The Dumbing Down of America and the Celebration of Ignorance....

 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

 

-         Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

As the Google search notes for a 2017 article via OpenCulture.com observes, “We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” Welcome to sooner….

Perhaps the last administration was the pinnacle of this lethal combination, but there’s no question that America is plagued by a virulent ignorance that’s been co-opted by power – or is it power that’s been co-opted by virulent ignorance? – and the results have been devastating. Forget our slipping educational attainment and well-being rankings in the world – the former has declined from 8^th to 15^th in the past decade and the latter from 14^th to 17^th in the past five years – and just witness what’s happening at this very moment in our country:

• As the latest manifestation of its sustained and quite successful campaign to distract from difficult and damning realities, the GOP is waging war against an idea – that of Critical Race Theory – taught virtually exclusively in law schools, despite it being patently obvious that virtually none of those who rail against it actually understand what it is. Further, it’s attempting to pass laws in at least half of the states (with a handful having enacted such statutes already) that either restrict or prohibit the teaching of alternative perspectives on our country’s history.
• As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman noted in a recent New York Times Opinion piece, “(W)illful ignorance has become a litmus test for anyone hoping to succeed in Republican politics.” He concludes that “Right-wingers have gone all in on ignorance, so they were bound to come into conflict with every institution – including the U.S. military – that is trying to cultivate knowledge.
• The former president’s company and its CFO are under indictment for myriad felonious evasionary tax pursuits.
• Egged on by the former president’s Big Lie, there’s an historic voter suppression campaign underway, with almost 400 bills proposed (and some passed) in 48 states.
• On January 6^th, the former president’s speech is seen by many if not most as an incitement to a veritable insurrection and an unprecedented invasion of our congressional halls on that day (and was a key factor in his being impeached a second time).
• Despite literally being in danger for their lives on January 6^th, Congressional Republicans have blocked an official inquiry into the insurrection.
• It’s almost superfluous given the preceding, but let’s not forget that in the waning months of his administration, the former president raised almost $200 million from supporters, much if not most of which has been diverted to his own personal control (and will likely be used for his own enrichment and/or personal legal defense).

Each of these is both a travesty and tragedy in its own right, but let’s just focus on one and how meaningfully yet completely it exhibits the collusion of ignorance and power: the assault on Critical Race Theory (CRT).

In a recent story for the PBS News Hour entitled “Why Americans are so divided over teaching critical race theory,” correspondent Amna Nawaz observes the meeting of the Loudon County, Virginia, school board during which “dozens of parents” flooded the meeting to protest CRT. As she notes dryly, “The thing is, critical race theory isn’t being taught here.”

So why would so many parents attend to protest it? In a word, ignorance. Or, in two words, racist ignorance.

As one attendee declared virulently, “I will do everything I possibly can to fight to the bitter end until you prove to me that you are not teaching my children that they are racist just because they’re white.” Another alleges that “The critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism. It should have no place in our school.” Another observes that, “I don’t see critical theory, race theory in our Declaration of Independence.”

To review: CRT is taught virtually exclusively in law schools, not in local ones, so this entire ‘movement’ against it is at best ignorance personified and weaponized or, more likely, to be blunt, racism in yet a different guise. In fact, observes Ms. Nawaz, “Critical race theory is now being leveraged as a catch-all phrase by opponents of equity and inclusion efforts in public education.”

In other words, these modern-day culture warriors are the slightly less overt version of their parents and grandparents who demonstrated their racism openly and proudly and protested vehemently against the integration of public schools more than a half-century ago.

Of course, there are more sophisticated but no less craven efforts, such as the one run by “a former Trump administration Justice Department spokesman now leading a group called Fight for Schools, a political action committee pushing back on equity and inclusion measures.” In its leader’s words, the group is “not about teaching history. We are about teaching history in an objective way that is not represented as America is systemically racist.”

Except, of course, that it is and always has been systemically racist (by design):

• What is the Electoral College but a now two-and-a-half centuries old relic of the racist designation of the enslaved as three-fifths of a person to determine the apportionment of electoral votes?
• What is the abominable 1857 Dred Scott decision but a statement by the supreme court of our country that even “free” African-Americans could not enjoy the privileges of citizenship and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”?
• Why was Juneteenth necessary, or, put differently, why did Gen. Granger have to journey to Galveston, more than two months after Gen. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, to read General Orders No. 3 to announce that “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free”?
• Why did SCOTUS endorse the racist “separate but equal” lie/Jim Crow policy in its 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision?
• Why were African-Americans systematically excluded from many US Government and especially New Deal benefits and, even worse, purposely harmed by racist government policies like redlining and the use of restrictive covenants (even after the Supreme Court outlawed the latter in its 1948 Shelley vs. Kraemer decision)?
• Why did it take the greatest victory of the 20^th century Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to codify what is supposed to be an inalienable right for American citizens of Color?
• Why has the GOP lead a sustained assault on the voting rights of African-Americans and other traditional Democratic constituencies since the passage of the original Act more than half a century ago, resulting in its effective overturning in the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder decision, aligned with the historic and re-energized voter suppression campaign since (and as evidenced in and reinforced by SCOTUS’ abominable ruling in the Brnovich vs. Democratic National Committee case earlier this week)?

I could go on … and on … and on … and on … and on … and on, but you get the picture: the truth is and always will be that the United States is now and has been since before its founding a systemically racist country by design.

So, of course, to avoid this reality, too many of our fellow citizens are falling for the ruse that Critical Race Theory in some way indoctrinates their children to think that they’re inherently racist because they’re white.

No, they may have racist – or at least deeply, perhaps willfully ignorant – parents and benefit disproportionately and undeservedly from the systemic racism that’s still very much a part of our society, but CRT does no such thing, other than to examine the perspectives of the historically disenfranchised, especially in an effort to encourage us to eradicate and never duplicate such historic and sustained state-sponsored dispossession again. Or, to use commentator Judy Woodruff’s assessment to introduce the aforementioned PBS piece, “Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America’s past and present by looking at the role of systemic racism….”

More importantly, it’s also a way to avoid making these same, dehumanizing mistakes again in our future, which is why the folks protesting against the figment of CRT are both on the wrong side of history and verify the continuing prescience of the great James Baldwin, especially as he observed in his 1972 book No Name in the Street:

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.