What Do Masks in School, Black Lives, Trans Youth, and Birth Control Have in Common?
Answer: They’re all topics subject to the mistaken impression that most people are upset about and fighting back against.
A casual observer could easily be led to believe that large numbers of Americans don’t want their kids wearing masks in schools. Surely you have seen or heard the TV news coverage of the whiny wannabe victims who want you to think that Gov. Gavin Newsom and Hitler are peas in a pod?
From Thursday’s Los Angeles Times:
Nearly two-thirds of California voters, including a majority of parents, support mask and vaccine mandates in K-12 schools, according to a poll conducted this month by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley and co-sponsored by the L.A. Times.
The results of the early February poll of nearly 9,000 California voters suggest continued broad public support for policies aimed at reducing the spread of the coronavirus in schools, even as protests against mask and vaccine mandates garner public attention in school districts across the state.
And how about those parent groups and politicians nationwide saying that discussions of race are divisive, and therefore anti-American? For all the coverage the subject’s received, you might even think a majority of citizens feel that way.
Except that they don’t. A CBS News poll offers data demonstrating that culture-war battles over race are mostly hot air.
This is about book banning and teacher spying programs being launched by right-thinking politicians and anti-mandate-type groups with nothing to do but show up at school board meetings for the first time in their lives to vent outrage.
“The children,” we’ve been told, might encounter history lessons that would make them uncomfortable. Parents, we were told, object to language they said characterized the U.S. as a racist nation.
It turns out that surprisingly large majorities of Americans oppose banning books on history or race. People do realize that teaching about our racial past makes students more understanding of others’ historical experiences.
There’s good news and bad news here.
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:
The poll finds that 83 percent of Americans say books should never be banned for criticizing U.S. history; 85 percent oppose banning them for airing ideas you disagree with; and 87 percent oppose banning them for discussing race or depicting slavery.
What’s more, 76 percent of Americans say schools should be allowed to teach ideas and historical events that “might make some students uncomfortable.” And 68 percent say such teachings make people more understanding of what others went through, while 58 percent believe racism is still a serious problem today.
Finally, 66 percent say public schools either teach too little about the history of Black Americans (42 percent) or teach the right amount (24 percent). Yet 59 percent say we’ve made “a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination” since the 1960s.
First, let’s be honest about the bad news, namely the “a lot” referring to real progress. From the perspective of being a white American, “a lot” refers to legislative and judicial events (some of which are being rolled back on a regular basis).
From the perspective of a Black American, being treated like you’re less than human on a regular basis doesn’t feel like “a lot.”
Being worried, day in and day out, about your safety, the future, and how you are being perceived by others because of racism, results in stress and anxiety from recurrent humiliation. Both psychological and physical health are impacted, and there are plenty of studies making that case.
Being disrespected by authority figures is all-too-common. Statistics about rises in hate crimes, the increasing willingness of the MAGA-types to be openly racist, along with a barrage of videos on social media showing simply awful behavior certainly don’t make up for political “feel good” moments.
“A lot” in this context means somebody can wake up and feel good about the future and their place in the world. “A lot” means not making 30% less on average than white workers on an annual basis, or having more than one-eighth of the wealth of white households.
Now, the good news. There is a silver lining in the rest of the polling results. Sargent’s prescription for Democrats who are prone to run away from cultural war propaganda is to fight back using people’s innate understanding that “taking away” things is bad.
Whitewashing our past means what progress has been made lacks context. Context is what makes history meaningful, even if it causes discomfort. What the GOP’s culture warriors want is to make teachers play down the ways in which racial disparities do persist and matter.
Even if the “wokeness” discourse does contain excess and overreach, that can’t lead Democrats to shy away from calling out these laws. What this poll does tell us is that Republicans can be depicted as overreaching: There’s obviously widespread public discomfort with the idea of going too far in sanitizing the U.S. past — or the present.
Other polls point to this sweet spot. In Texas, one survey finds that only a small minority of respondents trust elected state leaders to decide what books belong in schools. And in Virginia, a new poll shows large majorities favor teaching how racism continues to impact U.S. society.
Four years of Trumpiness allowed reactionaries to flip the script on Black lives mattering. They’d like for people to overlook the truth, to take every use of the word racism as a personal rather than a systemic matter.
Of course, it’s impossible to hide the white hoods behind the MAGA culture warriors, but changing the structure of society takes away most of their power and dooms their ideological future.
The disparagement of the term Black Lives Matter, turning a positive thought process into some evil force threatening suburbia with riots and looting is Exhibit A in the reactionaries’ effort to distort reality to suit their needs.
Confronting reactionaries on the specifics of their agenda rather than the generalities they espouse to create controversy is something that needs to be done. Democrats have let Republicans walk all over them on just about every part of governance.
Having lost the battle (for now, anyway) on same sex marriage, the flipping of the script from the right means that the mere existence of LGBTQ people is a threat to their concept of Christianity. Acceptance of transgender humans is contorted into child abuse and pedophilia.
From NBC News:
In less than two months since the start of the year, conservative state lawmakers have filed more than 170 anti-LGBTQ bills — already surpassing last year’s 139 total — with at least 69 of them centered on school policies, according to Freedom for All Americans.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has officially directed his state’s Family and Protective Services to begin investigating all trans children in Texas and prosecuting their parents as child abusers.
He has also instructed all teachers, doctors, and caregivers to begin reporting any trans students they see. Activists foresee children being taken from their parents as a result.
Texans don’t favor punitive legislation aimed at transgender humans, and the state has a gubernatorial election coming up this year.
The campaign question doesn’t need to be whether or not being transgender is okay; it’s about ripping children away from their parents, an act so heinous that it’s prohibited by he U.N. Charter.
Since it would appear that Roe v Wade is about to be neutered, two new fronts of the war on women are emerging.
Reactionary district attorneys in states where abortion is permitted under state law are exploring ways of charging mothers of stillborn babies with manslaughter or even murder.
CalMatters recently published a story about one Kings County women who was coerced into a plea bargain manslaughter conviction after being told her drug abuse could lead to a murder charge.
Abortion rights advocates believe her case has broad implications for abortion access in California, potentially opening the door to criminal prosecutions of people seeking to terminate pregnancies.
Anti-abortion groups and politicians are now actively strategizing over ways to undermine Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision in 1965 allowing birth control methods for married women. Debates in statehouses like Missouri and candidates for office in Michigan are already in the open about figuring out a way to conflate birth control with abortion.
Authoritarianism mandates the need for demonizing “others” to deflect from their real agenda, which in this case happens to be the looting of the commons in the name of prosperity.
Once they dispense with “others” along racial and gender lines, religion is the next step. In days of old, otherizing people by religion was more common; nowadays many people don’t define themselves primarily by their faith, so it’s lower on the list of people to hate.
Failing to oppose right wing initiatives on race and gender only speeds up the time frame for efforts aimed at (non-protestant) religions.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com