Republicans Are Trying to Suppress More Than Votes
The accelerating red-state offensive to censor what public-school students are taught about racism is emerging as a critical companion measure to proliferating race-based voter restrictions in many of the same states.
The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as many areas grow significantly more racially and culturally diverse. Voting laws are intended to reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate; the teaching bans aim to shape the attitudes of tomorrow’s.
“This is the next wave of voters, so the indoctrination that we see occurring right now is planting the seeds for the control of that electorate as they become voters,” Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me recently. “They are trying to manipulate power and exert their influence at both ends of the spectrum by limiting those who can cast ballots now, and by indoctrinating those who can cast ballots later.”
Proposals to limit how public K–12 schools—and even public colleges and universities—talk about race are exploding. They represent the latest battlefield between what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration,” centered on the places and people most uneasy about the way America is changing, and the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation,” revolving around those most comfortable with these changes.
