Does it matter if books and ideas are technically "banned"?
Structural racism is real; the continued use of the "literacy test" playbook for censorship and disenfranchisement of marginalized groups proves it.
Today the bureaucrats are issuing certificates to vote to people who cannot read the ballot nor even the instructions on a ballot or on a voting machine… The left wing liberals need as many illiterates as they can get to vote in order to keep them in power.
-George Wallace, 1965 (cited by ProPublica)
It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
The 1965 Voter Rights Act formally prohibited states, for five years, from administering “literacy tests” to disenfranchise voters. (Significantly, it didn’t end all literacy requirements; states could still, for example, require that voters complete a minimum level of schooling, which is sure to have had the effect of preventing many poor and marginalized citizens from voting.)
These tests were a clear example of de facto discrimination— a way of using state power to oppress specific groups or classes without explicitly passing laws that did so (which would be de jure discrimination). Because state legislators pushing a white supremacist agenda often could not— for both legal and political reasons— pass a law that said, “Black people cannot vote,” they came up with schemes like literacy tests, poll taxes, and other ways to structurally prevent Black citizens from voting.
Clearly, the ongoing backlash against the gains of the Civil Rights movement, and the ensuing gains made by LGBTQ+ communities, women, and other marginalized groups, relies on many of the same techniques that were the target of the protests, marches, and political advocacy which led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Culture warriors like Chris Rufo1 have made this explicit, by obsessing about the “radicals” of 1968, many of whom were explicitly attacking these kinds of structural, bureaucratic methods of state oppression.
Rufo, has been, in turn, parroted by the former president, and by state and federal officials who have explicitly attacked “wokeness” by attacking the means by which these ‘60s-era intellectuals and activists proposed to address structural discrimination.
The playbook
This has taken on the form of the following main strategies:
Redefining terms used by antiracist scholars (like “antiracism” and “CRT”) to mean, essentially “reverse racism,” or attacks on White people, Christians, straight people, and other demographic majorities. (The SC Freedom Caucus, for example, explicitly based a lawsuit against a South Carolina school district on this redefinition.) This has also included explicitly prohibiting the teaching of concepts related to structural racism— for example, South Carolina’s ongoing Budget Proviso, which uses a copy-and-paste (of a Rufo-inspired Trump Executive Order) to tap-dance all around a bunch of ideas related to race and racism, thereby intentionally creating a minefield for publicly-funded institutions trying to address structural discrimination.
Redefining terms used by marginalized communities themselves, like “wokeness,” or “gender-affirming care”. (Despite repeated testimony from physicians and other health experts, SC legislators chose to define gender-affirming care differently from the medical consensus, forming the basis for an anti-trans law passed during the final days of this session.)
Using these redefinitions to create conspiracy theories in which marginalized groups have “captured” America’s “institutions,” a conspiracy theory with close ties to White nationalist ideology and dangerous anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like “cultural Marxism”. (SC Freedom Caucus Chair Adam Morgan— who just lost his primary for a US House seat— explicitly evoked “cultural Marxism” when he addressed my AP Seminar Course two school years ago. As he did so, he strongly suggested that “CRT”— an exploration of structural racism— should be illegal to discuss.)
Using these conspiracy theories to justify actually “capturing the institutions” by using state power to:
-effectively ban books (by removing them from school libraries and public libraries) without explicitly banning them
- effectively ban concepts (by ending state funding for programs like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and for public schools which teach or discuss forbidden concepts like structural racism)
-effectively oppress communities by making their healthcare (especially healthcare related to reproductive health and/ or gender-affirming care) illegal, or, where they can’t succeed in doing that, ending state funding for that healthcare
When Steps 1-4 succeed and there is backlash from harmed communities and their allies, gaslighting everyone by falling back on the most technical and legalistic explanations of their own intentional behavior.
Step 5
SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver has provided extensive examples of this last technique, with mixed results. She started off the past school year by telling librarians that book bans aren’t really book bans, because, in her words “[t]hese materials are still going to be available at many public libraries, on Amazon”. Based on the ensuing State Board meetings, which saw off-the-charts attendance, largely from librarians, teachers, students, and advocates opposing Weaver’s school censorship regulation, this didn’t go over well.
Weaver responded by telling students who had come to Board meetings to protest the regulations that they were being “actively misled” by “adults and narratives”. Students responded by repeatedly telling Weaver they had read the regulation, and that they had made the informed decision to protest and disagree.
Weaver is now responding to widespread criticism of her department’s refusal to allow state schools to offer AP African American Studies for AP credit by callingthe controversy she manufactured a “manufactured controversy” (but in a way that suggests everyone else is just stupid for thinking her overt moves to make the course harder to take should be construed as… overt moves to make the course harder to take).
Rather than explain what her Department meant when it said it was responding to “controversy” around the course, she has once again with the argument that her critics, and not elected officials like herself— bear the burden of proof that her Department’s actions don’t actually represent the people who she was elected to serve. This has the predictable consequence that many of use are logically concluding she means something like it was controversial last year in Florida because Ron DeSantis made a huge show of saying it was controversial (and then, when College Board seemed to change the course to take out the parts he cited as most controversial, he banned it anyway) and I want in on that action. The fact that, while this controversy was heating up in South Carolina, Weaver was on a plane to Washington to hang out with Tim Scott at a Heritage Foundation event, makes it hard to take any motivation on Weaver’s part seriously, other than the usual one: to score political points with the kind of special interest groups and think tanks she has spent her entire career serving.
And as my colleague, Nicole Walker, and I explained last week, it doesn’t actually matter whether or not the South Carolina Department of Education “banned” AP African American Studies.
That’s because, like literacy tests, challenges to books, courses and programs that specifically serve African American students (or gay or trans or Jewish students, or any other specific demographic group of students) are wrong, in themselves, and are often unconstitutional.
The public should find it laughable and outrageous to hear an elected official argue that it’s okay to remove a book from student access for nakedly political reasons— as long as it is available for sale somewhere else. The public should never accept the explanation that the Department of Education has admitted that it intentionally and explicitly made it harder for students to access AP African American studies— but that it’s okay because technically they could still take it (if their districts are able and willing to offer a course the Department has singled out as “controversial,” and which the state will no longer fund, and which students will no longer receive the same weighted GPA points for taking).
Literacy tests and poll taxes did not technically make it illegal or even— in all cases— impossible for all Black Americans to vote. But they were still immoral, and they were eventually made explicitly illegal because they were intended to make it more difficult for Black Americans to vote (just as many modern voter laws are intended to make it more difficult for specific groups— often, again Black Americans— to vote).
This, of course, is one of many examples of the American people and their elected officials recognizing the objective reality of structural racism— that thing which political extremists and white nationalists want us to believe is some kind of purely theoretical and false abstraction.
The state can— and has— made it very difficult to discuss structural racism in schools, and legislators tried very hard to pass a law making it impossible to fund programs in public higher education designed to address it directly, and the SC Department of Education’s memo explicitly cites both the ongoing budget proviso I mentioned earlier (which, notably, hasn’t become a part of the current budget as of this writing, because state budget talks stalled out) and a bill (which has also not passed yet, and which may not pass at all during the current special session) which explicitly make it harder to talk about structural racism.
These attempted pieces of legislation— and the many others which have passed in South Carolina and across the country— are themselves clear examples of structural racism, especially when, like the SC proviso, they carefully weave together a bunch of nonsense to make it all but impossible to discuss structural racism, but without actually saying the quiet part completely out loud.
As my friend Jim recently wrote,
Sure, we can say it’s racist for the Board of Education to “de-certify” AP African American Studies and then claim that racism is wrong as a moral axiom…but there’s more at stake that’s worth naming here. As we describe and dissect this specific action as one that centralizes supremacist culture narratives for everyone, we can paint a clearer picture of how this is an injustice that’s well worth the concern of all people who belong to (or love someone who belongs to) any of the out-groups that don’t track foursquare with the various white supremacist cultures which are force-feeding their narratives on us as universal truths we must accept, with the heroes they insist we admire, and the villains we become acculturated to fear and revile.
Or, as one of my former research students, Clementine, put it in an interview with WACH Fox News this week,
When I first took the [AP African American Studies] course, I thought it was going to be the start of something amazing… I didn't realize I would be one of the last classes to ever take it… I don't understand why teaching African American studies is seen as not parallel to American studies, or as harmful.
Fittingly, by using the indirect methods favored by segregationists of the past and present, the Department is teaching the public— and especially young people— more about structural racism, and other forms of structural marginalization, and giving more practical examples to prove that they exist, than any banned book or course ever could.
Rufo famously wrote, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory’”