Alan Taylor, a professor of history at the University of Virginia and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, isn’t among the historians who have prominently utilized social media and other platforms to open up that work in recent years. Still, much of the soundest scholarship on our history remains largely inaccessible to lay readers-either sequestered away from the general public behind academic paywalls or too dense and dry to hold the interest of broad nonacademic audiences. Conservatives are hoping to engineer a wide and enduring backlash to the examinations of racial inequality and America’s past that have been shaking up Democratic Party politics and popular culture for the better part of the last decade.
In Texas, a representative bill signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott specifically bans the state’s educators from teaching that racism and slavery are “anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” The right’s motivations here are plain. By mid-July of this year, 10 states had banned the teaching of “critical race theory,” a progressive school of legal scholarship that conservatives have redefined as an attack on American patriotism and a conspiracy against white K-12 students.
It’s been some time since public school curricula sat at the center of America’s culture wars, but panicked parent politics have returned with a vengeance.
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