by Steve Haner
What are the most important facts to Virginia Democrats about American and Virginia history? Ask individuals and you get a host of answers, but the Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates focused on ten items last week they want to be sure our public schools teach.
The context was the floor debate of House Bill 787, seeking to expunge “divisive concepts” from those schools. Too many students can’t do long division, but divisiveness matters more. It is important to many, I sense. You can read the bill text as it passed here. The Senate will make it history, probably not law.
Before passage, however, the House Democrats as a team offered ten floor amendments on which they wanted recorded votes. That was the point of the exercise, to try to force Republicans to record “nay” votes and then imply in the next campaign that Republicans voted to suppress these topics.
Each of you can reach your own conclusions as to what this says about Virginia Democrats today. I offer slight commentary on only a few of them. Each is framed as a topic not to be kept out of the classroom as “divisive.” They are summarized below and are here in full, where you can identify the patrons of each. Democrats want students taught:
- Jim Crow and Jim Crow legislation, laws and practices, some of which remained in Virginia code until the 21st century, that enforced racial segregation in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War through the middle of the 20th century.
- The concept of “The Lost Cause of the Confederacy,” a narrative that promotes the morality and heroism of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery and included the erecting of many Confederate statues to celebrate that movement throughout southern states such as Virginia. (I’m sorry, they do want this taught? )
- The policies that created and sustain wealth and income gaps by race and gender in the United States.
- Supreme Court precedents and arguments. (I didn’t hear the floor debate, and don’t intend to, but I assume certain cases were cited.)
- Ruby Bridges, who as a six-year-old in Louisiana, became the first Black student to integrate an all-White school in the South. (Admittedly, I’m more familiar with the history of Barbara Johns.)
- The role of the death of Vincent Chin in exposing discrimination and hatred against Asian Americans and galvanizing the Asian American movement.
- The demographics of American local, state, and federal governments, including how only one of 50 states has a legislature in which over half the seats are held by women.
- Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 Supreme Court case that guaranteed the constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry.
- The compromises that resulted in the “three fifths” rule that regarded enslaved people as three fifths of a human.
- The disparate health and economic impacts of the COVID pandemic on people of color.
So first on the list, the single most important topic that must be taught in our schools, is the history of Jim Crow discrimination laws in Virginia and elsewhere, followed by the related Lost Cause narrative. A full eight of the ten deal with race and historical racism, two deal with gender, and one with gay marriage.
Is this the Virginia they see, the lens they put on their eyes every day, and the lens they seek to put on every school child’s eyes? They believe they created a record embarrassing to the Republicans who voted against adding these to a two paragraph bill.
Maybe. Future voters will judge. But it is also fair to wonder if Democrats have done themselves damage by voting to, in essence, endorse the following possible school lessons enumerated in the bill. For the GOP, that was also the point of this exercise. At the next campaign these positions will be imputed to all of the Democrats by Republicans:
- One race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.
- An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
- An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race or sex.
- An individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by the individual’s race or sex.
- An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.
More and more parents may cast their vote by fleeing public schools. More and more of us feel for the teachers caught in the middle This was not the General Assembly’s finest hour on any front. By the time we’re done, probably not the finest 100 hours.
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