Socialism 2022

Today there is legislation in some 42 states that seeks to require teachers to lie to students about structural racism, sexism, and heterosexism. This neo-McCarthyist attack on education has led to hundreds of book banns, the firing of teachers around the country for discussing antiracist themes, and even physical attacks on educators. This coordinated assault on honest accounts of U.S. history that grapple with white supremacy and oppression is about more than a Republican Party reelection strategy; it is about discrediting public education in a bid to privatize, halting the gains in consciousness that were advanced during the 2020 uprising, and ultimately an attempt at epistemicide--the killing, silencing, or annihilation of entire systems of knowledge. Yet a growing movement of educators, students, and parents are building the Teach Truth movement—rooted in the long tradition of the fight for Black education—against the “violence of organized forgetting.” (This session will now be a virtual presentation.)