Apartheid Pedagogy in the Age of Emerging Fascism

Posted on 24/10/2023

Pioneer of critical pedagogy and partisan in the struggle for forms of teaching and learning which enable pupils and students to become critically-aware, alert and engaged citizens, Henry Giroux writes about the state of public education in the USA.

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, especially in the whitening of American history. 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.

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.

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.”[i]  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.

Apartheid pedagogy is about denial and disappearance–a manufactured ignorance that attempts to erase history and rewrite the narrative of American exceptionalism as it might have been framed in 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.  Apartheid pedagogy most ardent proponent is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who has become America’s most prominent white supremacist. Nowhere is his version of apartheid pedagogy most obvious than in the new African American history standards adopted in 2023 by the Florida Board of Education. Under the new standards, middle-school students are told that slaves benefited from slavery by “developing new skills which…could be applied to their personal benefit.” It is hard to understand how African Americans who were raped, tortured, whipped, and subject to unimaginable acts of dehumanization somehow benefited from the horrors of slavery. This is white supremacy on steroids.  Under this form of apartheid pedagogy, students are also instructed that the acts of violence committed against African-Americans [as in] the 1921 Tulsa Massacre were perpetrated not only by whites but also by African Americans.[ii]  White supremacy is once again rewriting history by stating that mass violence and massacres committed by white racist mobs were sparked by violence from Black people. In fact, during the Tulsa Race Massacre, which took place on May 30, 1921. whites committed numerous acts of violence against Black people. The Red Cross later estimated that “some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other Black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed or damaged by fire.”[iii] 36 Black people were murdered.

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.

Central to any viable notion of pedagogical resistance against the prevailing forms of apartheid pedagogy 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 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 right 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.[iv]   This should serve 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.

Henry Giroux

 

Notes

[i] 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.

[ii] Antonio Planas. “New Florida standards teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills,” NBC News (July 20, 2023). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-florida-standards-teach-black-people-benefited-slavery-taught-usef-rcna95418

[iii] History.com editors, “Tulsa Race Massacre,” History (May 31, 2023). Online: https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre

[iv] Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism, [London: Verso, 2018], p. 37.