Cancel Culture Isn’t the Real Threat to Academic Freedom
The woman in the video is about the same age as my mother. She is speaking at a school-board meeting in Virginia as a concerned parent.
“I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” she reads from prepared notes. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social-justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.” Her voice is soft but stern. She recounts her youth in Mao Zedong’s China and the political fanaticism she witnessed firsthand, before calling critical race theory “the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” At the end of her remarks, the audience bursts into cheers. “Virginia Mom Who Survived Maoist China Eviscerates School Board’s Critical Race Theory Push,” blares the headline on Fox News.
As a Chinese academic working in the U.S., I watched the video and was disconcerted by its familiarity. The speaker’s views are not uncommon among many first-generation Chinese immigrants, who are grateful to their new country and eager to assimilate. Critical race theory, the analytical framework developed by a small group of legal scholars to address structural racism, has been morphed into a derogatory term by the right. The loudest conservative voices reject any effort to talk about racial inequality as divisive and dangerous, akin to the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s mass movement that plunged China into a decade of turmoil and claimed more than a million lives.
[From the January/February 2021 issue: Uncovering the Cultural Revolution’s awful truths]
At a time when authorities in Beijing have tightened their grip at home and are extending their reach abroad, when U.S.-China relations have tumbled to the lowest point in decades, and when
