Republican Insurrections in Education, Culture, and Politics

Republicans are quickly upgrading a series of insurrections as a response to the growing influence of ethnic minorities across multiple spheres in American life—education, culture, and politics. These initiatives reveal more volatile outcomes as Blacks, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx, and Indigenous Americans increase.

The assault on education is most visible from K-12 through higher education. Parallel to the quiet undermining of public education in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the privatization of public education has grown exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Republican legislators at the state level are introducing and passing laws to increase and/or expand and fund the number of voucher, religious, and charter schools with limited public accountability.

Supporters of K-12 public education are largely ignoring this reality and directing their focus toward the more volatile issue of the Republican attacks on teaching critical race theory and systemic racism in public schools. They reject teaching the truth about the intersection of race and oppression in the origins and development of our nation.

Teachers are being threatened with sanctions and/or dismissals for the so-called indoctrination of students by informing them of the facts behind U.S. growth and prosperity. These concerns reached an apex after the publication of the 1619 Project in the New York Times which chronicled the 400-year period of American slavery and was widely heralded by literary and academic bodies.

To eliminate this Project at its root, the right-wing Republican-controlled Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina System recently refused to vote on tenure for an endowed professorship for Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning and MacArthur Fellow, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after a unanimous vote by the faculty. Instead, they offered her a five-year contract despite her exemplary record.

Although the Board of Governors’ vote is usually a perfunctory measure, here it declined its normal duty as a way to send a message to what it deemed to be the critical race theory lobby. Similar actions are taking place throughout the country.

The opponents of these revelations label them unpatriotic and accuse the 1619 proponents of proliferating unwarranted and inaccurate criticisms of America’s founding fathers. The Trump administration countered with the establishment of the specious 1776 Project which airbrushed and sanitized the nation’s brutal period of slavery.

Republicans attempted to negate and demean cultural manifestations of ethnic minority personhood in terms of dress and hairstyle, especially among African Americans, and to suppress elements of pride and identity preceding this controversy. The Republicans took further actions and suspended students for ethnic hairstyles and barred their participation in sporting events in efforts to prevent self-expression.

The fear among Whites is that these demonstrations of ethnic solidarity, coupled with their aggregate numbers, would place this expanding New American Majority in an advantageous position to wield broader influence and to displace the prevailing power elite. Thus, one way to disrupt this course of human development was to cut it off before it gains further traction. Although White America has historically employed this approach, it now views ethnic minorities’ robust focus on personal identity as a threat.

While they are reconfiguring who has the power to approve vote counts at the state level, insurrectionists are rampantly using another ploy in their efforts to suppress the voting rights and access of ethnic minorities. As noted in previous columns, these initiatives are occurring at warp speed across the 50 states along with new audits of the 2020 presidential election.

That election has been duly certified by Democratic and Republican officials, alike, after numerous recounts. Republicans, however, have continued to launch round after round of audits, starting with Arizona and Georgia in the hope of further undermining voter confidence in the electoral process as we move toward the 2022 midterms.

They hope these tactics will sow enough doubt that Republican voters and non-voters in the 2020 elections will turn out in droves to enable the Republican Party to regain majorities in the House and Senate in 2022 and return Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024.

What we have here is a series of inter-connected insurrections that are meant to destabilize the current political arrangements and re-segregate ethnic minorities in the nation’s educational, cultural, and political life. The question is whether Democrats and the New American Majority will aggressively fight back against these machinations in order to continue to move toward ethnic and racial parity.

Both groups need to realize that they are in a fight for their very being as we move further into an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-racial America. The 2022 electoral midterms and the 2024 presidential election are shaping up to be watershed events that could determine whether we will continue as the world’s leading democracy.

Ex-President Trump is provoking these insurrections as he did the January 6th attack on our nation’s Capital as well as promoting the mugging of the critical race theory concept and disputing the systemic racism that was central to the founding of America. Trump is a key reason for the polarized racial divide among us.

And he is solidly supported by more than half of Republicans who fervently believe the Big Lie that the presidential election was stolen from him and that Trump is the rightful President despite reams of hard evidence to the contrary.