We should never forget that the right-wing fight to thwart inclusive learning plans stems from a fear of Black language.
There’s a reason conservatives have waged this fight using “woke” and “critical race theory” as boogeymen. Republicans have relied on bigoted, white fears of the unknown to frame these words as dangerous.
That these ideas were conceived by Black minds — more specifically, Black minds awakened and unnerved by the fact they were often seen as inferior to white people — only seems to make conservatives more resolute in banning them.
As an example, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke to those bigoted fears in her State of the Union rebuttal on Tuesday, denouncing what she called a “woke mob” that has put conservatives “under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.” And that was just one sliver of a rather unhinged speech.
In that vein, it feels right to highlight a James Baldwin article that’s been on my mind as the next post in our ongoing series “Black History, Uncensored,” which focuses on work by Black artists targeted by Republican bans. While most Republican bans targeting Baldwin take aim at his essay collections and novels, Baldwin’s “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” is a perfect follow-up to my Toni Morrison post from yesterday.
Not solely because the 1979 piece cites Morrison, but because it speaks to the same phenomenon Morrison addressed in her “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” speech: white elites’ apparent impulse to discredit the legitimacy of Black speech and expression.
And both probe for reasons.
Baldwin wrote:
The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by…
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