suppress actual history have already been taught about the past... My belief is that they don't want their children to see read and hear what was done in the past to affect their children's future... Denial is a dangerous game to play... SOLIDARITY FOREVER!!