They finally said the quiet part out loud

Why Republicans are re-fighting the Civil War over critical race theory and the 1619 Project

If you wait long enough, they finally get around to telling you who they really are and what they really want.  Today, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill that will ban the teaching of critical race theory in Tennessee schools.  The bill is similar to those Republicans are attempting to pass in many states where they control the governorship and legislature.  Before it left office, the Trump administration promoted the banning of teaching so-called “divisive concepts” such as the 1619 Project and critical race theory to public school students.  Among those concepts are the idea that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist, and that slavery had a role in the founding of the country.

Deadly and dangerous ideas, huh?  You should hear the way they talk about teaching this stuff in Tennessee. “These seditious charlatans would if they could destroy our heritage of ordered, individual liberty under the rule of law, before our very eyes,” bellowed state representative John Ragan, who introduced the bill.  “Disingenuously, these conniving hucksters masquerade as noble champions of the oppressed, regrettably, they have successfully hoodwinked a number of our fellow citizens into becoming what Lenin called useful idiots.”

Oh, boy.  Here we go with Lenin, invading our classrooms and polluting the minds of our innocent young children, not to mention the fact that it was probably the first time the word “oppressed” was uttered from his lips.

What they want to ban is teaching the 1619 Project, published in the New York Times in August of 2019 on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in what was then the colony of Virginia.  The project overtly reframes history to emphasize the centrality of slavery in the founding of the country in a direct challenge to the “founding fathers” narrative that promotes the Declaration of Independence and the signing of the Constitution as foundational historical moments.  Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill called “The Saving American History Act” that would prevent any federal dollars from going into teaching the 1619 Project in schools.  What they want to “save” is of course their version of history, shorn of all that nastiness about overseers and whips and families broken apart on the auction block.  All that nastiness about slavery, in other words.

One of President Biden’s first acts on Inauguration day was to sign an executive order revoking one of Trump’s final projects in office, the so-called “1776 Commission,” a gaggle of conservative historians and right-wing activists who were charged with writing a report designed to directly counter the 1619 Project.  Trump called it a project for “patriotic education.”  The commission, dissolved though it may have been, issued its report last week, 41 pages of right-wing pseudohistory apparently cribbed from conservative op-eds and speeches.  The report gave itself away in its introduction which denounced versions of history that "tell America's story solely as one of oppression and victimhood."  If that sounds like a slap at the 1619 Project, that’s because it is.

What accounts for this mania by Republicans around the country to attack what has heretofore been an academic discipline of some renown on college campuses but little noticed in the hallowed halls of state legislatures?  With all this smoke, there has to be fire somewhere, wouldn’t you guess?  A recent op-ed in the Washington Post opined that Republicans can’t figure out how to go up against Biden’s popularity, so they’re out there beating the bush trying to crank up the base by fanning the flames of the culture wars. 

There’s truth to that, but Republican Justin Lafferty said the quiet part out loud for us today on the floor of the Tennessee House of Representatives when he got up and delivered a fiery speech explaining what it’s really all about. 

“The three-fifths compromise was a direct effort to insure that southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country.  By limiting the number of the population in the south, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slave holding states, and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery well before Abraham Lincoln, well before the Civil War.  Do we talk about that?  I don’t hear that anywhere!”

They’re taking the “lost cause” myth to its logical conclusion.  The Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery!  Of course it wasn’t, because it didn’t have to be!  Slavery was already being ended out of the goodness of hearts of the slave owners!  And they had written their surrender into the Constitution with the three-fifths compromise!

So now we know:  They don’t want the 1619 Project making a big deal out of the first two hundred years of slavery.  Nor do they want critical race theory making a big deal out of what the south did to its newly enfranchised Black citizens during Reconstruction and Jim Crow by taking away their right to vote and denying them adequate education and economic opportunity by basically stripping them of their citizenship. As an extra added bonus, they’re inventing a new outrageous fiction that the south would have ended slavery on its own if they were just given the chance by that mean old Lincoln.

No, what they want to do is continue their own rewriting of history by inventing a new Big Lie about the three-fifths compromise, which was written into the Constitution at the demand of the southern states, not in spite of them.  The southern states knew if slaves were not counted in the census, the south would come up on the short end of the stick when it came to apportioning power in the congress.  So the “compromise” was to count slaves as three-fifths of a person, creating semi-citizens where there had been none, with the added advantage of giving them no vote.  At the same time, it gave the slave owning gentry of the south eight-fifths of a vote in the House of Representatives in Washington when it inflated southern populations by counting at least part of the number of non-voting slaves as mock-citizens.

I guess we’ll have to wait on Representative Lafferty to explain to us what all that had to do with “ending slavery well before Abraham Lincoln,” because he sure as hell didn’t include that explanation in his oration.  All he wanted to do was make sure that critical race theory and the 1619 Project don’t do any further damage to the almighty “lost cause” myth they’ve been pushing for the last 156 years, that the Civil War was a noble insurrection against an oppressive federal government.  Poor things.  All they were doing was trying to stop the steal by the Union, and if that doesn’t remind you of our very recent history at the United States Capitol, nothing will.