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A central issue in the Virginia election that was held last Tuesday was education and the role of parental or governmental censorship.

One of the ads for the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, displayed the mother of a high school senior upset by the assigned reading in his advanced placement, college-level American literature class. She claimed that the graphic depiction of slavery in it was deeply unsettling, even for this advanced student.

It turns out that the book in question was Beloved by Toni Morrison, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered a masterpiece of American literature.

Yes, novels are unsettling. Crime and Punishment is unsettling in its examination of the mind of the criminal. Madame Bovary is upsetting in examining adultery. Oliver Twist is disquieting as an examination of class and poverty.

The realistic novels of Eli Wiesel and other Holocaust authors include profoundly troubling accounts of violence. Morisons book is in part a story of the brutality of slavery.

Are stories of the Holocaust, of slavery, too problematic for our advanced students?

Is it not our responsibility to challenge students with provocative readings? Critical Race Theory, the product of hundreds of prominent scholars, offers a significant, if unorthodox, approach to law, civil rights and the role of race in society.

We need not agree with its premises or conclusions, many of us will not, but as open and concerned citizens should we and our advanced students not wrestle with its arguments, along with other outlooks.The culture wars now going on in school boards are deeply troubling. Where might this lead: to censorship and book burning, a favored practice of totalitarians? Or, to a meaningless or false orthodoxy?

Rather than disrupt school board meetings, we must work through elected representatives and those appointed by them for their expertise in education. Populist assaults by angry and often uninformed parents, and the hysteria that they may produce, can become daggers aimed at the heart of American democracy.

Howard Rock

Brevard

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Culture Wars - The Transylvania Times - The Transylvania Times

The brewing culture war over vaccine mandates now threatens to boil over after the Biden administration set a January deadline for all employers with more than 100 employees to require shots or regular testing.

Why it matters: The planned mandates which also include even more stringent standards for health care workers would impact more than 100 million Americans, or more than two-thirds of the workforce.

Driving the news: Lawsuits from 15 GOP-led states rolled in mere hours after the administration last week laid out Jan. 4 as the deadline for vaccine mandates at employers with more than 100 workers.

The other side: U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy took to ABC's "This Week" on Sunday to defend the Biden administration's mandate plan as a workplace safety and economic issue.

But, but, but: NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers took the mantle as a foil to employer vaccine mandates and COVID-19 protocol after it was revealed he was unvaccinated. He'd previously told reporters he was "immunized."

The big picture: A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found six in 10 employed Americans agreed their employer should require COVID vaccinations.

But they do not agree on what should happen for those who don't comply. Support for firing employees was low, at 14%.

Between the lines: As Axios' Jennifer Kingson wrote, employer vaccine mandates have already impacted millions of workers, and rather than leaving in droves most have either decided to get the shot or have taken advantage of wiggle room offered by their employers.

What we're watching: A mandated deadline for about 4 million federal workers coming up on Nov. 22 could give us a glimpse at how the broader mandates may play out.

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Vaccine mandates inflame the culture wars - Axios

These themes structured the Youngkin campaign. In a revealing postelection interview with Politicos Ryan Lizza, two top Youngkin strategists, Jeff Roe and Kristin Davison, outlined their campaign plan, which included, but was certainly not limited to, highlighting critical race theory:

One of our first advertising pieces in the general election and one of the first things we hammered on was that the Thomas Jefferson School in Northern Virginia had lowered their academic standards. It was then literally the first stop, Roe said, moving on to describe the goal of uniting under the Republican banner seemingly disparate constituencies:

If youre an Asian-American family going to Thomas Jefferson School and they lower the standards to let more kids who arent in accelerated math into the best school in the country, thats pretty important to you. Advanced math is a big dang thing. But it also is to the Republicans: Why would you not help and want your children to succeed and achieve? So we were having a hard time; those people dont fit in the same rooms together. You know, having school-choice people in the same room with a C.R.T. person with an advanced math [person] along with people who want school resource officers in every school thats a pretty eclectic group of people.

Achieving this goal received an unexpected lift from Terry McAuliffes now notorious gaffe during a Sept. 28 debate:

As Davison recounted the story to Lizza:

Within three hours of the debate where Terry said I dont think parents should be involved in what the school should be teaching, we had a video out hitting this because it tapped into just parents not knowing. And that was the fight. It wasnt just C.R.T. Thats an easier issue to talk about on TV. Thats not what we focused on here; it was more parents matter. Launching that message took the education discussion to a different level.

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, captured the problem with a common progressive analysis of the Virginia election in You Cant Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary, a Nov. 3 Atlantic essay the idea that Youngkin, an extremist posing in the garb of a suburban dad, was able to incite white backlash by exploiting fake and imaginary fears about the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.

The truth, Mounk continued, is rather different. Youngkin capitalized on a widespread public perception that Democrats are out of tune with the country on cultural issues.

The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools, Mounk continued, might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. He noted that across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about Americas copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, Mounk wrote,

Students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as perfectionism or the worship of the written word as elements of white-supremacy culture.

While just under half of respondents (49 percent) described themselves as very or extremely familiar with critical race theory in a June Fox News poll, the theory and arguments based on it have become commonplace throughout much of American culture.

On Sept. 9, 2020, for example, Larry Merlo, then the chief executive of CVS, held a Company Town Hall, at which he invited Ibram X. Kendi to lead a discussion on what it means to be antiracist. Merlo asked Kendi to explain what it means to be a racist.

Kendi replied:

I first have to define a racist idea, which I define as any concept that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group in any way, and also to say that this is whats wrong with a racial group, or whats right, or whats better, or worse, or connotations of superiority and inferiority. And a racist policy is any measure that is leading to inequity between racial groups.

The Racial Equity Institute offers programs lasting from 18 months to two years to battle racism, a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history.

The institute, which cites the work of scholars like Kendi, Tema Okun and Richard Delgado, lists more than 270 clients including corporations, colleges and schools, foundations, hospitals and health care facilities, liberal advocacy groups and social service providers.

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Opinion | Republicans Are Once Again Heating Up the Culture Wars - The New York Times

Janet Jackson, etc. in 2004Photo: JEFF HAYNES/AFP via Getty Images

The last few years have seen a persistentand welcomere-evaluation of the way the media and the wider world treated the female pop stars of the 1990s and 2000s. (I.e., the realization that pretty much every aspect of said treatment was shot through with misogyny on a frankly staggering number of levels.)

Nowon what is also, coincidentally or not, the same date as the end of one of the enduring symbols of that period, the conservatorship of Britney SpearsFX has released a trailer for a new documentary tackling another milestone in our collective crappy cultural treatment of women superstars: Malfunction: The Dressing Down Of Janet Jackson.

In case the title didnt somehow give it away, the New York Times-produced doc is centered on the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, during which Justin Timberlake ripped off part of Janet Jacksons costume, briefly exposing her body to camerasan event for which the vast majority of blame, outrage, and general nation-wide freaking out was somehow assigned to Jackson.

And while the documentary talking heads might be going a bit overboard by describing the wardrobe malfunction as the 9/11 of the culture wars, that second or so of footage has undeniably been hugely influential on the world that followed. (This is where we note the standard anecdote that the foundation of YouTube was at least partially inspired by co-founder Jawed Kawims inability to find an online copy of the clip.)

Malfunction is being directed by Jodi Gomes, who previously filmed Jacksons brothers Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon, and Tito for A&Es docuseries The Jacksons, which aired six months after Michael Jacksons death. Her most recent film was One Child Left Behind, a documentary about the Atlanta Public Schools testing scandal from the late 2000s.

It doesnt look, from the trailer, like either Timberlake or Janet Jackson were involved in the production of Malfunction, although a press release does note that it features new reporting from The Times, which also produced both Framing Britney Spears,and follow-up Controlling Britney Spears.

G/O Media may get a commission

Malfunction debuts on November 19 on FX.

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FX tackles the "9/11 of the culture wars" with trailer for Janet Jackson doc Malfunction - The A.V. Club

Issued on: 08/11/2021 - 03:34Modified: 08/11/2021 - 03:32

Houston (AFP) Conservatives in Texas and several other states have declared war on the teaching of books aimed at sensitizing students to racism and gender identity issues, saying they wrongly inflict feelings of guilt on white and non-LGBTQ students.

In one direct result of the campaign, a school district west of Houston last month temporarily withdrew copies of a book that explains the unintentional "micro-aggressions" an African-American child suffers because of the color of his or her skin.

"New Kid" by Jerry Craft is just one of 850 books being examined by a Texas legislative committee examining how books used in the schools deal with institutional racism and sexism.

Committee head Matt Krause has asked every school district in the state to send him a list cataloging how many of each of the books they possess, where they are located and how much they spent for them.

Divisive debates over the acceptability of books and of certain teachings have sprung up in some 15 states, primarily in the South, sparking unusually angry confrontations in local school board meetings.

They "will pop up everywhere in the future, especially in urban areas where there is a conservative push at the state level but where local politics tend to be more Democratic," Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told AFP.

Far away, on the east coast, the newly elected Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, appears to have drawn votes with his promise that parents will always have a say on the books being taught in the schools.

His campaign drew nationwide attention with an ad in which a Virginia woman says she was shocked to learn her son had suffered nightmares after his high school English class read "Beloved," a Pulitzer-winning historical novel by Black author Toni Morrison.

"Beloved" tells the rending story, based on an actual incident, of an escaped slave who kills her infant child rather than have it seized by marshals and returned to slavery.

Conservatives have also lodged angry protests against the teaching of "critical race theory," an academic approach to studying ways in which racism infuses US legal systems and institutions in often subtle ways.

Protests broadly targeting so-called "woke" culture -- a term used to describe awareness of race- or gender-based injustices -- have led to the banning of books seen to include racial stereotypes.

The Texas Library Association has pushed back against what it called "a substantial increase in censorship activity in Texas."

"A parent has the right to determine what is best for their child," the group says on its website, but "not what is best for every child."

And the Texas State Teachers Association has denounced what it called a "witch hunt," following passage by the state legislature of a law that sets specific guidelines for the teaching of racial and sexual inequalities.

In the Spring Branch school district in Texas, the graphic novel "The Breakaways" -- which features a character born as a girl but who feels like a boy -- has been withdrawn and added to Krause's list of 850 questionable books following complaints from parents.

For the book's author, Cathy G. Johnson, "Book banning serves as a media distraction from the real harm politicians like Matt Krause perpetuate."

She noted that Equality Texas, which advocates for gay, lesbian and transgender causes, considers Krause "a prolific author of anti-LGBTQ legislation."

"New Kid," which has won several prestigious prizes and been translated into a dozen languages, was finally returned to library shelves at the Katy school district west of Houston.

Its author, Jerry Craft, draws on his own experiences and those of his children to describe the difficulties facing a child of color in a mainly white private school.

"If you and I are co-workers and there is something that I always do that offends you, you should be able to tell me without me getting angry at you," he told AFP.

"But the people who wanted to ban my book would rather shut the door and keep it the way that it is." And that, he added, leaves students like his children "uncomfortable all the time."

The tensions over the banning campaigns led New York book editor Alessandra Bastagli to launch a campaign to send copies of "New Kid" to dozens of Texas schools.

Bastagli said her children, who are aged eight and nine and are of Italian-Puerto Rican heritage, love the book and were angry that young Texans were not being allowed to read it.

She sent 200 free copies of "New Kid" and "Class Act," another book by the same author, to school libraries that requested it.

The Black-owned bookstore in Houston providing the books confirmed to AFP that all copies have now shipped.

2021 AFP

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In Texas and beyond, conservatives take culture wars to classrooms - FRANCE 24