February is Black History Month in the United States, a time in which national institutions related to history and culture “join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society”. This year, Black History Month comes amid heated right-wing attacks on education, many of which centre on banning the teaching of America’s actual racist history in public schools.
In the summer of 2020, following the brutal murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who was Black, by police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, the US was engulfed in massive protests amid an outcry against systemic racism and anti-Black police violence.
Since then, Republican politicians and activists have increasingly fixated on opposing the supposed teaching of ‘critical race theory’ (CRT) as an issue to motivate the party’s mostly white, aggrieved majoritarian base, who like to scream about “CRT” when they’re not screaming about drag shows. (In reality, it’s highly unlikely that any American schoolchildren are being exposed to theory typically reserved for advanced undergraduate or even postgraduate university studies.)
