Talk about cancel culture. Bill would censor slavery text in Missouri classrooms
For weeks, conservative Republicans — led by the increasingly incoherent Sen. Josh Hawley — have complained about alleged censorship by, well, everyone who doesn’t think like they do.
They whine about the “muzzling” of free speech incessantly each night on television, or on social media, or in newspapers. The irony of claiming you’re being censored while appearing on Fox News is apparently lost on deep thinkers such as Hawley or his coconspirators.
So it’s beyond strange to see a conservative Missouri lawmaker, state Rep. Brian Seitz of Branson, introduce a bill that represents actual government censorship.
Seitz wants to prohibit the state’s schools from using The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Missourians who value education, oppose censorship and condemn slavery should be aghast.
The 1619 Project, published in The New York Times Magazine in August 2019, is a deeply reported attempt to reexamine U.S. history in the light of its terrible original sin, slavery. The series of stories is named for the year African slaves were first imported into the American colonies.
“No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed” those first slaves, the story asserts.
The truth of this claim is undeniable, which is why Seitz and his fellow travelers want to deny it. Bills similar to Missouri’s have also been introduced in Arizona, Iowa and Mississippi.
“The Project … seeks to reframe history and discredit and belittle our founding fathers and our founding documents,” Seitz said in an email. “It is vital that this revisionist history be prohibited from inclusion in the curriculum of Missouri schools.”
The 1619 Project is, indeed, revisionist. It seeks to upend decades of false teaching that glosses over the stain of human bondage. It forces readers to reconsider what they’ve been taught, and what they know, about the devastating impact of racial animus in our nation.
It is a fact that George Washington was a slave owner. It is a fact that Thomas Jefferson, the man who claimed human equality in the Declaration of Independence, owned other humans. It is a fact that the country had to fight a vicious civil war to emancipate Black slaves.
It is a fact that Black Americans were beaten, murdered, lynched, lied to, stolen from and prevented from full citizenship for decades after that war.
It’s also a fact that the bitter legacy of these and other events echoes today in our politics, our government and our lives. Racism remains our deepest national shame, and The 1619 Project seeks to illuminate the cost of that reality.
It’s true some scholars have criticized the project’s conclusions, even though it won a Pulitzer Prize. That criticism is fully acceptable. That’s how we discover the truth: study, discussion, debate. It’s vitally important for the country to review its past, in all its complexity, to create the more perfect union the founders promised.
The 1619 Project, which will rise or fall on its merits, should be a part of that effort.
Instead, Seitz seeks to censor it in the classroom. No school shall “teach, affirm, or promote as an accurate account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America any of the claims, views, or opinions presented in The 1619 Project,” his bill says.
Does he want Missouri students to ignore slavery? They are stronger, and smarter, than he and his colleagues may think. And they will learn the truth, no matter how much legislators seek to cover it up. The Times’ work is hardly mandatory in classrooms now.
“Our teachers should be unbiased in their teaching of history, allowing our students to draw whatever conclusions they may,” Rep. Seitz said in his email.
Censoring The 1619 Project would seriously impede that goal, and reflect the bigotry and ignorance all Missourians should seek to end. The bill should die, and Black History Month would be a good time to kill it.