Source: HenryGiroux
The toxic thrust of white supremacy runs
through American culture like an electric current. Jim Crow is back
without apology suffocating American society in a wave of voter
suppression laws, the elevation of racist discourse to the centers of
power, and the ongoing attempt by right-wing politicians to implement a
form of apartheid pedagogy that makes important social issues that
challenge the racial and economic status quo disappear. The cult of
manufactured ignorance now works through disimagination machines engaged
in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. Matters of justice, ethics,
equality, and historical memory now vanish from the classrooms of public
and higher education and from powerful cultural apparatuses and social
media platforms that have become the new teaching machines.
In the current era of white supremacy, the most obvious version of
apartheid pedagogy, is present in attempts by Republican Party
politicians to rewrite the narrative regarding who counts as an
American. This whitening of collective identity is largely reproduced by
right-wing attacks on diversity and race sensitivity training, critical
race programs in government, and social justice and racial issues in
the schools. These bogus assaults are all too familiar and include
widespread and coordinated ideological and pedagogical attacks against
both historical memory and critical forms of education.
The fight to censor critical, truth telling versions of American
history and the current persistence of systemic racism is part of a
larger conservative project to prevent teachers, students, journalists,
and others from speaking openly about crucial social issues that
undermine a viable democracy. Such attacks are increasingly waged by
conservative foundations, anti-public intellectuals, politicians, and
media outlets. These include right-wing think tanks such as Heritage
Foundation and Manhattan Institute, conservative scholars such as Thomas
Sowell, right-wing politicians such as Mitch McConnell, and far-right
media outlets such as City Journal, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, and Fox News. The threat of teaching children about the history and systemic nature of racism appears particularly dangerous to Fox News, which since June 5, 2020 has posited “critical race theory” as a threat in over 150 different broadcasts.[1]
What is shared by all of these individuals and cultural apparatuses is
the claim that critical race theory and other “anti-racist” programs
constitute forms of indoctrination that threatens to undermine the
alleged foundations of Western Civilization.
The nature of this moral panic is evident in the fact that 15 state
legislatures across the country have introduced bills to prevent or
limit teachers from teaching about the history of slavery and racism in
American society. In doing so, they are making a claim for what one
Texas legislator called “traditional history,” which allegedly should
focus on “ideas that make the country great.”[2] Idaho’s
lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, is more forthright in revealing
the underlying ideological craze behind censoring any talk by teachers
and students about race in Idaho public schools. She has introduced a
taskforce to protect young people from what she calls, with no pun
intended, “the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism,
and Marxism.”[3]
Such attacks are about more than
censorship and racial cleansing. They make the political more
pedagogical in that they use education and the power of persuasion as
weapons to discredit any critical approach to grappling with the history
of racism and white supremacy. In doing so, they attempt to undermine
and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others
to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core
conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty,
freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and
exclusion.”[4] The
current attacks on critical race theory, if not critical thinking
itself, are but one instance of the rise of apartheid pedagogy. This is a
pedagogy in which education is used in the service of dominant power in
order to both normalize racism, class inequities, and economic
inequality while safeguarding the interests of those who benefit from
such inequities the most. In
pursuit of such a project, they impose a pedagogy of oppression,
complacency, and mindless discipline. They ignore or downplay matters of
injustice and the common good, and rarely embrace notions of community
as part of a pedagogy that engages pressing social, economic and civic
problems. Instead of an education of civic practice that enriches the
public imagination, they endorse all the elements of indoctrination
central to formalizing and updating a mode of fascist politics.
The conservative wrath waged
against critical race theory is not only about white ignorance being a
form of bliss but is also central to a struggle over power—the power of
the moral and political imagination. White ignorance is crucial to
upholding the poison of white supremacy. Apartheid pedagogy is about
denial and disappearance–a manufactured ignorance that attempts to
whitewash history and rewrite the narrative of American exceptionalism
as it might have been framed in the 1920s and 30s when members of a
resurgent Ku Klux Klan shaped the policies of some school boards.
Apartheid pedagogy uses education as a disimagination machine to
convince students and others that racism does not exist, that teaching
about racial justice is a form of indoctrination, and that understanding
history is more an exercise in blind reverence than critical analysis.
Apartheid pedagogy aims to reproduce current systems of racism rather
than end them. Organizations such as No Left Turn in Education
not only oppose teaching about racism in schools, but also comprehensive
sex education, and teaching children about climate change, which they
view as forms of indoctrination. Without irony, they label themselves an
organization of “patriotic Americans who believe that a fair and just
society can only be achieved when malleable young minds are free from
indoctrination that suppresses their independent thought.”[5]
This is the power of ignorance in the service of civic death and a
flight from ethical and social responsibility. Kati Holloway, citing the
NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, succinctly sums up the elements of
white ignorance. She writes:
“White ignorance,” according to NYU philosopher Charles
W. Mills, is an “inverted epistemology,” a deep dedication to and
investment in non-knowing that explains white supremacy’s highly
curatorial (and often oppositional) approach to memory, history and the
truth. While white ignorance is related to the anti-intellectualism that
defines the white Republican brand, it should be regarded as yet more
specific. According to Mills, white ignorance demands a purposeful
misunderstanding of reality—both present and historical—and then treats
that fictitious worldview as the singular, de-politicized, unbiased,
“objective” truth. “One has to learn to see the world wrongly,” under
the terms of white ignorance, Mills writes, “but with the assurance that
this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic
authority.”[6]
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reports that
right-wing legislators have taken up the cause to ban critical race
theory from not only public schools but also higher education. She
highlights the case of Boise State University, which has banned dozens
of classes dealing with diversity. She notes that soon afterwards, “the
Idaho State Senate voted to cut $409,000 from the school’s budget, an
amount meant to reflect what Boise State spends on social justice
programs.”[7] Such
attacks are happening across the United States and are not only meant
to curtail teaching about racism, sexism, and other controversial issues
in the schools, but also to impose
strict restrictions on what non-tenured assistant professors can teach
and to what degree they can be pushed to accept being both deskilled and
giving up control over the conditions of their labor.
In an egregious example of an attack on free speech and tenure itself, the
Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina denied a tenure
position to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones
because of her work on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 project, “which examined the legacy of slavery in America.”[8]
The failure to provide tenure to Hannah-Jones, who is also the
recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” and an inductee into
the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame, is a blatant act
of racism and a gross violation of academic freedom. Let’s
be clear. Hannah-Jones was denied tenure by the North Carolina Board of
Trustees because she brings to the university a critical concern with
racism that clashes with the strident political conservatism of the
board. It is also another example of a racist backlash by conservatives
who wish to deny that racism even exists in the United States, never
mind that it should even by acknowledged in the classrooms of public and
higher education.
This is a form of “patriotic education” being put in place by a
resurgence of those who support Jim Crow power relations and want to
impose pedagogies of repression on students in the classroom. This type
of retribution is part of a longstanding politics of fear, censorship
and academic repression that has been waged by conservatives since the
student revolts of the 1960s.[9]
It is also part of the ongoing corporatization of the university in
which business models now define how the university is governed, faculty
are reduced to part-time workers, and students are viewed as customers
and consumers.[10]
Equally important, Hannah-Jones’ case is an updated and blatant
attack on the ability and power of faculty rather than Boards of
Trustees to make decisions regarding both faculty hiring and the crucial
question who decides how tenure is handled in a university.[11]
Keith E. Whittington and Sean Wilentz are right in stating that the
Board’s actions to deny Hannah-Jones a tenured professorship are about
more than a singular violation of faculty rights, academic freedom, and
an attack on associated discourses relating to critical race theory.
They write:
For the Board of Trustees to interfere unilaterally on
blatantly political grounds is an attack on the integrity of the very
institution it oversees. The perception and reality of political
intervention in matters of faculty hiring will do lasting damage to the
reputation of higher education in North Carolina — and will embolden
boards across the country similarly to interfere with academic
operations of the universities that they oversee.[12]
Holding critical ideas has
become a liability in the contemporary neoliberal university. Also at
risk here is the relationship between critical thinking, civic values,
and historical remembrance in the current attempts to suppress not just
voting rights but also dangerous memories, especially regarding the
attack on Critical Race Theory. David Theo Goldberg has brilliantly
outlined how the war on Critical Race Theory and other anti-racist
programs is designed largely to eliminate the legacy and persistent
effects of systemic racial injustice and its underlying structural,
ideological, and pedagogical fundamentals and components. This is
apartheid pedagogy with a vengeance. As Goldberg writes:
First, the coordinated conservative attack on CRT is
largely meant to distract from the right’s own paucity of ideas. The
strategy is to create a straw house to set aflame in order to draw
attention away from not just its incapacity but its outright refusal to
address issues of cumulative, especially racial, injustice…. Second, the
conservative attack on CRT tries to rewrite history in its effort to
neoliberalize racism: to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs and
interpersonal prejudice. … On this view, the structures of society bear
no responsibility, only individuals. Racial inequities today are …not
the living legacy of centuries of racialized systems…. Third, race has
always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around.
They know all too well how to use it to stoke white resentment while
distracting from the depredations of conservative policies for all but
the wealthy.[13]
The public imagination is now in crisis. Radical uncertainty has
turned lethal. In the current historical moment, tyranny, fear, and
hatred have become defining modes of governance and education.
Right-wing politicians bolstered by the power of corporate controlled
media now construct ways of thinking and feeling that prey on the
anxieties of the isolated, disenfranchised, and powerless. This
is a form of apartheid pedagogy engineered to substitute
disillusionment and incoherence for a sense of comforting ignorance, the
thrill of hyper-masculinity, and the security that comes with the
militarized unity of the accommodating masses waging a war on democracy.
The public imagination is formed through habits of daily life, but only
for the better when such experiences are filtered through the ideals
and promises of a democracy. This is no longer true. Under neoliberal
fascism, the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite has
ensured that any notion of change regarding equality and justice is now
tainted, if not destroyed, as a result of what Theodor Adorno called a
retreat into apocalyptic bombast marked by “an organized flight of
ideas.”[14]
Violence in the United States has become a form of domestic
terrorism; it is omnipresent and works through complex systems of
symbolic and institutional control. It extends from the prison and
school to the normalizing efforts of cultural apparatus that saturate an
image-based culture. Violence registers itself in repressive policies,
police brutality, and in an ongoing process of exclusion and
disposability. It is also present in the weaponization of ideas and the
institutions that produce them through forms of apartheid pedagogy. Fear
now comes in the form of both armed police and repressive modes of
education. As the famed artist Isaac Cordal observes, “We live in
societies….that use fear in order to make people submissive….Fear bends
us [and makes us]vulnerable to its desires….Our societies have been
built on violence, and that heritage, that colonial hangover which is
capitalism today still remains.”[15] Under gangster capitalism’s system of power, the poverty of the civic and political imagination is taking its last breath.
Authoritarian societies do more than censor and subvert the truth, they also shape collective consciousness and punish those who engage in dangerous thinking.[16]
For instance, the current plague of white supremacy fueling neoliberal
fascism is rooted not only in structural and economic forms of
domination, but also intellectual and pedagogical forces, making clear
that education is central to politics. It also points to the urgency of
understanding that white supremacy is first and foremost a struggle over
agency, assigned meanings, and identity—over what lives count and whose
don’t. This is a politics and pedagogy that often leaves few historical
traces in a culture of immediacy and manufactured ignorance.
The emergent and expanding presence of white supremacy and fascist
politics disappear easily in a culture dominated by the endless images
of spectacularized violence that fill screen culture with mass
shootings, police violence, and racist attacks on Blacks and Asian
Americans in the post-Trump era. Disconnected and decontextualized such
images vanish in an image-based culture of shock, entertainment, and
organized forgetting. When critical ideas come to the surface,
right-wing politicians and pundits attack dissidents as un-American and
the oppositional press as “an enemy of the American people.” They also
attempt to impose a totalitarian notion of “patriotic education” on
public schools and higher education and censor academics who criticize
systemic abuses.[17]
As is well known, former President Trump, waged a relentless attack
on the media and in ways too similar to ignore echoed written and spoken
sentiments that Hitler used in his rise to power.[18]
In this instance, culture, increasingly shaped by an apartheid
pedagogy, has turned oppressive and must be addressed as a site of
struggle while working in tandem with the development of an ongoing
massive resistance movement. This
suggests the need for a more comprehensive understanding of politics and
the power of the educational force of the culture. Such connections
necessitate closer attention be given to the educational and cultural
power of a neoliberal corporate elite who use their mainstream and
social media platforms to shape pedagogically the collective
consciousness of a nation in the discourse and relations of hate,
bigotry, ignorance, and conformity.
America’s slide into a fascist politics demands a revitalized
understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves, along
with a systemic critical analysis of the new political formations that
mark this period. Part of this challenge is to create a new language and
mass social movement to address and construct empowering terrains of
education, politics, justice, culture, and power that challenge existing
systems of racist violence and economic oppression. The beginning of
such a political and pedagogical strategy can be found in the Black
Lives Matter movement and its alignment with other movements fighting
against authoritarianism. The Black Lives Matter movement teaches us
“that eradicating racial oppression ultimately requires struggle against
oppression in all of its forms…[especially] restructuring America’s
economic system.”[19]
This is especially important as those groups marginalized by class,
race, ethnicity, and religion have become aware of how much in this new
era of fascist politics they have lost control over the economic,
political, pedagogical, and social conditions that bear down on their
lives. Visions have become dystopian, devolving into a sense of being
left out, abandoned, and subject to increasing systems of terror and
violence. These issues can no longer be viewed as individual problems
but as manifestations of a broader failure of politics. Moreover, what
is needed is not a series of stopgap reforms limited to particular
institutions or groups, but a radical restructuring of the entirety of
U.S. society.
The call for a socialist democracy demands the creation of visions,
ideals, institutions, social relations, and pedagogies of resistance
that enable the public to imagine a life beyond a social order in which
racial, class, gender, and other forms of violence produce endless
assaults on the environment, systemic police violence, a culture of
ignorance and cruelty. Such
challenges must also address the assault on the public and civic
imagination, mediated through the elevation of war, militarization,
violent masculinity, and the politics of disposability to the highest
levels of power. Capitalism is a death driven machine that that
infantilizes, exploits, and devalues human life and the planet itself.
As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects
of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being
downsized, if not altogether disappearing, along with the informed
citizens without which there is no democracy.
Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and
pedagogical tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness, capable
of both recognizing the scorched earth policies of neoliberal
capitalism, and the twisted ideologies that support it. This shift in
consciousness cannot take place without pedagogical interventions that
speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify
with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their
troubles in a broader systemic context.[20]
Niko Block gets it right in arguing for a “radical recasting of the
leftist imagination,” in which the concrete needs of people are
addressed and elevated to the forefront of public discussion in order to
confront and get ahead of the crises of our times. He writes:
the crises of the twenty-first century call for a radical
recasting of the leftist imagination. This process involves building
bridges between the real and the imaginary, so that the path to
achieving political goals is plain to see. Accordingly, the articulation
of leftist goals must resonate with people in concrete ways, so that it
becomes obvious how the achievement of those goals would improve their
day-to-day lives. The left, in this sense, must appeal to people’s
existing identities and not condescend the general public as victims of
“false consciousness.” All this means building movements of continual
improvement and refusing to ask already-vulnerable people for short-term
losses on the abstract promise of long-term gains. This project also
demands that we understand precisely why right-wing ideology retains a
popular appeal in so many spaces.[21]
A pedagogy of resistance must be on the side of hope and civic
courage in order to fight against a paralyzing indifference, grave
social injustices, and mind deadening attacks on the public imagination.
At stake here is the struggle for a new world based on the notion that
capitalism and democracy are not the same, and that we need to
understand the world, how we think about it and how it functions, in
order to change it. In the spirt of Martin Luther King, Jr’s call for a
more comprehensive view of oppression and political struggle, it is
crucial to address his call to radically interrelate and restructure
consciousness, values, and society itself. In this instance, King and
other theorists, such as Saskia Sassen, call for a language that
ideological ruptures and changes the nature of the debate. This suggests
more than simply a rhetorical challenge to the economic conditions that
fuel neoliberal capitalism. There is also the need to move beyond
abstract notions of structural violence and identify and connect the
visceral elements of violence that bear down on and “constrain agency
through the hard surfaces of [everyday] life.”[22]
We live in an era in which the distinction between the truth and
misinformation is under attack. Ignorance has become a virtue, and
education has become a tool of repression that elevates self-interest
and privatization to central organizing principles of both economics and
politics. The socio-historical conditions that enable racism, systemic
inequality, anti-intellectualism, mass incarceration, the war on youth,
poverty, state violence, and domestic terrorism must be remembered in
the fight against that which now parades as ideologically normal.
Historical memory and the demands of moral witnessing must become part
of a deep grammar of political and pedagogical resistance in the fight
against neoliberal capitalism and other forms of authoritarianism.
A pedagogy of resistance necessitates a language that connects the
problems of systemic racism, poverty, militarism, mass incarceration,
and other injustices as part of a totalizing structural, pedagogical,
and ideological set of condition endemic to capitalism in its updated
merging of neoliberalism and fascist politics. Audre
Lorde was right in her insistence that “There is no such thing as a
single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
We don’t need master narratives, but we do need a recognition that
politics can only be grasped as part of a social totality, a struggle
rooted in overlapping differences that bleed into each other. We need
relational narratives that bring together different struggles for
emancipation and social equality.
Central to any viable notion of pedagogical resistance is the courage
to think about what kind of world we want—what kind of future we want
to build for our children. These are questions that can only be
addressed when we address politics and capitalism as part of a general
crisis of democracy. This challenge demands the willingness to develop
an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a call to action, one
willing to dismantle the present structure of neoliberal capitalism.
Chantal Mouffe is correct in arguing that “before being able to
radicalize democracy, it is first necessary to recover it,” which means
first rejecting the commonsense assumptions that capitalism and
democracy are synonymous.[23]
Clearly, such a project cannot
combat poverty, militarism, the threat of nuclear war, ecological
devastation, economic inequality, and racism by leaving capitalism’s
system of power in place. Nor can resistance be successful if it limits
itself to the terrain of critique, criticism, and the undoing of
specific oppressive systems of representation. Pedagogies of resistance
can teach people to say no, become civically literate, and create the
conditions for individuals to develop a critical political
consciousness. The challenge here is to make the political more
pedagogical. This suggests analyzing how the forces of gangster
capitalism impact consciousness, shape agency, and normalize the
internalization of oppression. Such a project suggest a politics willing
to transcend the fragmentation and politicized sectarianism all too
characteristic of left politics in order to embrace a Gramscian notion
of “solidarity in a wider sense.”[24]
There is ample evidence of such solidarity in the policies advocated by
the progressive Black Lives Matter protest, the call for green
socialism, movements for health as a global right, growing resistance
against police violence, emerging ecological movements such as the
youth-based Sunrise movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, the massive
ongoing strikes waged by students and teachers against the defunding and
corporatizing of public education, and the call for resistance from
women across the globe fighting for reproductive rights.
What must be resisted at all costs, is an “apartheid pedagogy,”
rooted in the notion that a particular mode of oppression, and those who
bear its weight, offers political guarantees.[25]
Identifying different modes of oppression is important, but it is only
the first step in moving from addressing the history and existing
mechanisms that produce such trauma to developing and embracing a
politics that unites different identities, individuals, and social
movements under the larger banner of democratic socialism. This is a
politics that refuses the easy appeals of ideological silos which
“limits access to the world of ideas and contracts the range of tools
available to would-be activists.”[26]
The only language provided by neoliberalism is the all-encompassing
discourse of the market and the false rhetoric of unencumbered
individualism, making it difficult for individuals to translate private
issues into broader systemic considerations. Mark Fisher was right in
claiming that capitalist realism not only attempts to normalize the
notion that there is not only no alternative to capitalism, but also
makes it “impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” [27]
This is a formula for losing hope because it insists that that the
world cannot change. It also has the hollow ring of slow death.
The urgency of the historical moment demands new visions of social
change, an inspired and energized sense of social hope, and the
necessity for diverse social movements to unite under the collective
struggle for democratic socialism. The debilitating political pessimism
of neoliberal gangster capitalism must be challenged as a starting point
for believing that rather than being exhausted, the future along with
history is open and now is the time to act. It is time to make possible
what has for too long been declared as impossible.
Notes.
1) Adam Harris, “The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession,” The Atlantic (May 7, 2021). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/gops-critical-race-theory-fixation-explained/618828/ ↑
2) Kate McGee, “Texas’ Divisive Bill Limiting How Students Learn
About Current Events And Historic Racism Passed By Senate,” Texas Public
Radio (May 23, 2021). Online:
https://www.tpr.org/education/2021-05-23/texas-divisive-bill-limiting-how-students-learn-about-current-events-and-historic-racism-passed-by-senate
↑
3) Julie Carrie Wong, “The fight to whitewash US history: ‘A drop of poison is all you need’,” The Guardian (May 25, 2021). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/critical-race-theory-us-history-1619-project ↑
4) George Sanchez and Beth English, “OAH Statement on White House Conference on American History,” Organization of American History (September 2020). Online: https://www.oah.org/insights/posts/2020/september/oah-statement-on-white-house-conference-on-american-history/#:~:text=History%20is%20not%20and%20cannot%20be%20simply%20celebratory.&text=The%20history%20we%20teach%20must,slavery%2C%20exploitation%2C%20and%20exclusion. ↑
5) Editorial, “Mission goals and objectives,” No Left Turn in Education, (2021). Online: https://noleftturn.us/ ↑
6) Kali Holloway, “White Ignorance Is Bliss—and Power,” Yahoo! News (May 24, 2021). Online: https://news.yahoo.com/white-ignorance-bliss-power-080232025.html ↑
7) Michelle Goldberg, “The Social Justice Purge at Idaho College,” New York Times. (March 26, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/opinion/free-speech-idaho.html ↑
8) Katie Robertson, “Nikole Hannah-Jones Denied Tenure at University of North Carolina,” New York Times (May 19, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/business/media/nikole-hannah-jones-unc.html ↑
9) Michelle Goldberg, “The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness,” New York Times. (February 26, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html ↑
10) Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2020). ↑
11) Silke-Marie Weineck, “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Craven and Dangerous,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 20, 2021). Online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-tenure-denial-of-nikole-hannah-jones-is-craven-and-dangerous ↑
12) Keith E. Whittington and Sean Wilentz, “We Have Criticized Nikole
Hannah-Jones. Her Tenure Denial Is a Travesty,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education (May 24, 2021). Online:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-have-criticized-nikole-hannah-jones-her-tenure-denial-is-a-travesty?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_2377858_nl_Afternoon-Update_date_20210524&cid=pm&source=ams&sourceId=11167
↑
13) David Theo Goldberg, “The War on Critical Race Theory,” Boston Review (May 7, 2021). Online: http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory ↑
14) Volker Weiss, “afterword,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (London: Polity, 2020), p. 61. ↑
15) Brad Evans and Isaac Cordal, “Histories of Violence: Look Closer
at the World, There You Will See,” Los Angeles Review of Books,”
December 28, 2020). Online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-look-closer-at-the-world-there-you-will-see/ ↑
16) Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015). ↑
17) Charlotte Klein, “Mitch McConnell: Don’t Teach Our Kids That America Is Racist,” Vanity Fair (May 4, 2021). Online: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/mitch-mcconnell-dont-teach-our-kids-that-america-is-racist; Michael Crowley, “Trump Calls for ‘Patriotic Education’ to Defend American History From the Left,” New York Times (September 17, 2020). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/trump-patriotic-education.html ↑
18) Editorial, “Trump’s crusade against the media is a chilling echo of Hitler’s rise,” Las Vegas Sun (August 14, 2017). Online: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/aug/14/trumps-crusade-against-the-media-is-a-chilling-ech/; for a larger examination of this issue, see Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). ↑
19) Lacino Hamilton, “This is going to Hurt,” The New Inquiry (April 11, 2017). Online: https://thenewinquiry.com/this-is-going-to-hurt/ ↑
20) See Robert Latham, A. T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen and Niko Block, eds Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left–Recasting Leftist Imagination (Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2020). ↑
21) Nico Block, “Augmenting the Left: Challenging the Right, Reimagining Transformation,” Socialist Project: the Bullet
(August 31, 2020). Online:
https://socialistproject.ca/2020/08/augmenting-the-left-challenging-the-right-reimagining-transformation/
↑
22) David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012), p. 105 ↑
23) Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism, [London: Verso, 2018], p. 37. ↑
24) Institute for Critical Social Analysis, “A Window of Opportunity for Leftist Politics?” Socialist Project: the Bullet (August 3, 2020). Online: https://socialistproject.ca/2020/08/window-of-opportunity-for-leftist-politics/ ↑
25) I have taken the notion of “apartheid pedagogy” from Adam Shatz, “Palestinianism” London Review of Books (43:9 (May 6, 2021), p. 28. Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/adam-shatz/palestinianism ↑
26) Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,” Boston Review, (March 7, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/robin-d-g-kelley-robin-d-g-kelleys-final-response ↑
27) Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), p. 2. I would be useful on this issue to read the brilliant Stanley Aronowitz, especially The Death and rebirth of American Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1996), ↑
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the
McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the
English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire
Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2018), and the American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism
(City Lights, 2018), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury),
and Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis
(Bloomsbury 2021):His website is www. henryagiroux.com.
